Age Groups: 8+
No. Staff per children necessary: 1 adult with required skill per 7 children
Approximated time: Minimum 60 minutes: 10 minute briefing, 10 minute example, 20-60 minute task, 10-20 minute discussion.
Required Materials: 
Soft plastic waste and/or textile waste, string, masking tape, scissors, medium/heavy weight cardboard, knitting needles (optional). Students will be asked in preparation to bring in rubbish, ideally soft plastic waste, clothing that is unfixable, ideally not paper waste or metals.
Overview:
Through playful craft, students will be challenged to rethink binary oppositions of waste vs rubbish, and usefulness vs uselessness. By weaving, students will recontextualise rubbish in practical contexts, and learn material composition of textiles through fun, simple, hands-on activities. Rubbish will be presented as a beautiful, bountiful, toxic residue of modern existence, that we should not be scared to look at, but something we must embrace!
Craft is an incredibly powerful medium, it allows conversations between matter, helps us meditate, allows for playful experimentation, and lets us stim while chatting to one another.
Workshop Plan:
The workshop will begin with a brief presentation of what a textile is, where they are used and how they are made both by hand and machines. We will then briefly discuss the environmental impact of sourcing fibres through farming and mining. Students will be asked what resources they think might be better to use in constructing textiles before landfills are pitched as the ultimate source of abundance. We will briefly discuss the scale and implication of landfill, repercussions of plastic decomposition and excessive disposal culture that manifests such landfills.

The hands-on section of the workshop will then begin, by showing students an example of making a weave textile using plastic and textile waste. After the example of the technique has been shown, students will be encouraged to begin their own samples, which will be later patchworked into a class blanket.

During this section, questions for students to discuss will remain on the board, and workshop facilitators will help with the project, and encourage conversation around cultures of disposal. Questions will include: What makes something rubbish? What are different types of rubbish? What is the difference between waste and resource – are these ideas so separate? Why do we think it’s ok to throw so much away? When you throw things away do you think about where they go? Can over here really be clean, if what we’ve thrown away to make it clean is over there, but out of sight? How can we get people thinking more about the life of things after they’re thrown away more? How can we make the use-life of disposables longer?

At the end of the class, students will be encouraged to share their answers to the questions in a discussion of what waste is and how we can think about waste differently. The class will conclude with a discussion of waste as a part of oneself, and something that we are responsible for. It will be pitched as a reflection of one’s patterns of consumption, and thus an abstract depiction of who you are. Students will be encouraged to go home thinking of what they mindlessly throw away as the same as something they need, and to continue engaging with rubbish as something bountiful, beautiful and useful.
Intended Impact:
This workshop directly engages with reducing ecological damage on personal scales. Students will be inspired to shift in their definitions of ‘waste’, thus rethinking cultures of disposal. As well as minimising mindless consumption/disposal, waste will be seen as a resource that is free, accessible, and abundant. As a resource for craft and beyond, students will be encouraged to use rubbish first, fix things rather than pay for them, and step out of capitalist means of production.

Supporting Texts:
Hyperobjects, The Beautiful Math of Coral, Staying With the Trouble, The Geish manifesto.