Celebrating Student-led Projects Driving Clothing Circularity at HKUST
Last semester, 11 HKUST students took part in JCSCCP’s Sustainability Leadership Programme (Spring 2024), where they joined a cohort of students from seven other universities to undergo leadership training and learned about issues of overproduction and overconsumption in the clothing industry, from both local and global contexts. After learning from local circular fashion experts at Redress and JupYeah, the university-based student teams were tasked with developing and delivering a project that helps drive clothing circularity within their respective campus communities—i.e., find a way to collect, sort, and redistribute clothing within the community, encouraging circularity and responsible consumption.
Throughout February and March this year, the university-based teams refined their project ideas to find ways to target their respective campus communities. At HKUST, 11 students were split into two project teams—Sustainable Style and Thrive Shop—both of which thought of different ways to encourage a circular fashion mindset within the HKUST community, working together to prevent over 600kg of unwanted clothing from entering landfill.
Sustainable Style: Promoting Campus Circularity, One Closet at a Time
The Sustainable Style project team planned and delivered an awareness-raising campaign, collecting and showcasing the vast amount of clothing people ‘give away to charity,’ while also making people confront the reality that quite often, clothes that are given away reveal the culture of overproduction and overconsumption in our society. Using unwanted clothing collected from the HKUST community, the project team created an installation at SSC Hub—a massive pile of clothing containing items ranging from brand new (i.e., items still with tags on them), to used and worn-out undergarments. The student leaders then hosted a few days of ‘Swap, Sort, and Select’ educational booths, where they shared their learnings from the Programme and encouraged a circular mindset among their peers.
The student team’s innovative and creative campaign ideas, as well as impactful reach of their project scored them second place in the whole Programme! Kudos the students for their efforts running their wide-ranging project.
Thrive Shop: Turn Surplus to Purpose
The Thrive Shop project team approached the task by providing a free clothing reselling platform for the HKUST community, establishing a consignment store and all the intricate operations that helped collect more than 50 kg of clothing for reuse, and reselling over 100 items within the HKUST community, helping extend the clothes’ lifespan. Their project allowed campus community ‘sellers’ to list their clothing items for sale, and the items were displayed and sold at their ‘Thrive Shop’ secondhand thrift store over several weeks at SSC Hub. This helped introduce the idea of circularity on the HKUST campus, and gave many community members a taste of the benefits of choosing secondhand over new—not only does it save the items from being wasted, it turns surplus to purpose!
While the JCSCCP’s Sustainability Leadership Programme (Spring 2024) has come to an end, it is exciting to see student leaders feeling empowered to drive sustainability within their own community. We only hope that they continue to pass on the torch as students at HKUST and onwards into their lives, further encouraging sustainability or simply just keeping this mindset!
