Textile-to-textile Recycling Is a $1.5 Billion Opportunity in the U.S.

Done right, textile-to-textile recycling in the U.S. could unlock a $1.5 billion economic opportunity, a new report says. The problem is that clothing is currently being disposed of wrong. Just 15 percent of the 17 million tons of textile waste the country generates is currently recovered, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, with a whopping 85 percent winding up in landfills or incinerators.

And despite North America being one of the biggest consumers of apparel and footwear in the world, not to mention its leading generator of waste from the same, critical questions about the market remain unanswered: What do people do with garments they no longer want? What materials are in these castoffs? And what does this mean for the inchoate aspirations of upstarts like Syre that are funneling millions into building a textile-to-textile recycling ecosystem where none exists at scale?

Fashion for Good decided to find out. Following similar forays in Europe and India, the Amsterdam-based innovation platform surveyed 1,200 consumers and sifted through more than 16 tons of garments to map out what textile waste looks like in California, Colorado, Florida, Texas and New York throughout the year. The fact that this was a novel endeavor signals the relative immaturity of end-of-life legislation in the U.S. versus Europe, where eco-design rules governing the creation, use and disposal of products, including a ban on destroying unsold goods, are set to enter into force in the EU single market, said Georgia Parker, Fashion for Good’s innovation director. It’s her hope that the organization’s findings will feed into broader policy conversations beyond the “pockets of stuff” happening in California and New York around extended producer responsibility.

The difference between the geographies is also reflected in the amount of post-consumer textiles found to be suitable for textile-to-textile recycling using existing mechanical and chemical means — 56 percent in the U.S. as opposed to 74 percent in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the U.K. One reason for this disparity is that few textiles that are collected for reuse, repurposing or recycling in the U.S. are sorted or graded domestically.

“So what happens in the United States is there are big collectors, whether the charity collectors or the for-profit collectors, that collect material, and they typically don’t sort it here; they export it,” said Karla Magruder, founder of Accelerating Circularity, a New York-based nonprofit that has been successfully running ​​cotton-based textile recycling trials in the U.S. and Europe. “In Europe, they’re sorting for domestic reuse and then they send other materials out to other countries. We have a tendency to just collect, bale it and ship it out.”

In other words, there’s less visibility into how much is sorted as rewearable or non-rewearable in the U.S., compared with regional sorting operations within Europe that can offer a better idea of rewearable and non-rewearable fractions, Parker said. Ditto with India, where post-consumer textiles that can serve as grist for recycling hover around 84 percent.

How Americans approach textile disposal was another interesting data point, even though Fashion for Good didn’t do a consumer survey in Europe so there isn’t any specific to compare results to. More than 60 percent of respondents, for instance, said they never throw away textiles, choosing instead to “divert” them through donation, resale, recycling or repurposing. Another 4 percent said they exclusively chucked their unwanted clothing in the trash. There also appeared to be a “logical pattern” guiding the methods of dealing with textiles, Parker said. Those that are regarded as “high” quality and in good condition are more likely to be resold or passed on to family and friends. “Fair” quality items are commonly passed onto a charity, while those perceived as “damaged,” along with holey socks and underwear, are almost always thrown away.

Whether Americans will be able to recycle their duds the way they do plastic bottles and aluminum cans remains to be seen. Goodwill, one of Fashion for Good’s partners on the project, has trialed curbside collection for textiles, which might be more convenient for consumers but remains logistically challenging, not least because consumers clean out their closets in bursts rather than in a consistent manner, making efficient routing difficult. Textiles are also vulnerable to weather conditions and can absorb liquids from other recyclables, rendering them unsuitable for recycling. Making something halfway workable would require significant municipal investment, including in education and building trust through transparency. (Around 5 percent of people who discard textiles instead of diverting them do so because they’re skeptical about whether textile reuse or recycling genuinely happens.)

That the Goodwills and the Eastmans of the world need to better align on recycling feedstocks is obvious to Magruder, whose organization works with a slew of stakeholders, from textile collection to recycling to yarn spinning to retail, to cooperatively develop and source feedstock specifications. The trick is to do this to a much larger extent, while remaining mindful of issues like restricted substances that require testing from batch to batch to ensure compliance with existing and emerging regulations. It can be done, she said, but it needs interoperability that fosters win-win collaboration.

“With our first trials, we wanted to prove that we could make recycled textiles and we came up with a T-shirt with 40 percent of recycled material in there,” Magruder said. “Now that we know we can do that at decent quality, how do we really get the system functioning?”

Better sorting, which is, for the most part, a tedious, manual process, could be an answer. While intelligent sorting technologies from the likes of Refiberd or Tomra already exist, making sure that sorters have a reason to invest in them so that innovators can achieve a consistent feedstock in the necessary volumes is paramount. The bipartisan Americas Act, which earmarks $14 billion in federal grants, loans and tax breaks for circular fashion, could be a boon if it passes, but nothing is a sure thing in Washington, D.C., where the ballooning deficit is a perennial bone of contention. If states don’t step in with financial carrots, the industry will have to fend for itself.

“One of the next stages of our project might be us is to look at how can we bring together the relevant stakeholders and build a demo facility in the U.S. that’s best in class and validates automated sorting technologies,” Parker said. “And building out that business case.”

Fashion for Good’s results show that the volumes of useful textiles — foremost of which was cotton at 51 percent, followed by polyester at 28 percent — exist. Now the $1.5 billion question is how states can create incentives to create favorable environments for innovators like Syre to invest in setting up their facilities. It’s not the only one, however.

“What is the perfect future state?” Parker asked. “Is it that we should build recycling facilities where the textile waste is and then ship the pellets or pulp to Asia, where it gets then made into like yarns and fabrics and garments? Or should we have more nearshoring — where more of the manufacturing is happening in the U.S. and in Europe? What does this mean from a tariffs or customs perspective? I don’t have an answer to that but it’s a really interesting one.”