How to repurpose unwanted clothes, such as by turning them into art, instead of sending them to Hong Kong’s landfills
- Embroidery art, macramé, dyeing and fabric print making using potatoes – there are lots of creative uses for surplus garments on show at The Mills in Hong Kong
- An exhibition and workshops show the possibilities, while highlighting the city’s huge textile waste problem – every 10 seconds, 200 garments hit landfills
Two hundred garments are thrown into landfills in Hong Kong every 10 seconds.
That shocking statistic from the Chinese University of Hong Kong is shown prominently next to a giant wall display made up of hundreds of neatly folded items of clothing at the Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile (Chat). It should give you pause before you put another piece of clothing in the bin.
Hong Kong group Pop & Zebra have produced instructions for making furoshiki, square pieces of cloth for wrapping things used in Japan. Abhishek Desai and Krupa Joshi Desai, the couple behind the design studio with an anti-consumerist ethos, are holding workshops on simple dyeing methods and creating fabric prints with tools as basic as carved potatoes.
They are also behind the eye-catching murals around the exhibition venue highlighting the vast resources that go into making the simplest piece of clothing.