Stitching textile recycling together

This article appeared in the January 2025 issue of Resource Recycling. Subscribe today for access to all print content.

Editor’s note: Learn more about textile recycling and many other topics at the 2025 Plastics Recycling Conference on March 24-26 in National Harbor, Maryland. 

From public campaigns to a new textile extended producer responsibility law, textile recovery and recycling is taking its place in the national resource recovery conversation.

Both public and private entities are working on addressing fast fashion and the challenges of recycling materials that are, more often than not, blends of different materials — some organic and some plastic — making them tricky to sort and process.

Different ways of collection

Trashie, which started as a clothing take-back service and recently expanded into electronics, offers consumers the option to buy a $20 “Take Back Bag” that they fill with clothing, shoes, accessories and linens from any brand and then mail back. Customers get $20 in TrashieCash, which they can redeem at various dining, travel, clothing, beauty, wellness and home goods brands.

Annie Gullingsrud, Trashie’s chief strategy officer, said in an interview that the four-year-old program has seen great success and collects about 80,000 pounds of textiles per week.

“We sort and grade them to ensure that they go back into the system and can be either reused or recycled,” she said. “Our goal is to divert stuff from going to the landfill.”

The company started out with an eye toward circularity — in fact, it used to produce its own clothing and take back only the same, but it has since stopped making its own clothing and expanded to all textile brands.

“Our goal is to make recycling accessible for everybody,” Gullingsrud said, “focusing on the things that have a high likelihood of ending up in landfill that people don’t know what to do with.”

Using the mail system is one way to increase accessibility, she added.

“The reality is, a lot of people do returns these days. There’s billions of dollars that are put back into the return and the reverse logistics system. So we’re relying on that system, and we are doing that because we see a higher engagement rate,” Gullingsrud said.

Another way has been offering people rewards for sending in textiles. That helps bring in more people than the ones who are sustainability minded, she noted, as there’s a limit to those customers.

“You have all these young people coming into the world who were brought up shopping on Amazon and Shein,” she said. “They also shop vintage, but that’s sort of where they’re at.”

However, the average consumer also has a strong brand awareness of Goodwill and other donation centers, and that’s a strength to be leveraged, panelists said at the 2024 Resource Recycling Conference, held this November in Louisville, Kentucky.

During the “Textile Recycling: Current Challenges and Future Opportunities” session, 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, spoke with Resource Recycling reporter Antoinette Smith about how to use existing infrastructure to tackle the complexities of textile recycling.

Forsberg pointed out that Goodwill diverted 4.3 billion pounds of material in 2023, via 3,300 locations. 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, one partner that is not really working in the space is municipalities, 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.”

“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 recreate the wheel. The infrastructure and the expertise and the partners are already out there.”

Starting at production

Colorado-based apparel company Cocona Labs starts higher up in the chain, President Blair Kanis said in an interview. BioSphere Plastic provides an enhanced biodegradation additive that Cocona Labs adds to all of its fibers and yarns. That way, if clothing does end up in landfill, it breaks down faster.

Kanis noted that she doesn’t see disposal as a replacement for recycling but rather as a stopgap measure while textile-to-textile recycling ramps up.

“Just changing the speed of degradation of a plastic product that goes into a landfill is not the end of the sustainability goal,” she said.

Cocona Labs launched in 2020, and Kanis said attention to sustainability declined somewhat as inflation rose.

“It was more front and center in the industry coming through COVID, and out of COVID it was definitely a focus, but now due to economic factors sustainability is maybe not front and center,” she said. “But it is something that I’d say we’re really still in the beginning of the journey of.”

Enhanced biodegradation is also a complicated scientific topic, Kanis added, which has kept it from gaining traction. She said some regulations in the U.S., specifically in California, that restrict the use of labels such as biodegradable, degradable and compostable have had the same effect.

“There’s that legal component as well that makes it a complex marketing story, and while those regulations remain in place it will make it difficult to adopt this technology,” she added. “I think they are really well-intentioned laws, they’re really attempting to stop greenwashing. I completely understand the reasons for these laws, but I do think that technology has made quite some strides in this space, and I think it’s important for the law to keep up with where the technology is.”

Future moves

Goodwill has been forming partnerships and moving into the textile recycling space, as Resource Recycling reported earlier this year.

Gullingsrud, of Trashie, said policy has a role to play. California recently passed extended producer responsibility for textiles, which she said was an exciting development. Trashie has always focused on being fun and joyful, and that helps get people onboard, as well, she added.

“We’re helping to build awareness by helping people enjoy the act of recycling,” Gullingsrud said. “What can we do to enable people to do this awesome thing, but also have a great time? That’s why I love the Trashie cause.

“We truly want to bring joy to people’s lives through the act of recycling,” she added. “I think that we are poised to be able to do that, and that’s what I want. That’s what I want for all of us is to not think of this as an annoying activity, but to think of it as something that’s really great and fun that other people can do — and it’s not a hassle, and I get something out of it.”

During the textile panel, London said that 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 in order to avoid competing with themselves.

“That takes a little more thinking and a little more conversation,” 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 EPR model involves subsidizing the collection and sorting and processing material through a small tax on each new garment purchased.

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