In convivial communities individuals are looking for being autonomous and self-educated in the way they are learning how to repair bikes, how to cook in solar hoovens or how to better produce foods. The Do it yourself and opensource philosophy is being propagated in actual practices.

The question of eco-efficiency of learning activities is rarely explored and could appear as a contradiction when adopting the posture of eco-hacktivist learners. Indeed, the question we would like to explore in the session is how to minimise the important cognitive and material wastes which appears when we are learning by doing.

This problematic will be explored and discussed through the example of cloth recovering activities.

The cloth recovering consists in collecting clothes, and finding new uses for material falls through classical activities such as cutting, patterning and sewing. In parallel with industrial initiatives like I.CO, the “trash to cash project” or the global award launched by the H&M brand, some people are designing solutions at a local scale, through collaborative sewing workshops, social enterprise, or DIY initiatives. These initiative owns a progressive level of expertises and most of people starts with few skills in the required field. Our feedback highlights that novices had a tendency to explore in a fuzzy way these activities by combining basic requirements and new emergent zero waste techniques.

We will explain how the learning step could be improved by sharing technologies like pattern library apps, by a better local management of skills and resources, and by the social and pedagogical entrepreneurship initiative of an itinerant sewing tricycle.

This media entry was a contribution to the special session „How to minimise material waste when learning & investigating for more convivial practices? “ at the 5th International Degrowth Conference in Budapest in 2016.