Adapting engineering education to challenges of sustainable development

Abstract

Textile and clothing industries generate a lot of waste at both production stages and in the process of wearing garments. Every inhabitant of developed countries annually wastes up to 30 kg of used but still suitable clothes, which decompose very slowly in natural conditions. The broadest possible implementation of textile waste processing technologies, such as downcycling and upcycling, is the key to ensuring the successful operation of the textile and clothing industries under conditions of sustainable development. The paper goal is to determine factors controlling students’ upcycling behaviour to strengthen the educational components and meet sustainable development challenges for the garment industry. Based on interpersonal and planned behaviour models, 93 students of 1-6 years majoring in clothing technology, design and sectoral professional education were surveyed to understand their upcycling behaviour. The surveyed students are divided into similar-sized groups of optimists (practice upcycling more than once every three months) and pessimists (less than once a year). Upcycling behaviour was shown to correlate with intentions, which are, in turn, affected by social factors, attitude, and perceived behaviour control. Perceived habits and facilitating conditions have a relatively small impact. There is almost no difference between students of different years of study and specialities. Students’ understanding of the benefits of upcycling is shallow and does not change with training years. Amid a highly-positive attitude towards upcycling, a low level of knowledge of the benefits and lack of progress with years indicate existing problems in developing upcycling behaviour in the learning process.

Understanding and attitude toward upcycling according to the survey of students of various specialities

“…Depending on the field of study, immediate attention should be paid to those sustainable development goals that are a priority for that field. Two previous works were devoted to the problems of engineering education for sustainable development [15][16][17], and this work further develops the obtained results. Sustainable technologies and materials are a priority for engineering education.…”

“…The influencing factors form an interconnected scheme that illustrates the mutual dependence of the elements on each other and the order of their action. In more detail, the procedure and assessment of the influence of individual factors are described in [16,17].…”

“…Possible choices consisted of 8 options ranging from the most frequent use (less than once a week) to the option "never". Works [16,17] show that answers 1-3 from "less than once a week" to "once a month" are characteristic of upcycling optimists. On the contrary, answers 5-8 from "never" to "once every six months" are typical of respondents who are sceptical about applying upcycling practices.…”

“…As mentioned above, the problems of engineering education for sustainable development, namely the perception of upcycling by students of various specialities in the clothing industry, were considered in previous works [16,17]. The current research is expanded the started topic for students of other specialities not related to the study of textiles, as well as for teachers.…”

“…In previous studies [16,17], the focus was on studying the change of attitude towards the waste management problem with years of study for students specialising in vocational education and training (VET) for the clothing industry. In contrast, this study covers more majors but only concerns junior students who have not yet had special classes to develop an understanding of the importance of waste management.…”