Becky Swainson is a PhD researcher at the University of Guelph whose work addresses the global textile waste crisis through community-based governance solutions. With an academic foundation in environmental sciences and geography, she has authored multiple refereed publications and reports examining the socio-political dimensions of resource governance in Canada and internationally and has been awarded a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship in support of her work.
Alongside her doctoral research, Becky is a parent, educator, textile artist, and community leader advancing textile circularity, slow fashion, and mending in Guelph, Ontario. She teaches highly sought-after sewing classes focused on textile sustainability and has received recognition for her contributions to the circular economy through her studio, gather + make. She is also the founder and coordinator of the Stitch Together Community Mending Project, an innovative volunteer-run initiative that creates free, inclusive, and accessible spaces for textile repair, skill-sharing, and community connection.
Drawing on over 18 years of experience across government, non-profit, academic, and social enterprise settings, Becky integrates action-oriented research with community organizing to mobilize knowledge and drive meaningful change. Her work bridges scholarship and practice, demonstrating how locally grounded initiatives can inform scalable, equitable solutions for textile sustainability in Canada and beyond.
Slowing fast fashion: collaborative governance for textile waste prevention in Canada
Textile waste is among society’s most pressing environmental issues, driven largely by the rise of “fast fashion” – low cost, lower quality clothing being produced and consumed at an alarming rate. Globally, textile consumption has doubled in 20 years, with a garbage truck full of textile waste landfilled or incinerated each second. Canada is a major textile consumer, but we are just beginning to manage our growing waste problem, with no national strategy and very few examples of direct action. Addressing textile waste in Canada will require a suite of tools, including encouraging reuse and repair (an oft-cited solution but rarely supported in practice), as well as collective action at a broader scale, through collaborative governance among stakeholders including government, industry, non-profits, academia, and consumers/citizens. Most existing research on the issue is technical and/or engineering-focused; social science research on textile waste in Canada is limited, and in order to address root causes and inform effective governance, more work is urgently needed. My PhD research will investigate solutions to the textile waste crisis through the scholarly lenses of discard studies and waste governance, with a focus on identifying how Canadian municipalities can prevent textile waste and implement effective governance strategies.
My research objectives are to characterize the textile waste governance landscape in Canada; develop a case study of textile waste generation and governance at the municipal scale, including barriers and opportunities; and test innovative, community-based strategies for supporting mending by evaluating their impact on textile waste perceptions and behaviours and their role in a collaborative, community based approach to waste governance.
This research will contribute to a conceptualization of textile waste through the framework of discard studies, which in turn will offer insights to inform strategies for preventing and managing textile waste in Canada and globally. It will contribute to social science scholarship on textile waste governance and interventions in Canada, and participatory research will foster collaboration among local stakeholders while identifying barriers and opportunities to inform effective governance. It will also guide evidence-based development of innovative strategies for facilitating mending and repair as a critical component of a circular textile economy.
