Last week, several Environmental Design students participated in the Solutions Showcase during the 29th Annual Campus Sustainability Summit. The showcase was held at the University Memorial Center (UMC) on Thursday, April 21, from 12 to 7 p.m. The exhibit floor featured a wide array of research, ideas and proposals from undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students, as well as from faculty and staff.
Sarah Fitzpatrick, a sophomore in product design, led a team of four seamstresses and a videographer in creating the Upcycled & Recycled Fashion Collection. The interdisciplinary team of students–Aiden Paul (AP) Liu, a junior in architecture, Cece Thyen, a sophomore in product design, Carly Kunkle, a sophomore in chemistry, Deven Verma, a sophomore in film, and Fitzpatrick–designed and created seven, personally themed, outfits that featured different methods and materials. The collection was established to create an intimate display of the possibilities for the fashion industry to be more “circular” and use post consumer materials. Viewers were educated on the harm of “fast” fashion and argued that “waste is only waste if it’s called waste.”
In addition to the fashion collection, the team produced a runway video that was filmed in three different locations.
“A natural place we love (Boulder Creek), a place sickened by pollution (80216 the most polluted zip code in Colorado, just 30 minutes away) and a place destroyed by climate change (Marshall Fire neighborhood),” Fitzpatrick said.
Fitzpatrick and her team won the Sustainability Summit Grand Prize of $5,000, from the Mission Zero Fund.
“We all have different plans, but in the general realm we all want to continue forward with curating sustainable and recycled fashion,” Fitzpatrick said.
Other exhibitors include Caleb Schmitz, a junior in planning, for his work Hazards and incarceration facilities: evaluating facility-level exposure to floods, wildfires, extreme heat, and landslides in Colorado. ENVD Instructor Emily Greenwood and students from her senior landscape architecture studio Landscape as Agent, Abby Mohlis, Sarah Riddick and Yikang Mei. And, Nicholas Arvidson, an architecture major, participated in the exhibit along with the CU Boulder Solar Decathlon 2023 team, who won a prize of $2,000.