How can we teach children about textile waste?

Educating the next generation

It is important to practically decrease textile waste to save Earth’s limited resources. But it is equally important to educate the next generation about sustainable consumption habits. This is what we have done to address these issues in our own garment factory in Latvia.

In the small Latvian town of Tukums, we have something very unique – our own garment factory called Prodem. It is not at all a regular factory; rather, it is a factory that has been fine-tuned to deliver workwear to customers fast and based only on their needs. This helps us to fight against textile waste, which is a huge problem globally.

In Europe, we deliver around 20 percent of our workwear from Tukums, so we really can have impact through having the production in our own hands.

Textile waste can be used creatively

Garment manufacturing is mainly handicraft work, but there are also processes that can be automated and optimized, such as cutting. With optimized cutting, we are able to generate only a minimum amount of textile waste. And we donate these scraps to local schools and kindergartens. This is our way of helping to save the planet and educate children through the creative usage of textile waste.

This is a very important project for me personally. While using their own hands and making something useful out of the leftover fabrics, the kids learn that textile waste is a big problem and that they can be part of the efforts to minimize it. Today’s kids are smart! At the nearby school they wanted to get rid of plastic bags and had an idea to use the waste textile from Lindström to prepare re-usable shopping bags for themselves.