Of the billions of pounds of clothing produced every year for consumers in the United States, the majority ends up in landfills. Textile waste accounts for some of the world’s most egregious pollution, and unfortunately, donating your clothes doesn’t exempt you from contributing to the problem. In Ghana, for instance, “obroni wawu”—“dead white man’s clothes” imported by salvage resellers through the Western resale market—clogs waterways and accrues in trash piles more than 60 feet high.
Goodwill, one of the biggest names in nonprofit clothing resale, is trying to change that. Two of the organization’s executives, Goodwill Industries International President and CEO Steven C. Preston and Goodwill of Greater Washington President and CEO Catherine Meloy, visited the George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum last Tuesday to walk their audience through the inner workings of the textile economy and explore innovative potential paths forward. “Advancing the Circular Textile Economy for People, Planet and Prosperity” was presented by GW’s Alliance for a Sustainable Future and co-hosted by the museum, Goodwill and Sustainable GW.
Textile manufacturing and clothing production are “incredibly pollutive,” Preston said, and the best way to lessen their environmental impact is to reduce how much we buy (and therefore how much is produced). But once pieces are already produced and in circulation, reuse is the next best thing.
Through donation, Goodwill diverts about 4.6 billion pounds of reusable goods annually from ending up in landfills, Preston said. Most of their resale takes place through their 3,330 physical retail stores in the United States, operated by a web of local organizations under the Goodwill International umbrella.
If donated goods don’t resell, Preston explained, trashing them is Goodwill’s last-choice option, not least because “landfills are expensive.” Instead, many local Goodwill organizations partner with the growing material recycling industry. Goodwill of Greater Washington, for instance, works with manufacturer Trex to turn plastic garbage bags—the material in which most people drop off their donations—into composite decking material that can last for decades, Meloy said. They also partner with local recyclers to crush glassware into fine sand for use in landscaping and décor.
Glassware and plastic bags are “an easy entry point” to recycling, Meloy said. Other goods are more difficult to remake, but those solutions do exist. Textiles can be broken down for yarn and upcycled into socks; rigid, unrecyclable plastics can be turned into skateboards or pet food bowls.
But these solutions are limited to locations where the manufacturing technology is available, Preston said. Part of the path forward will be to share solutions and build a broad, cooperative recycling infrastructure.
Goods that can’t be sold or remade directly through Goodwill partnerships go to third-party salvage buyers, and there’s little oversight of this opaque international industry, Preston said. While Goodwill has no direct insight into where exactly salvaged goods end up or how they get there, they estimate that about a third of textile salvage is recycled into rags, 20% is shredded into mash for industrial use, and 45% is resold, mostly to the Global South. This re-resale market has advantages for locals, since it provides jobs that benefit local economies and low-cost goods to people in need. But it also is the source of the “obroni wawu” crisis and others, as unwanted textiles flood into these markets at volumes they are unable to handle.
Preston said Goodwill, with its vast donation network and ongoing relationship with the salvage industry, can be a leader in reducing waste worldwide.
“This is a problem that is getting increasing visibility globally, and even though we're one player in a very big global market, we have the ability to begin bringing greater visibility to it, and investing in solutions that over time could lead to a longer term, much more sustainable pathway.”
He listed four steps for an improved circular economy: Increasing donations, maximizing value by routing goods to markets in which they will sell, improving accountability by working with brokers to track where resold goods go and what happens to them once they enter third-party markets, and increasing waste diversion by supporting emerging recycling technologies. This more sustainable model will require a vast network of collaboration—from brands and manufacturers to policymakers and the tech industry.
“You can begin to see how big and complicated the ecosystem is,” Preston said, “But you can also begin to see that [improvement] is possible.”
At the end of the presentation, Preston and Meloy joined a panel with GW students Aditi Chandrasekar, Emily Meltzer and Niharika Sen. Sen is president of the GW Responsible Fashion Collective, of which Meltzer, an intern with Sustainable GW’s Eco-Reps program, is a member; Chandrasekar is the creator and host of sustainable business podcast “Circular Logic” and a member of Compass Impact Consulting. The panel briefly discussed Goodwill’s employment practices, how its employees determine how to sort donations and whether the nonprofit’s prices are able to compete with for-profit sellers.
Sustainable fashion marks an area of overlapping interest and expertise between the museum and GW students and faculty, said Program Associate for Academic Engagement Katrina Orsini, who also teaches a class on responsible fashion for GW’s Sustainability Minor. “We're able to bring a material focus to how the textiles function in this global supply chain.”
