Wearable Waste: Mask-Making Workshop

“Wearable Waste” was a student-led mask-making workshop that activated creativity, community, and collective imagination through conversations on environmental justice, climate justice, and waste equity as interconnected struggles—not only locally, but across borders. Held at The City College of New York (CCNY), the workshop invited participants to reflect on how systems of consumption and disposal in urban centers and the Global North produce waste inequities and waste colonialism in marginalized communities across the peripheries and the Global South, disproportionately exposing them to pollution and the impacts of climate change.

The workshop explored how environmental justice centers fairness in the distribution of environmental benefits and harms, particularly for low-income, Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Global South communities that disproportionately bear the burden of pollution and environmental hazards. Climate justice builds on this framework by recognizing that these same communities contribute the least to climate change while experiencing some of its harshest consequences, including extreme weather, displacement, and food insecurity. Waste equity sits at the intersection of these issues, drawing attention to how systems of waste generation, consumption, and disposal externalize environmental and health burdens onto communities with the least political and economic power, both locally and globally.

These conversations were catalyzed through art-making. Participants transformed discarded materials into wearable masks, reframing waste as both a material of accumulation and a site of creative intervention. Layers of plastic bottles, soda cans, paper, and other discarded objects mirrored how environmental burdens accumulate on bodies, neighborhoods, and ecosystems. Inspired by Ndaku Ya La Vie Est Belle, a Congolese art collective, the masks also operated as forms of protest: making waste wearable rendered systems of disposability visible and difficult to ignore. At the same time, the workshop challenged assumptions that discarded materials lack value, demonstrating how creative reuse can translate policy and ideology into embodied experience, collective reflection, and solidarity.

The workshop was designed by LMQBA/UKAI Initiative collaborators and CCNY classmates Abby Manwiller and Ezra Undag. It was presented in collaboration with the UKAI Initiative by Little Manila Queens Bayanihan Arts, Sustainable CCNY, New York Public Interest Research Group–CCNY, and the Sustainability in the Urban Environment Graduate Programs at CCNY, with support from The NYC Climate Justice Hub and Social Practice CUNY.