Public defence: Anna Schytte Sigaard
On the 9th of February, Anna will defend her thesis “Want Not, Waste Not. A Practice-Theoretical Study of Textile Disposal in Everyday Life” for the PhD in Innovation for Sustainability.
The defence will take place at OsloMet and will also be available for streaming. Read more about the event here.
Abstract
Every year, households get rid of large amounts of clothing, towels, curtains, and other textiles. The environmental impacts of the textile industry are well documented but while most attention has been directed at production, shopping, and recycling, the moment when textiles leave the home has received far less focus. Disposal is often seen as the simple act of throwing something away.
This research challenges that assumption by showing that disposal is an everyday practice full of meaning, shaped by household routines, cultural expectations, material constraints, and identity. The dissertation asks: How do household routines influence textile disposal? How are these practices shaped by culture, materials, and identity? And what can this tell us about how textile consumption can become more sustainable?
The study is based on a four-year project involving 28 households. Participants were asked to collect all textiles they would normally throw away or give away over a six-month period. In total, 3,556 items were discussed across 81 interviews. The textiles were then collected for further analysis and recorded based on physical characteristics such as brand, color, fiber content, damage, acquisition method, and lifespan. This dual approach, which looks both at people’s stories and the textiles themselves, offers a rare insight into how and why clothes and other textiles leave the home.
The results of the study reveal three main insights:
1. Disposal is central to how households organize daily life. Getting rid of textiles enables people to create order, adjust to life changes, and move toward future goals.
2. Disposal is influenced by many different factors: the quality and condition of textiles, ideas about appropriateness and cleanliness, as well as shifting roles within the household.
3. Disposal has become normalized. Even when textiles are still usable, discarding or donating them feels natural and socially acceptable. This normalization helps explain why sustainable practices such as repair, reuse, and reduced consumption are still less common.
The study also shows that people justify their decisions through a combination of logics. On the one hand, they speak of care, for family members, the home, themselves, and occasionally the environment. On the other hand, their actions often follow capitalist principles such as efficiency, novelty, and economic rationality, which frequently lead to acquisition and discarding more things. Clothing donation, for example, is widespread partly because it allows people to combine care with continued consumption.
By focusing on these dynamics, the dissertation frames textiles disposal as a window into how sustainability plays out in everyday life. It argues that lasting change cannot rely solely on individual behavior or technological solutions. Instead, sustainable textile consumption must be integrated into the infrastructure, routines, and cultural norms of daily life in ways that make it feel normal. This means that the key to lasting change lies in making sustainable textile habits seem like a natural part of everyday life, in the same way that throwing away or donating textiles feels normal today.