Trash School is a community initiative for learning about what we discard, celebrating its value and developing practices to keep it local.
At the beginning of the year, we gathered some friends of the studio to prefigure this question: what if we had a community-scale solution for recycling discarded and unwanted textile waste?
As we started enacting this system, we began collecting loads of data and meeting lots of incredible people doing important waste reduction measures. Their work doesn’t fit neatly into any one category, as we were finding true for ours. Even though this problem is large and heavy, we found the expansiveness in learning and unlearning with others on a hyperlocal level.
We launched Trash School so we can start inviting you all into the fun. Our hope is that by better understanding textile waste, we can all see ourselves playing a role in … We can’t wait to share what we’ve been learning! Starting with current methods of donating and recycling textiles we identified the skills and knowledge we have and need within our community to develop solutions for a hyper-local system.

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As our research went on, our excitement grew as our solutions became more complicated. These were not small questions: Can solutions promote degrowth? Is transparency possible? What is the definition of waste anyways? Is there a way for this to be…fun?

So Trash School was born. We are learning and unlearning alongside each other. Textile waste includes many sectors and we plan to include them all. We hope the resulting ecosystem creates collaborations, innovative materials, connection and a model for local resilience that can be replicated elsewhere.

Check out the calendar for upcoming Trash School offerings at the studio. Our ongoing findings will be available in The Trashy Times, launching November 6th. You can donate to our distribution here.