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Faculty of Economics and Business
The Faculty of Economics and Business offers an inspiring study and working environment for students and employees. International accreditation enables the Faculty to assess performance against the highest international standards. It also creates an exciting environment of continuous improvement. FEB's programmes, academic staff and research do well on various excellence ranking lists.
FEBRI, the graduate school and research institute of the Faculty of Economics and Business has one position in the field of Sustainable Fashion and Consumer Behavior available.
Project description
In the Northern Netherlands, approximately 31 million kilos of clothing are discarded annually, of which less than 50% ends up in textile containers for reuse or recycling. More than half of all discarded textiles is incinerated, which contributes to the 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions from this sector. The consortium S3ORTED received funding from SNN/JTF to contribute to finding a solution for these problems. The mission of this consortium is to realize a new revenue model in the textile value chain, by scaling up and strengthening the (business/government/NGO) activities around sorting and recycling of consumer textiles and corporate clothing within the North of the Netherlands. The consortium consists of companies (e.g., Sympany, DEMCON), academic institutes (e.g., RUG, Hanze), governmental organisations (e.g. municipality of Groningen and Emmen), etc.
This PhD project is one of two positions available within FEBRI that are part of S3ORTED and focus on the business side of this mission. Within the S3ORTED project, other work-packages will focus on the technical development of an automated sorting process of discarded textiles as well as chemical recycling. But we also need to understand how we can create a circular textile ecosystem for business to innovate in (Project 1 - https://www.rug.nl/about-ug/work-with-us/job-opportunities/?details=00347-02S000BEBP), and how we can make consumers recycle better, buy more second-hand and recycled textiles and thus to waste less (Project 2).
This vacancy call concerns Project 2:
Given the high rate of discarded clothing that ends up at landfills or in incinerators, we need consumers to change their behavior regarding discarding clothing they no longer wear. The first aim of this project is to contribute to existing research on consumer’s willingness to offer their old clothing up for recycling, and to test new interventions (lab and field) to increase this willingness. The second aim is to get consumers to buy more often second-hand clothing: how to get consumers interested in buying clothing that has been handed in via textile bins (e.g. GoudGoed in Groningen). Finally, the exponential growth in how many fashion items consumers buy also increased the total volume of clothing that will end up at recycle organisations. To preserve scarce natural resources, we would need consumers to also simply buy less in general. The third aim is to study how consumers can be influenced to buy less. Part of the project entails field experiments in which you will work together with Dutch municipalities. As such, it is necessary to be able to communicate fluently in Dutch.
The PhD position will be embedded within the research programme Marketing at the Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB). The project will be supervised by Marijke Leliveld and Kim Poldner.