OBJECTIVE: The objective of the project is to increase through training the employability opportunities of the project’s beneficiaries in the textile sector from a sustainable, ethical and circular point of view.

THEME: The theme of the project will be ethical, sustainable and circular fashion in the textile sector.

DESCRIPTION: This project aims to promote training in sustainability applied to the textile sector for the unemployed in Galicia and Asturias, promoting their employability and improving their professional qualification. Currently, the predominant production model is linear, the classic model of extract, manufacture, use and throw away, which requires large amounts of energy and natural resources and where the scarcity of some natural resources is beginning to be detected. It is therefore necessary and urgent to move to a more circular production model based on the principle of closing the circle in which the waste of some becomes resources for others.

The transition to a circular economy requires changes in all value chains, from product design to new management and market models, from new ways of converting waste into an asset to new forms of consumer behavior. A responsible consumer plays a fundamental role in changing behavior and consumption habits towards more sustainable attitudes.

Within circular economy policies, textiles is one of the material flows where priority action is required. First, because its industry is highly polluting and resource-consuming. The manufacture of clothing requires the use of raw materials (natural or synthetic) as well as high water consumption, and its transportation has consequences for climate change. On the other hand, our society is becoming more and more capricious and consumerist in which it prevails to buy textile products, basically clothes, at the lowest possible price and with a shorter and shorter life cycle. However, no consideration is given to the ethical or environmental effects it may cause.

In Spain, the average amount of textile waste (understood as all clothing, footwear, household textiles and other textile products that are discarded after a certain period of time) that is reused or recycled is less than 15%; more than 85% ends up in incineration plants or landfills. The European Commission estimates that each kilo of clothing that is reused or recycled, without being destined for incineration, avoids the emission of 3.17 kg of CO2.

To ensure a good integration of sustainability in the fashion industry, it is important to have knowledge that has to be accompanied by a strategic vision and a new way of understanding the fashion business. A key factor in the success of this training program is its interdisciplinary nature, offering students a global vision of sustainability, a fundamental aspect for understanding the future scenario of fashion and thus being able to design fashion with a future.

The general objective to be achieved with this training course, which will be held in Galicia and Asturias, is to train the recipients (mostly women) to be able to implement more sustainable actions within the different areas of work that make up the world of fashion: design, purchasing, production, sales, communication and management, as well as to adopt changes towards more ecological attitudes in the way we behave when consuming textiles. Students will be provided with a global vision of the concept of circularity and will be equipped with the skills to be aware of the environmental and social impacts of the fashion sector, which they can pass on to third parties, as well as with the tools to apply sustainability to the different phases of the life cycle of a garment, from the idea, manufacture, production and consumption.