Reimagining Tights

Reimagining Tights explores the environmental impact of consumption and disposal of tights and stockings and the role they play in many people's lives. We have collected 100s of individual stories about tights; let us know yours? Visit our sister project www.tightsball.co.uk

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Guest Blog Post:The cost of sending clothes to landfill – and the value of keeping them out

A guest post by ‘Love your Clothes’, an organisation that aims to raise awareness of alternative uses for discarded textiles, part of the UK national waste charity WRAP*.  

Each year in the UK over a million tonnes of clothing is passed on for recycling, incineration or landfill. That’s after we’ve cleared out the “good stuff” and passed it on to friends, family or the charity shop.

Although recycling rates have improved, more than 30% of our unwanted clothing still ends up in landfill. Nearly half of people still put at least some clothing in the bin, according to research by WRAP, Love Your Clothes’ parent organisation. Not surprisingly, the items most likely to be binned are tights, socks and underwear – things that are seen to be personal and to have no value to anyone else.

There’s an economic issue here: if all the clothing that currently goes to landfill was given to charities, local authorities and other organisations for re-use and recycling it could generate £140 million at current prices. We know people would be less likely to throw clothes out if they thought the material was of value, but most do not realise that even old tights and underwear can be recycled into insulation or stuffing for chairs.

There is also an environmental issue: not just the waste created by throwing out clothes, but the water used and the energy and carbon emissions created in manufacturing new clothes to replace the old ones. In fact, keeping hold of your clothes for just three months longer could lead to a 5–10% reduction in their carbon, water and waste footprints[1].

Love Your Clothes campaigns to raise awareness of these issues. To us, loving your clothes means:

Checking before you buy: Look out for timeless classics that will last. Whatever your budget, check the quality of the fabric and the stitching on seams, buttons and hems to make sure items are well made. Consider buying pre-loved clothes (vintage or second-hand) or hiring special-occasion clothes instead.

Making clothes last longer: Take care with laundry and use the tumble dryer less, learn how to mend the basics, re-style outfits and re-fashion clothes to create new looks and make the most of what you have.

 Keeping unwanted items out of the bin: Pass on clothes you no longer wear to friends, family or charity. Swap or exchange them. Use clothes banks or collections to recycle anything you can’t pass on – even laddered tights have a value! Recycling creates jobs, raises money for charities and reduces the cost of waste disposal for local authorities.

About WRAP and Love Your Clothes

*WRAP is a not-for-profit organisation working together with partners for a world where resources are used sustainably. It coordinates the Sustainable Clothing Action Plan (SCAP), which brings together industry, government and the third sector to look at reducing the environmental impacts of clothing in the UK. http://www.wrap.org.uk/content/sustainable-clothing-action-plan-1 Love Your Clothes was developed as part of the Sustainable Clothing Action Plan and shares tips and inspiration with consumers to help make the most of our clothes. http://loveyourclothes.org.uk

[1] http://www.wrap.org.uk/content/valuing-our-clothes

http://loveyourclothes.org.uk/ 

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Read Anna’s tip on how to make old work tights glamorous here

Love Your Clothes part of WRAP

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Supporters and More Infomation

Re-imagining Ladies Tights explores the politics around the material value, consumption, disposal and unexpected central importance hosiery plays in many women's lives. Beginning  in Lewisham in 2013, the project has morphed and grown, with further performance interventions in London borough of Camden (Jan - June 2014) and the City of London ( Oct 2014 - Feb 2015) ____________________________________________________________ This project has been financially supported by Arts Council England, London borough of Lewisham and London borough of Camden.  We now plan to seek corporate funding to obtain our ambition of placing the giant Mother Ball on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square during 2017.  

This project has been financially supported by Arts Council England, London borough of Lewisham and London borough of Camden.  We now plan to seek corporate funding to obtain our ambition of placing the giant Mother Ball on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square during 2017.   _______________________________________________________________ Over 400 stories and personal accounts of tights have been gathered since 2013 and there are two academic studies on the project's impact. _______________________________________________________________ More information can be found on www.tightball.co.uk, official website of the project.  If you or your organisation wish to become involved with the project or support us financial or through sponsorship please contact [email protected]  

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Extract: Working in a textile recycling plant

Study exposing working conditions for pickers employed within some textile recycling plants in the UK in 2014.  This extract is taken from Doing the ‘dirty work’ of the green economy: Resource recovery and migrant labour in the EU*

Textile recycling

Textile recovery is similar to MRFs in that discarded textiles are collected from diverse sources. In the UK this would include recycling banks, charity shops and leftovers from car boot sales that are then brought to recycling plants for processing. The difference, however, is that, even in the UK, textile recycling is a highly labour-intensive process throughout, and shifts in large factories would typically involve over 100 workers at a time. Clothes are first separated by type and then sorted by wear, fibre type, weight, size, age and gender. A series of conveyor belts pass clothing around a factory, with workers handling, inspecting, assessing and classify- ing items by ‘picking’ them from the belt and then throwing them into the appropriate chutes, pigeon holes, bins or other conveyor belts. These initially classified garments then move round the factory for further assessments by other workers. In such a way classifications are refined and finer grade distinctions produced, each one tailored to a market niche – from vintage/retro, to export for reuse, to industrial rags to fibre reclamation (Crang et al., 2013). The sometimes more than 400 resultant grades ensure not only that clothing has a second life, but also that the maximum economic value is extracted from the clothing on the belt, through a variety of reuse and recycling markets.

As with manual work in a municipal MRF, textile recycling is physically demanding. The toll that the work takes on the workers’ bodies is considerable. Allergies to dust are commonplace; so too are skin complaints, for workers in textile recycling plants do not use gloves. Instead, they must rely on haptic, as well as visual, senses to classify what is unpleasant, smelly and often soiled clothing. Workers resort to over-the-counter remedies, such as nasal inhalers, to attend to excessive sneezing and running noses, while many bring additional shoes to alleviate the effects of standing in the same spot for hours on end. As with municipal MRFs, the pay is low: in 2011 in the factory studied, all sorters earned £5.73 per hour, so standard weekly take-home pay amounted to less than £200. Working overtime, at £7 per hour, brought it slightly above £200, which is still less than two- thirds of the UK median wage.

Textile recycling, like much textile work the world over, is gendered as primarily women’s work but, as with other areas of low-paid ‘dirty work’, it is particular women who get to do this work. In the study factory, Russian was the lingua franca, and the women working on the lines mostly came from Eastern Europe, principally Lithuania, Bulgaria and Russia, but not Poland. UK nationals were also notable by their absence, with the floor manager obsersving that they ‘would be better off on the social’. In previous years, the work force had been dominated by West Africans, by workers from the Caribbean, and before that by workers from Pakistan. In each labour market phase, prevailing ethnicities relate to their perceived knowledge of key international mar- kets in second-hand textiles (c.f. Abimbola, 2012), which are currently West Africa, India and Eastern Europe. Thus, when one textile recycler in the East Midlands was prosecuted for employing 30 illegal immigrants there were 21 Ghanaians, six Indians, two Nigerians and one from Niger (Holder, 2014). For the factory studied, ensuring that the best items get placed on the lines destined for Eastern European markets mattered most, and Eastern Europeans were assumed (by employers) to have unique skills in making these value judgements. Moreover, in this factory such essentialising knowledge connected with internal quality controls, in which employee numbers were placed on Eastern European sorting bags, making individual employees accountable for their grading decisions.

Recruitment to textile recycling factories such as this is largely word-of-mouth. Perhaps surprisingly, labour turnover was not particularly high – at least in

the study factory. It was not uncommon here to find workers who had been in this factory for 6 years or even, in one instance, 16. Whilst explanations for inertia from managers would typically suggest that this kind of work was the best that such workers could either do, or hope for, sheer exhaustion and tiredness at the end of each shift ‘lock’ workers into such patterns of work. It is perhaps such working conditions that suggest why reports like Well dressed? The present and future sustainability of clothing and textiles in the United Kingdom (Allwood et al., 2006) speak of the technical possibilities of recycling but make no mention at all of the work involved.

Full extract can be found at http://t.co/5ECurtB0I

N. Gregson, M. Crang, J. Botticello, M. Calestani, Anna Krzywoszynsk, (2014), Doing the ‘dirty work’ of the green economy: Resource recovery and migrant labour in the EU, European Urban and Regional Studies, Published online before print October 30, 2014, doi:10.1177/0969776414554489, Sage Journals {found at http://eur.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/10/29/0969776414554489.abstract}

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City of London Corporation promoting the Tights Ball project at Waste.Agency during autumn 2014 to major corporations with offices in the City as part of the Cleaner City Awards programme.

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Phil & Tanya at the London Fire Brigade HQ in London 9th March 2015

The Ball is made from tights collected during autumn 2014 from the office workers in the building.  

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Tights Ball Family just gotta helluva lot bigger ;) 27th February 2015 

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Images from City of London interventions at the Waste.Agency and London Cannon Street Station (October 2014 - February 2015) 

www.waste.agency

For more images visit www.tightsball.co.uk

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Tights Ball in London Cannon Street Station

Very pleased to announce The Tights Ball is now on display at London Cannon Street train station.  www.tightsball.co.uk

Other Tights Ball Locations:

British Land plc (internal only), London Fire Brigade HQ (internal only), City of London Corporation, Lower Thames Street (public) and North London Waste Authority (internal only)

All information is on The Tights Ball website www.tightsball.co.uk

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PRESS REVIEW: Camden New Journal

check out all the latest on our new dedicated website www.tightsball.co.uk

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Camden Council Blog Post

First posted on internal Camden Council staff blog:

Mix it up

Jun 20th, 2014

It’s Recycle Week, so Ann Baker in environment services team is blogging this week and tells us why more than ever can be recycled.

LB Camden officer Ann Baker with Tights Dress in Camden Town Hall Councillors members room

Recycling in Camden is easy – that’s our main message during Recycle Week. The list of things that can be recycled is so long that there’s very little you should be putting into general waste. We’ve made it easier to recycle by introducing mixed dry recycling. In other words, in Camden you don’t need to separate your dry recycling. Plastic, glass, paper and card, tins and cartons can all go in the same office recyling bin or residential wheelie bin, bag or box.

For residents we also offer collection services for large electrical items and anything with a battery, plug or charger can be recycled. You can get the full lowdown on our recycling pages on the website.

Where does it all go?

A lot of people ask what happens to their recycling after it’s been collected. The answer is that mixed dry recycling ends up at a materials recovery facility (MRF) in Bromley-by-Bow, east London. Here it’s separated via a giant spinning drum (a trommel), a conveyor belt with magnets and air jets and a check by hand that the materials are in the correct places. To see this in action you can see a video on theBywaters website. Then depending on the material, they’re recycled into new products. For example glass bottles and jars are crushed into fine sand for use in paving and road resurfacing.

As well as mixed recycling we also collect food and garden waste. This is sent to a composting plant in North London to be turned into a soil improver (you can see a short video about composting from the NLWA website). There’s lots more information about the recycling process and what happens to food and garden waste on our website.  

A leggy issue

As part of Recycle Week, we’ve teamed up with local arts group Platform-7 and the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama on a project that focuses on textile recycling, in particular old tights. Every week millions of pairs of ladies tights are consigned to the bottom drawer or the bin and a large number contain nylon, a non-biodegradable material that often ends up in landfill.  

You can go to a tights collection point to hand in your nylons and see them turned into a giant tightsball! There’s a giant tightsball currently on display at Kentish Town library. More information can be found on the tightsball website.

As part of the project a live performances took place today and there is another tomorrow, Saturday 21 June 11.30am – 1.30pm, Somers Town estate, NW1 1EE. Find out more at www.tightsball.co.uk

Happy recycling!

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Request for Hackney Event

event in stoke newington or Dalston Hi. I lovee your project and wud therefore love to ask you guys whether you wud consider to make an event in the Hackney area as well as a tights donation point? It wud be making a change in this area I am sureee. Thanksss, Hulya

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1. A Pakistani lady, probably in her 60s-70s, was very enthusiastic about tights. She loves it when people use “the other part of their brains”. In Pakistan, apparently it’s too hot to wear tights so mostly they just wear pop socks. But in London she notices way more tights. She has a few herself...

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Catford still going strong!

Great feedback from Julie at Age UK Catford. 32 tights, 3 footless and 5 stockings/hold ups, lots of colours, well done local ladies! These will be added to the 'Mother' ball in due time. Keep them coming please!:)

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in response to "Black is the new womans uniform" [below]

~Poster by Jason Wen~

In 5 minutes we spotted 22 tights all black, of these all were black, mainly opaque - only 4 were sheer. . In 1 hr we saw 70 black opaque, 20 black sheer, 3 black with holes, 2 black with patterns, 2 nude, 1 mustard yellow ….'Exactly ..this is why we need a  “Mass Culling” on Black opaque Tights ..so send your Thick Black opaques to the “Tights Ball project” so that they can be cut up ..in order to drastically reduce the amount of Black opaque Tights on our streets'.

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Send us Broken Tights and your Stories

We are going to create the world's biggest artwork and we need your tights!

- soon it will be on the 4th plinth in London's Trafalgar Square

Send your broken tights and stories to:

Platform-7 / The Tights Ball Project

The Little House, 16a Belmont Hill,

London, SE13 5BD

England

and they will become part of the Tights Ball - the largest artwork in the world!

Anna preparing the ball for Camden exhibition at Platform-7 HQ -

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Donation of broken tights into New limited edition bins

Thank you for all the ongoing feedback in relation to our recycling tights bins' look. We have learnt a lot in the past year about what you desire - colour and texture being among the most important!