George Washington University
IN-50: Innovation D

As a part of GW's zero waste approach, GW introduced permanent clothing donation bins on campus and has been increasing the amount of clothing diverted from the landfill every year. In the Spring of 2019, with support from the Urban Sustainability Directors’ Network (USDN) and the District of Columbia Department of Energy and Environment, GW launched an education and awareness campaign to improve students’ knowledge of how to properly treat clothing and other textiles when they are no longer wanted. The campaign served as a pilot study with the potential to be scaled and applied in municipalities that are members of the USDN. As part of the campaign, the Office of Sustainability partnered with faculty in the GW Corcoran School of the Arts to promote an exhibit "Fast Fashion, Slow Art", as well as a community wide conference on sustainable fashion, clothing swap pop-ups on campus, pop-up clothing mending stations on campus, and increased signage about clothing reuse bins. The partnership allowed GW to conduct a study on the impact of the campaign. GW learned that increased educational efforts did in fact increase understanding of textile waste issues and resulted in greater volume of textiles diverted from the landfill. This information has been shared with USDN for further deployment across cities. Results were presented at the Drawdown Research Conference in Fall 2019 at Penn State University.

The volume of textiles diverted from the landfill has increased over the years.
2014: 17.3 tons
2015: 24.0 tons
2016: 16.2 tons
2017: 28.2 tons
2018: 32.8 tons
2019: 48.7 tons