Technical and behavioural change for a more sustainable textile life cycle

Research Project, 2017 – 2020

Human behaviour in laundries causes massive wastage of textiles, water and electricity, and avoidable climate and aquatic pollution. Models of consumer behaviour in laundries are frequently based on unreliable self-reported behaviour. Shared laundries have become less common, which is not preferable from a resource perspective. This project aims to improve environmental outcomes by reducing uncertainty in existing systems analyses, to find out how to improve consumer behaviour in laundries, and to find out why residents of future multiunit dwellings would prefer a common laundry over their own private one.

Transdisciplinary work will occur at the Chalmers Living Lab. Residents will be engaged in surveys based in social science and trials based in engineering. RFID tags and flow instrumentation will answer questions regarding the number of times tagged garments are washed, and the scale of the resource flows. We will answer questions about how physical interventions and resource use information generated in the laundry can affect consumer behaviour. The work will extend beyond the Living Lab, with the surveys of residents of other multiunit dwellings to enhance the social science component of the project.

Outcomes of this research will have practical use in the development of multiunit dwellings, social media campaigns for reducing resource use and waste generation, garment industry sustainability actions and the future of communication between whitegoods and people.