July/August 2013
Recyclers are working to raise awareness and increase the convenience of textile recycling in the United States, where the vast majority of used clothes and shoes endS up in landfills despite healthy demand for this material.
By Ellen Ryan
Most people have used, unwanted clothes and shoes sitting around their homes. When they finally want to get rid of them, what do they do? If they give them to charity, they’re in the minority. U.S. residents donate or recycle an average of 12 pounds of clothes per person each year, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (Washington, D.C.), but they throw away an average of 70 pounds, even though “95 percent of that can be reused or recycled,” says Jackie King, executive director of the Secondary Materials and Recycled Textiles Association, or SMART (Bel Air, Md.).
Discarded textiles were 13.1 million tons, or 5.2 percent, of the U.S. municipal solid waste stream in 2011. Approximately 2 million tons, or 15 percent of that total, was recovered, which means 11.2 million tons, or 85 percent, went to the landfill, according to the EPA. That low recovery rate raises the question: Why are so many textiles trashed rather than recycled? “People want to do the right thing, but it’s a question of convenience,” says Mattias Wallander, CEO of USAgain (West Chicago, Ill.), which sells secondary textiles domestically and abroad. “If you’re moving, or you don’t have a car, or there’s no curbside pickup, or you don’t know where to take unwanted clothing, these things end up being thrown out.”
Discarded textiles represent a challenge—and an opportunity—for SMART; its related advocacy group, the Council for Textile Recycling; recyclers; and waste haulers. Some companies are taking steps to increase recovery through manufacturer and retail takebacks, curbside collection programs, public-private partnerships, and other innovative efforts.
The Recovery Side
According to SMART, nearly all of the 3.8 billion pounds of used textiles its 200 members handle each year come from institutions, individuals, and households. The vast majority of the recycled or donated material—95 percent—ends up reused or recycled; only 5 percent is discarded. Of the reused or recycled portion, an estimated 45 percent gets reused in its original state—as clothes, accessories, or shoes—though only a small portion of that reuse is via thrift store sales. Charities reportedly sell in their retail outlets only 2 to 3 pounds of every 10 pounds they receive, with the unsold 7 to 8 pounds sold to for-profit recyclers, according to a SMART member company that licenses inventory tracking software to charities. The recyclers collect, sort (or not), bundle, and sell the material for use as clothing or for processing into raw material for other products. Those other products might be wiping cloths (the destination of 30 percent of recycled and donated textiles) or fiber for carpet padding, pet bedding, home and industrial insulation, and automotive needs (20 percent). Heavy industry, hotels, hospitals, and consumers are big users of wiping cloths. Hotels, hospitals, and restaurants also are big suppliers of used linens. “In the old days, material for wiping cloths and fibers would come from scraps from the mills,” King says. Today, “with so little clothing made domestically, that’s more postconsumer now than postindustrial.”
Rick’s Rags, a small wiping rag company in Canastota, N.Y., sources material from laundries, the local landfill, and a textile sorter/grader in Toronto. Owners Rick and Penny Stevens began in 1984 by cutting old clothes into rags while watching TV, then selling the material to the copper wire mill where he worked. The company has grown from processing 100 pounds a week to generating 800 pounds an hour, with 14 employees processing material with double-head cutters in a 15,000-square-foot facility. Rick’s Rags sells a million pounds a year to customers in the Northeast, including furniture refinishers, restaurants, abatement companies, theaters, mills, schools, printers, and hospitals. It sells 10 different grades of rags, with prices varying based on the material’s absorbency and color. “The whiter and the more cotton, the better,” Rick Stevens says.
Beyond the U.S. market, there is enormous and growing demand for secondary textiles and shoes in developing countries due to their steady population growth and lower standard of living. Seventy percent of the world’s population depends on secondhand clothing and shoes, King says. “In a prosperous country, we don’t think about that.” Products that consumers in developed countries find unacceptable are perfectly fine in less-developed regions, even if they need repairs. “There’s a large cottage industry in other countries to mend things, even shoes that need new soles,” Wallander says. “In many countries we sell to, the main form of transport is feet, so we can never satisfy the market for shoes.”
A majority—60 percent—of recovered U.S. textiles are exported, SMART says, with such shipments often following a familiar pattern: A wholesaler in, say, Guatemala buys an export container of used clothing and shoes at a port and sells goods by the bale. Buyers take these wares to the marketplace or stores and sell by the piece. Prices come down each day for a week, Wallander says, until someone buys the remains and takes them to the countryside, where the buying and selling cycle begins anew. After another week, leftovers are sold for wiping rags. “This generates a lot of income opportunities along the way,” he says.
Boosting Collection
Convenience largely seems to determine whether people will donate, recycle, or discard their used textiles. To make donating or recycling textiles more convenient and help boost recovery, a few clothing retailers have launched recycling programs on their own or in partnerships with other companies, industry groups, or nonprofits. Fashion retailer H&M (Stockholm), for instance, started accepting old clothing this year in select stores as part of its efforts to reduce the environmental impact of clothes throughout their life cycle. Since 2010, Gap’s “Recycle Your Blues” program has encouraged customers to recycle their old denim garments by bringing them to Gap stores in a two-week period each fall. In Patagonia’s “Common Threads” recycling program, people can return Patagonia clothing with the Common Threads label to any of its stores for recycling. And Nike’s “Reuse-a-Shoe” program, which launched in the early 1990s, turns worn-out athletic shoes into Nike grind, a material used in playground and sport surfaces.
Though local governments traditionally have left textile recycling to the nonprofit and private sectors, municipalities seem to have a new interest in facilitating this commodity’s collection and recycling. New York City started its re-fashioNYC program to encourage residents to donate their used clothes, blankets, shoes, belts, and other textiles. The program, a partnership between the city’s Department of Sanitation and Brooklyn-based nonprofit Housing Works, has collected more than 1 million pounds of secondary textiles since its inception in April 2011.
Other cities and towns are experimenting with curbside collection of used textiles, which is touted as the most convenient recovery option for the public. The oldest curbside program might be in St. Paul, Minn., where Eureka Recycling, which has the municipal hauling contract, and USAgain have partnered for more than a decade on household pickup in trucks that have a separate compartment for textiles and corrugated to prevent contamination.
In a more recent example, Queen Creek, Ariz., a town of 26,000 residents near Phoenix, launched a pilot curbside textile recycling program in partnership with United Fibers (Chandler, Ariz.) and Right Away Disposal (Apache Junction, Ariz.). United Fibers approached Queen Creek officials with the idea of adding textiles to the town’s curbside recyclables collection program, which operates as a public-private partnership with Right Away Disposal. The three entities initiated a pilot program in August 2012.
“This is a win-win-win-win-win proposition,” says Ramona Simpson, the town’s environmental programs supervisor, explaining that five different entities benefitted from the program. Residents got a convenient recycling option: The town mailed one large, blue United Fibers plastic bag with textile recycling instructions to each of its 7,500 households. Residents could add their bag, with any amount of material inside, to their usual recycling bin. They also could get additional bags at the town hall or drop items in a couple of bins around town. Right Away picked up the bags and delivered them to United Fibers, which paid Right Away and Queen Creek, the municipal partner, based on weight. Thus, the hauler and town each received additional revenue. As an incentive to encourage participation, United Fibers also paid the town and the local Boys & Girls Club each 10 cents a pound.
As for United Fibers, it received a regular supply of delivered material, and it calculated that the additional supply was worth the extra costs of bags and payouts. How much additional supply? “We thought if we got 1,200 pounds, we’d be successful,” Simpson says. In the end, the program collected 27,000 pounds in its four-month duration. The pilot program was such a success the partners are moving forward with full implementation as soon as this summer.
The family that owns United Fibers also owns Phoenix Fibers and Bonded Logic. Phoenix Fibers converts fabric into loose fiber and ships it to Bonded Logic, which processes it into thermal and acoustical insulation. Previously, the companies had to buy materials from international sources; a reliable local supply will give them flexibility and lower costs, they say.
Based on data from Queen Creek and United Fibers, this program worked because United Fibers and its sister companies are integrated, and all are near the pilot project’s community and its hauler. Simpson says she thinks curbside textile recycling could work in places without so much integration. Technological advances have made it easier to recycle other household products, she points out: Previously, recyclers “couldn’t do single stream; they couldn’t take glass; you had to remove labels. Those same improvements need to happen with textiles, and end users need to find ways to make products out of used clothing.”
Some textile recycling companies also are finding success through curbside ventures with waste haulers. Community Recycling (Fairless Hills, Pa.)—a for-profit textile recycler—approached George Leck and Son/Leck Waste Services (Ivyland, Pa.) to launch a pilot residential curbside textile pickup project last October. It was such a success that the companies went live after just a few pickups. At launch, Leck delivered two 35- to 40-gallon, weather-resistant Community Recycling laundry-style bags with textile recycling instructions to each of its 8,000 residential customers. Leck drivers pick up filled bags monthly and leave the same number of empty bags for customers who recycle materials. In the first four months, the program netted 17,000 pounds of goods.
“We help [Leck] grow their business, and they help us grow our business,” says Lisa Pomerantz, Community Recycling’s vice president of marketing and business development, noting the additional service might give Leck an edge where it competes with other haulers. As Tina Leck, marketing director, adds, “Our No. 1 goal was to pull these items from the waste stream. The energy savings from a national standpoint are so important.” Customers have reacted favorably. “They like that it’s an innovative program,” Leck says. “I hope other companies see that it works and implement a similar program themselves.”
Community Recycling is not a sorting facility, so education plays a large role in making sure all materials collected for recycling are suitable for reuse. The company educates customers through related collateral, signage, a website, social media, videos, and school programs. “Education and awareness are an ongoing process to get material ready for reuse,” Pomerantz says. “‘People Recycling for People’ is so much more than our corporate tagline. Reuse matters and makes a tremendous impact in others’ lives.”
Moving the Needle
Although textile recycling has a long history, dating to the 1700s or earlier, “the amount going into landfills is six times the amount being reused or recycled,” says Eric Stubin, CTR chairman and president and CEO of Trans-Americas Trading Co. (Clifton, N.J.). Such a low recovery rate is “really out of line with other recyclables.” SMART organized the Council for Textile Recycling, in part, to promote textile recycling and help shift that balance toward higher recovery, reuse, and recycling, he says.
Today a significant number of U.S. cities and towns still offer no options for unwanted clothing and shoes besides public donation bins and established charities or secondhand stores. Almost all charities say they want only “gently used” goods, which leads many people to throw lower-quality secondhand items into the trash. In response, CTR is pushing its “wear, donate, recycle” motto, but the public is getting “mixed messages,” Stubin says. “This is an ongoing conversation in which CTR continues to engage charities and consumers, with the goal of gaining wide-scale recognition among all stakeholders that worn or torn clothing should be donated or recycled.”
What will it take to move the needle on textile recycling? Charities—the main collectors of used textiles in the United States—could announce they’ll take all textiles regardless of quality, which would most likely boost recovery. Charities and for-profit recyclers also could put out more bins or take other actions to make recycling clothes and other materials more convenient. Community Recycling, for example, uses some traditional collection methods: It pays local company “hosts” for the right to position steel bins in their parking lots or other locations, and it buys from thrift stores. But it also spreads the gospel of textile or clothing recycling with outreach to schoolchildren with a program,
CR Kids, that connects diverse cultures together via Skype in the Classroom, and it has a partnership with PODS containers to collect material from college campuses during move-out days and transport it to warehouses and ports.
More local and state waste management authorities could get involved in textile recycling as well, Wallander says. “As we move toward a zero-waste society,” he notes, “communities will start to look at how to work textiles into their waste-management plans.” In addition, more waste haulers and curbside collection companies could form public or private partnerships similar to those in Arizona and Pennsylvania. Landfills and MRFs could set up separate areas for textiles to make collection easier, too.
For their part, SMART and CTR are working to boost textile recycling through several educational initiatives, including lesson plans that seek to teach students in grades K-2 and 3-5 that “clothing and textiles can be recycled just like items in their homes they currently recycle such as paper, plastic, glass, and aluminum,” the groups explain. This “Wear It? Recycle It!” educational program, created in conjunction with The Education Center (Naperville, Ill.), has reached 323,400 students and 12,900 teachers since its introduction in October 2012, the groups say.
Here’s another way to boost textile recycling: More scrap recycling companies could add used textiles to their commodity mix. Joel Litman, president and co-owner of Texas Recycling/Surplus (Dallas), considers textiles “so much low-hanging fruit for recyclers,” which explains why his company began buying recyclable textiles from local residents last year on a per-pound basis. Establishing textile drop-off sites isn’t hard, he says, advising interested recyclers to “look online, ask SMART, or talk to other industry people about who might buy from you.” Recyclers simply need to set a purchase price, collect material, bale it (or not), and sell it based on industry specifications. Although textiles currently represent “a really small percentage” of his company’s business, Litman affirms that “the industry is growing”—good news for textile recyclers and textile recovery.
Ellen Ryan is a writer based in Rockville, Md.
The U.S. Textile Recycling Industry
Each year in the United States, 2 million tons of clothing and textiles recovered from individuals and institutions (postconsumer) and manufacturers (postindustrial) is reused as clothing and apparel or recycled as wiping cloths and as raw materials for the automotive, furniture, mattress, coarse yarn, home furnishings, paper, and other industries. This translated to about 12 pounds of textiles per person in the United States in 2011.
About 45 percent is secondhand clothing, which is typically exported to developing nations
Approximately 30 percent is processed into wiping and polishing cloths
About 20 percent is converted into fiber for use in products ranging from stationery and mattresses to roofing and flooring materials
About 5 percent is discarded because it is unusable for reuse or recycling
Source: SMART/Council for Textile Recycling
Recyclers are working to raise awareness and increase the convenience of textile recycling in the United States, where the vast majority of used clothes and shoes endS up in landfills despite healthy demand for this material.