This paper presents a framework for analysing which households are doing 'their bit' for sustainability in an era of climate change, using a two-stage cluster analysis of sustainable household capabilities. The framework segments households by their reported level of commitment to 'pro-sustainability' practices common to conventional government policies. Results are presented from a large-scale survey of Wollongong households, New South Wales, Australia. Results illustrate the importance of approaching household sustainability through everyday practices. Attention is drawn to the wide variation in participation in specific household sustainability practices. Investigation into sustainable household capability by household segments shows the limits of even the most committed households. Results show the importance of socio-cultural contexts in differentiating sustainable household capabilities*with women, suburban-detached households and lower income segments of the population ultimately doing most of the work of being sustainable.

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Narratives of clothing reuse and repurpose have centred on secondhand economies, recycling, upcycling and DIY, fashioning a particular kind of 'wasted' aesthetic where stitching, darning and patching become visible. But what of clothes that don't show signs of wear, because they are made from human-made fabrics that degrade much more slowly than organic materials? Drawing on ethnographic 'fashion journeys' with young adults from Sydney, Australia, this paper follows polyester clothes, geographically and temporally, beyond of spaces of production, to their everyday use, storage, divestment, reuse and recirculation. Clothing is theorised as always in-process-materially, temporally and spatially-and understood haptically through relations between agentic component materials and human touch. Reconfiguring concepts of fashion waste questions how clothes become redundant: their material memories instead lingering in wardrobes, in stockpiles of divested objects and hand-me-downs, entering cycles of secondhand trade and ultimately, landfill. Polyester manifests a particular variant of material culture: both mundane and malignant, its feel and slow decay result in clothing that seldom slips from the category of surplus to excess in clear ways. An embodied approach, focused on materials and haptic properties of touch and 'feel', reveals the contours of an otherwise opaque everyday geography of clothing waste. Disciplines Education | Social and Behavioral Sciences Publication Details Stanes, E. & Gibson, C. (2017). Materials that linger: An embodied geography of polyester clothes. Geoforum, 85 27-36.

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