Taking textile recycling mainstream

Policy, partnerships and planning are all crucial components of scaling up textile recycling, stakeholders said during a panel discussion at the 2024 Resource Recycling Conference.

Held in November in Louisville, Kentucky, the conference touched on textile recycling during the session “Textile Recycling: Current Challenges and Future Opportunities.” Panelists Marisa Adler, a senior consultant at RRS, Beth Forsberg, senior vice president of sustainability at Goodwill of Central and Northern Arizona, and Brian London, president and CEO of textile trading company Whitehouse & Schapiro as well as president of industry association SMART, discussed how to use existing infrastructure to tackle the complexities of textile recycling.  

More often than not, textiles are blends of different materials, some organic and some plastic, making them tricky to sort and process – though many entities, private and public, are working on the issue. 

The first challenge of any recycling system is collection, a service Goodwill provides. The average consumer has a strong brand awareness of Goodwill and other donation centers, and that’s a strength to be leveraged, Forsberg said. 

Forsberg pointed out that Goodwill diverted 4.3 billion pounds of material in 2023 via 3,300 locations, and the nonprofit has been forming partnerships and moving into the textile recycling space. One of her “favorite stats to share” is that 82% of the U.S. population lives within 10 miles of a Goodwill store. 

“When we start to talk about the needed infrastructure or the lack thereof, it’s a really heavy reminder that some of the solutions already exist,” she said. “But without the partnerships and the clarity and the understanding of how to win, it’s never going to work.” 

London added that there’s “really a mosaic of different collection types,” from Goodwill-style stores that take donations, to drop-off bins in parking lots and boutique doorstep collection services. 

“All these methods have advantages and disadvantages, but I think as we keep going, we’ll find more and more ways to try and capture more of this,” he said. 

However, partnering with municipalities is not really working in the space, Adler noted. “The Goodwills of the world and the for-profit collectors of the world have done such a good job providing the service, it has sort of developed outside of our traditional municipal mechanisms.”

However, “as we move forward, I think there’s an opportunity for municipalities to get engaged in this in a lot of different ways,” she said. “But one of the key things that we want to remember is that we don’t need to re-create the wheel. The infrastructure and the expertise and the partners are already out there.”

Aside from the complexity of textile recycling, there’s also the problem of brands destroying out-of-season or older clothes instead of reselling or recycling, to avoid competing with themselves, London added.

“That takes a little more thinking and a little more conversation” to address, he said. “There are ways to divert that material to other markets where it can be used for good, for people who couldn’t afford at the normal retail price without interfering with their sales, but until they’re kind of pressed to make those more responsible choices, generally they don’t, in my experience.” 

As policy develops and expands, “I think we’ll see more progress with that problem,” he added. 

Working with governments or municipalities to help procure feedstock and de-risk startups could also help, Adler said. 

“All the stars kind of need to align,” she said. “You need to align your feedstock, need to align your offtake. You need to align your equipment and all these different things for an industry, basically, that doesn’t exist yet.” Cities or other governments could bring credibility to those conversations as well, she added.

Overall, “all eyes really are on EPR efforts,” London said. He pointed to France, where the extended producer responsibility model imposes a small tax on each new garment purchased, to subsidize material collection, sorting and processing. 

“How are they going to bridge the gap here to make it economically feasible to collect what you need to collect?” he asked.