You’ve seen the overflowing boxes around the office.  You know kind of what they are for.  But really, why does it matter if we put this fabric in an overflowing box instead of a trash can?  Well here are the facts:

• More than 15 million tons of used textile waste is generated each year in the United States, and the amount has doubled over the last 20 years. In 2014, over 16 million tons of textile waste was generated, according to the EPA. Of this amount, 10.46 million tons were sent to the landfill.

 

• An average American throws away approximately 80 pounds of used clothing per person per year. Cotton takes 45 years to decompose on average.  Synthetic clothing (like Polyester) can take up to 250 years decompose

 

• Only about 0.1% of recycled fiber collected by charities and take-back programs is recycled into new textile fiber.

 

• Consumers are regarded as the main culprit for throwing away their used clothing, as only 15 percent of consumer-used clothing is recycled.  The average person buys 60 percent more items of clothing every year and keeps them for about half as long as 15 years ago, generating a huge amount of waste. The average lifetime of a piece of clothing is approximately 3 years.

 

• Nearly 100 percent of textiles and clothing are recyclable.

 

• The annual environmental impact of a household’s clothing is equivalent to the water needed to fill 1,000 bathtubs and the carbon emissions from driving an average modern car for 6,000 miles

 

• If the average life of clothing is extended by just three months, it would reduce their carbon and water footprints, as well as waste generation, by 5 to 10 percent. The recycling of two million tons of clothing per year equates to taking one million cars off the U.S. streets. 

 

So now that I’ve officially depressed you, here’s how the industry is starting to correct itself:

 

• More than 70 percent of the world's population uses secondhand clothing. About 50 percent of collected shoes and clothing is used as secondhand products. Meanwhile, 20 percent is used to produce polishing and cleaning cloths for various industrial purposes, and 26 percent is recycled for applications such as fiber for insulation products, upholstery, fiberboard, and mattresses.  

 

• The United States textile recycling industry removes approximately 2.5 billion pounds of post-consumer textiles each year from the waste stream, and the industry creates more than 17,000 jobs. Among this workforce, 10,000 are semi-skilled workers employed in the primary processing of used textile; the remaining 7,000 employees are employed in the final processing stage. There are more than 500 garment-recycling companies in the U.S. and a majority of these companies are owned and operated by small and family businesses, each of which employs 35 to 50 workers. 

 

So, after seeing all of these bags of mutilated samples, sample yardage, and fabric headers go into our trashcans, I found an organization called FabScrap.  FabScrap is a 501(c)3 organization based in New York City that collects, consolidates them, and recycles or reuses/resells sample yardage, mutilated samples, fabric headers, fabric rolls, and more.

URBN started working with FabScrap in August 2019, as a pre-consumer recycling option for our sample room and tech fabric waste, to divert all of this waste from the landfill.   Since that time, we have recycled over 1200lbs of our pre-consumer waste, and we have opened this relationship to the brands as well. 

WE are also beginning to explore opportunities for POST-CONSUMER garment and fabric recycling through various take back programs and inventory solutions, so stay tuned!

 

Read more about our partner FabScrap at: https://fabscrap.org/