How to Reduce (& Repurpose) Global Textile Waste

What is Textile Waste, and What Can We do About It?

Textiles are materials made of interlacing fibers, and they’re the fabric of our clothes. 

Textiles are everywhere. They show up in home decor, car upholstery, medical supplies, toys, and even weapons. But the majority of textiles are used in the fashion industry, and most will eventually end up as waste. In 2018, the EPA estimated that the United States alone produced 17 million tons of textiles and discarded 14 million tons. 

Here are a few essential textile waste facts: 

• The textile industry uses 98 million tons of non-renewable resources every year.
• People are discarding finished textile goods faster than ever before. 
• Less than 15% of textiles are ever effectively recycled

What are Textiles?

To understand textile waste, we first need to know what it’s made of.

Textile fibers fall into two categories: natural and synthetic.

Natural fibers come directly from animal, vegetable, or mineral sources. Their cells are already arranged in a string-like shape when nature gives them to us.

Common plant fibers include cotton, hemp, and flax. Wool, silk, and cashmere are popular animal fibers.

Synthetic fibers are man-made through chemical processes. 

Plant-derived, or semi-synthetic fibers like rayon, are made through a chemical process that breaks down raw material and reconstitutes it as a durable thread. Most popular synthetics, like polyester, nylon, and spandex, are usually made from petroleum. 

Synthetic fibers have a lot of appeal—stretch, softness, durability—and are often blended with natural fibers to make commercial textiles. So much so that they constitute 60% of clothing worldwide. 
These materials matter when we’re talking about waste. Natural fibers eventually biodegrade back into their natural components. Synthetics will eventually break down, but only into their constituent microplastics that pollute the water supply and never truly disappear.

What are the Different Types of Textile Waste?

Textile waste comes in the form of raw materials and finished goods. Let’s dive deeper into each category. 

Finished Goods

Clothing production continues to increase worldwide while clothing utilization (the number of times an item is worn) continues to fall. That’s a recipe for more and more textile waste in the form of finished goods (most often clothes and shoes).

Old clothes cannot always be resold. Most donated clothes are sold to recyclers, where only about half are actually recycled. The rest are exported overseas. More than 9 million tons of clothes go into landfills every year, and 2.2 million tons are incinerated. 

The industry itself trashes a significant amount of finished goods, too. Brands from H&M to Nike and Burberry have made headlines for destroying millions of dollars worth of their own unsold clothes, which insiders say is a common industry practice. 

Raw materials

This is textile waste that never made it to the fashion supply chain—it was produced but never used.

Deadstock is a term used for unsellable inventory. Businesses across industries end up with deadstock when they produce or order more than they can sell. It’s a result of flawed inventory management, which is especially challenging in fashion where supply chains are long, and trends change daily.

With old-fashioned record-keeping still the norm in the fashion industry, Stephanie says it’s hard for businesses to identify and understand the waste in their supply chains.

It’s often cheaper to overproduce than underproduce, incentivizing mass production and raising the risk of waste. 

Without strict or consistent reporting standards or efficient inventory tracking systems, it’s hard to know how many textiles are wasted before they become clothes.
Since textile recycling is often labor-intensive, material-dependent, and not economically viable, brands are left to deal with textiles and finished goods often in undesirable or unethical ways.

Why is Textile Waste a Problem?

Textile waste is a problem because of the environmental impact of production, wasted money, lost business, and the eventual volume added to incinerators and landfills. 

Between chemicals, energy, water use, and contamination, fashion is one of the planet’s most polluting and resource-intensive industries.

Textile production uses nearly 800 billion gallons of water every year, and dyeing and treatment of textiles account for 20% of industrial water pollution, according to the Ellen Macarthur Foundation’s Circular Fashion Initiative report “A New Textiles Economy.” 

That’s a problem when 1.1 billion people worldwide lack access to water, and it will only get worse if we don’t drastically change consumption on a global scale.

Raw materials, water, chemicals, energy, and labor go into producing textiles that may never even get used. 

Stephanie notes the industry wastes $120 billion worth of unused textiles every year.

That’s bad news for the planet, but it’s also bad for business. As Stephanie says, this waste is both environmentally and fiscally irresponsible. 

To recap—the negative effects of textile waste: 

• Water use and pollution
• Landfill volume
• Lost business

As Stephanie tells Cory on the podcast, “Obviously there is a problem, but in that a huge opportunity and solution.”

How to Reduce Textile Waste

The impact of textile waste spans the entire lifecycle of production in a massive industry, and it will take an army of solutions to tackle it from every angle. Luckily, there are folks (like Stephanie) heading in that direction.

Tech

Stephanie founded the New York City-based Queen of Raw as a textile marketplace and technology partner. They use tracking and analytics, machine learning, and blockchain technology to find waste in the supply chain, pull it into the Queen of Raw marketplace, and give businesses a chance to decide if they want to reuse, resell, or recycle textiles responsibly. 

This radical, new-tech tool is bringing the fashion industry closer to circularity—the ideal closed-loop future that requires no new raw materials and releases zero waste—but it won’t happen overnight. 

Inertia is one of the biggest obstacles to a circular fashion economy, and new-tech adoption moves slowly. The benefits for businesses really do outweigh the costs, but it takes buy-in from the top.

“This is about the CEOs setting the corporate agendas, the CMOS doing marketing and storytelling around the good work companies are doing, the CFOs who are dealing with these financial liabilities every day, the CIOs and CEOs who manage this information supply chain procurement. We need all of these parties engaged in order to have transformational change,” Stephanie says.

Queen of Raw’s work rescuing and reselling unused fabric serves the triple bottom line: people, the planet, and profits. Businesses save money and open new revenue streams. The marketplace keeps textiles (and all the resources that went into them) out of the landfill, makes recycling textiles easier, and allows producers to use existing textiles instead of continuing to build demand for brand new ones. 

Marketplaces like Queen of Raw and finished goods platforms like Poshmark and thredUP address the symptoms of fast fashion. They also offer the tools to get to the root of the problem. 

Queen of Raw collects data—quantifying water use, toxins, carbon emissions, and dollars saved with every action taken. This data helps companies make good decisions now, and it will also identify inefficiencies and inform systemic improvements going forward.

“Now that we’ve unearthed this dark data, we can leverage tools that are only available today, things like advancements in machine learning, AI, and blockchain technology that I believe truly revolutionize how supply chains are run,” Stephanie says.

Stephanie sees the future of fashion as on-demand, local and sustainable. Much of the overproduction and waste stems from the disconnect between supply and demand. In a transparent, circular-minded world, production would only happen once a purchase was made, eliminating much of the guesswork, and closing the margin of error. 

And progress is already happening within the fashion industry.

Custom Production

Much of our individual fashion waste comes from impulse buys that just aren’t right for our bodies or tastes. We buy an outfit with the best of intentions, then toss it after realizing it doesn’t really fit right. Custom production ends waste by only creating garments that fill a need and truly fit.

Direct-to-consumer business models, like Dhana’s D Sphere, a Queen of Raw partner, invites users to design their own garments with their personalities and choices literally in the fabric. 

Frilly, a Los Angeles-based apparel brand, lets shoppers customize every piece of their new sustainable wardrobe. 

The men’s clothing company, Trumaker, takes customization offline and combines the traditional tailored experience with cutting-edge technology to create only the best-fitting button-down shirts. 

Dessarte Paris is bringing couture online, with style, design, and tailoring catered to an individual’s unique needs and desires. Fame & Partners is another women’s retailer taking the guesswork out of apparel for occasions that deserve the best, specializing in wedding and bridesmaids’ gowns. 

Textile Innovation

New developments in natural textiles that don’t require chemical processing and can biodegrade reduce the environmental impact of production and waste.

Fruit fibers are especially promising. Innovators are tapping waste from oranges, grapes, apples, and other fruits to disrupt toxic supply chains and create quality, covetable textiles of the future.

Bananatex is a technical fiber made entirely from organically raised banana plants by the bag-maker Qwstion. 

Dr. Carmen Hijosa, the founder of Certified B-Corp Ananas Anam, developed Piñatex as a solution to the environmental harm of leather manufacturing and the lack of sustainable alternatives. Made entirely of pineapple leaf fiber waste, Piñatex is replacing leather in fine goods from shoes to jewelry and even upholstery. 

Recycling

Chemical recycling startup Circ is developing a new textile recycling process to break down blended fabrics into their constituents, maintaining the integrity and quality of both natural and synthetic fibers. This technology could revolutionize the textile recycling industry—making it possible to truly recycle post-consumer textile waste like old clothes and household textiles.

Small-scale startups with sustainability baked in are the vanguard of the fashion revolution. Queen of Raw is bringing that energy to the corporate space, charting the course for the fashion industry to do better business while serving people and the planet along the way.