Studio Zao × ELWA

Closing the Loop

You've been invited to a hackathon to co-create solutions to London's textile waste problem.

A day to build what the sector has been working towards.

A curated, full-day session bringing together 25 leaders across textiles, retail, and the circular economy to solve three specific, evidence-backed problems in London's clothing disposal system. Each brief is framed as a How Might We question — a concrete design challenge backed by behavioural research.

20%

of London's unwanted clothes end up in general waste

68% vs 27%

of Londoners buy secondhand. Only 27% sell. The gap is the problem.

12%

of Londoners have clothes bagged up and ready to go. They never leave.

What we did

What the research found

Studio Zao was commissioned by ELWA and NLWA to go beyond awareness and map exactly how Londoners dispose of unwanted clothing and where the system fails them.

We surveyed 1,014 Londoners, conducted in-depth interviews, and consulted major organisations across the sector.

The result: four behavioural personas, a systemic friction map, and three challenge briefs.

Headline finding

"Londoners aren't binning clothes because they don't care. They're binning them because the system has made every other route harder than the bin."

The four personas

The four types of London clothing disposer

The Accumulator · 17.5%

Buys frequently, holds onto clothes, struggles to act on disposal intent

The Pragmatic Replacer · 41.8%

Replaces clothes when worn out. Not values-driven, not trend-driven.

The Ethical Keeper · 12.7%

Environmentally motivated and fairly circular, but held back by institutional distrust

The Seasonal Clearer · 28.0%

Disposes in large batches when triggered. Right mindset, wrong frequency.

The hack focuses on The Accumulator, The Ethical Keeper, and The Seasonal Clearer, the three personas with the greatest capacity for behaviour change.

The hack

How the day works

This event is the culmination of the ELWA/NLWA venture-building project. The research is done. This is the day we put it to work.

On hack day, 25 invited leaders will work in three focused working groups, one per brief, to develop viable, stress-tested concepts.

The aim is to leave with a set of ideas that have real commitments behind them — and a clear path to building business cases and taking them forward.

Brief 01

Closing the Exit Gap

"How might we make disposing of a garment circularly as low-effort as buying one, without forcing people to become sellers?"

Brief 02

The Clearout Occasion

"How might we create clear-out occasions that trigger action for people who tend to dispose in large batches only when something prompts them?"

Brief 03

Closing the Information Gap

"How might we give people quick, trustworthy confidence that their unwanted garments are worth doing something with, before questions of where they should go even arise?"

Why this, why now

Why now, and why in a room together

The barriers here are structural, and they call for cross-sector thinking. Progress has been slow not for lack of effort, but because the problems span organisations, incentives, and infrastructure that no single actor controls.

If you are working in this space and want to see things move, this is a day built for that purpose. Come ready to commit.