What actually happens after you donate a bag of clothes? Most people assume it gets sold locally to someone in need, but the reality is much bigger, stranger, and more global.
In this episode of Infinite Loops, hosted by OSV’s Nick Tawil, we sit down for a roundtable on the hidden global economy of secondhand textiles with Brian London, Marisa Adler, and Eric Stubin, all experts in the field. We discuss how the industry works, why fast fashion has made the problem harder, why 70% of the world uses secondhand clothing, what AI can and can’t solve, and why turning an old shirt into a new shirt is still much harder than it sounds.
We’ve shared some highlights below, together with links & a full transcript. If you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.
Links
Highlights
70% of the Planet Wears Your Hand-Me-Downs
Brian London: When we say reuse, it’s useful I think just to kind of conceptualize what that really means. And I mean the stats I’ve seen, something like 70% of the world uses secondhand clothing. Something that probably includes US consumers that buy from thrift. But dozens of countries, it’s the main item that they buy. When people are living on a few dollars a day, it’s really the only affordable option. So that’s something in the profile of that in the book. The different benefits of our industry, again that no one really notices or sees much, is the environmental benefit which we can get into that. All the water and greenhouse gases it takes to create new garments. The charitable benefit. So you don’t even know how many billions of dollars go to Goodwill, Salvation Army, powering huge amounts of workforce training and other services like that.
Marisa Adler: And even the for-profit sector often has a charitable aspect to it.
Brian London: Sure, yeah.
Marisa Adler: Just wanted to mention that.
Brian London: Yeah, we’ll get back to that in a second because the collection part is a huge question too. But yeah, the third big benefit is that it provides affordable clothing to folks that otherwise really would have no option. So you see that every time. And we can get into this too about some of the barriers to trade a lot of times. But you’ll see every time they try to impose a ban or a restriction on used clothing in these countries, the people get up in arms because it’s such a hotly desired product. And sometimes there’s different forces at play, but it’s all around the world, it’s a hotly desired—
Eric Stubin: I’ve always looked at it in the following way in that demand always told the overwhelming story. I mean, demand for these secondhand products is global. And like you alluded to, Brian, two-thirds, I believe, of Africa lives on less than $2 a day. So you could really see, especially when you travel there and not for safari, but when you really travel and you walk in where people live and you see just how ubiquitous secondhand really is, it really gives you a distinct impression and you see the demand. And it’s not only Africa, I mean, it’s across the Americas, it’s throughout the world.
The World Wants America’s Old Jerseys
Brian London: But largely it’s a story of American soft power influence throughout the world. So in a lot of countries, I mean, I think in most markets a lot of times though, because of our, because of Hollywood, our sports stars, just like a lot of people here, they’ll be looking to have a LeBron James jersey or Jalen Brunson, go Knicks, jersey. Because American culture is kind of what they’re buying also.
Nick Tawil: And at the time of this taping, the Knicks are in game two.
Brian London: Okay, yeah, good luck tonight. And so, yeah, I guess traditionally over the decades, and as America’s role in the world changes or doesn’t change, I mean, that’s been sort of a constant because obviously we’ve been a major force around the world, definitely culturally still, and I think that plays a lot into it. But each country and each region has their own, whether it’s religious, cultural, weather, climate issues, they all have their specific items that they want.
What Does Vintage Even Mean Now?
Nick Tawil: For thrift and vintage, has there been a change? So it’s as hot as ever, but has there also been a change in where it’s happening? When you think of high-end vintage, you think of metropolitan areas like New York or Paris or London or LA. And I know Japan has a big Americana vintage market, but is this happening in other places as it continues to be a steadfast thing that consumers want or grow?
Eric Stubin: My sense is that there is large global demand for American vintage. I mean, Americana, American fashion is a big part of global fashion today. And it continues to be a lot of demand throughout the world for American vintage. Vintage, the term vintage has changed a lot over the last decade. Vintage typically sometimes means, what does vintage mean? Yeah, vintage. I mean, I think in the past, well, when I first started in this industry in the ‘90s, it meant ‘40s and ‘50s and sometimes even ‘60s as a decade in terms of what you were looking for. But obviously as time advances, that changes. Now ‘90s is popular and different fashion styles and what the vintage crowd is looking for, whether it’s flare leg, skinny leg jeans, that changes of course annually.
Nick Tawil: So as you’re sorting the stuff, you kind of have to be up on this.
Eric Stubin: Yeah, I mean for the companies that sell it and deal in those markets, they have to be very aware of what they’re selling and what they’re collecting or they’re not going to find it. But yeah, the world is always looking for American vintage and there seems to be continual demand for this, although that changes what constitutes it.
Transcript
Nick Tawil
All right, so I’d love for you guys to tell me exactly how this secondhand global economy works. And for a lot of people that don’t know about it, maybe the best way to go about it is to walk me through what happens after you drop off a bag of donated clothing to a Goodwill or a Salvation Army.
Brian London
So in addition to my day job in my industry position, another role I have is baseball coach for Little League. And so I bring that because last week I was looking in our bag and I realized there’s a bunch of T-shirts in there. We have extra uniforms and also T-shirts and a fleece in there too, and no one claimed them. And that’s a moment. There’s a lot of moments like this where it comes up in daily life where it starts to seem like clothing really is almost started to be seen as disposable, almost like a Kleenex or something. And then another moment I think about it is we were at the beach for Easter, and you see these silly shirts, crazy shirts. And it’s almost just like any message you have just becomes a T-shirt. It’s almost like it really is just like printing T-shirts.
So I bring that up because we were talking before about hidden economies. And on the way here, I was looking as I walked. I started walking, I took Uber, but driving down or up, whatever I was doing, first of all the clothing stores, and then I started looking at each person wearing clothing, started to think how long are they going to wear that shirt? Where is it going to go? Just because I knew we were coming here. And it really is a fascinating story because you see them all the time. Everyone you look at is wearing something.
But the story before and after is a fascinating story that really never gets told. So I mean, a little bit more, I think the public is starting to look at it a little more. But yeah, I bring that up because we’re going to get into that story. So when you look at the shirt, what happens before? And I’m not an expert on this side, but that book Travels of a T-Shirt, shout out Pietra Rivoli, great book, tracks the globalized production of a T-shirt. So you got cotton growing in Texas, it goes to another country where it gets spun and then made into the cloth and then dyed and all this. So there’s all that goes into it, huge amount of resources that go into it and the volume of it. So that whole machine has just grown enormously.
And Marisa has all kinds of interesting statistics. She can say, she really normally paints that picture well, but it’s a staggering amount and the story of what happens after someone’s done with it. So people don’t really think too much about it. People tend to give it to Goodwill or another local charity, and then they think it’s just kind of, most people think that store sells it to people in need, which is a fair—
Nick Tawil
That’s what I always thought.
Brian London
Yeah, fair assumption. But long ago, even before this recent influx of huge volumes of fashion, they got way more than they could ever serve the public with, and monetizing it through thrift stores and then downstream, which we’ll talk about, became the best method to monetize all their programs, their job training programs, and a host of other charities. So anyway, to get back to the question, because they can only use a certain amount, and I’m not even sure what the current numbers are, but traditionally we would say maybe a quarter of it, 20% might sell to folks here domestically. Then the rest goes down a path that I think is equally, probably more interesting than the journey that it took to become a shirt.
So at that point, it’ll get consolidated into bales of used clothing. So we call it salvage, mixed rags, or different names for it. And it’ll end up getting sorted somewhere. And we can get to the history of that as much as you want, but it used to get sorted here in the United States. And as the cost of doing—that’s why I say sorting. And Eric will give a much more detailed picture of that. But essentially the job then is all this stuff has, over the years, the same entrepreneurial spirit that created that huge fashion boom, which became a fast fashion problem, also has over the years created much of the solution. And so that solution involves finding a home for all those pieces.
And so we get all the numbers, but between being reusable here or somewhere else around the world, being repurposed, being recycled, and increasingly we’re looking at this world of what else? How can you really turn that into new material? So it goes all over the world. Some of it goes all over the world and then comes back to the US. Some of it goes across the world to get sorted most efficiently and then to another home, and then sometimes it crosses borders again, and then it’ll get repurposed. So there’s infinite stories, infinite loops that these items go through. It happens every day. And the volumes really are staggering.
Nick Tawil
In terms of volume, just coming from the United States, any range of time is good. But you think about this in tonnage, right?
Eric Stubin
I think the stat that I’ve heard is about 2.8 billion pounds annually. That was the last EPA stat that I recall. Is that about right?
Marisa Adler
Yeah. When you, I think of this in terms of tonnage because of the scale. There’s sort of a little bit of a difference. When you’re in the industry, you think in terms of pounds because that’s how things are traded often. But when you’re looking at this from a systems view, looking at it from the tons perspective is more meaningful to a waste management professional. But 17 million tons were generated as waste back in 2018, and we don’t really have more official numbers as of then. But it’s a lot.
Eric Stubin
What’s the EPA stat that they’ve always quoted? Is it 3.8 or 2.8 billion? I’m having a hard time recalling that. I don’t know if we can look in the background. But there’s a stat that the EPA is always talking about and they typically use the number. I think they say that 3.8 billion pounds of textile waste are donated, recycled, that’s captured by large charities like Goodwill, blue chip charities, private sector collectors that go through the reverse supply chain, including US recyclers of waste.
Nick Tawil
So for people listening, the reverse supply chain, talk about what is that. What do you mean by that? And is that the recycling that happens with these donated textiles?
Eric Stubin
Yeah, I mean, just picking up on Brian’s example. So somebody gives away a sweatshirt because they didn’t, it wasn’t quite the right fit, or it could be that they used to wash the car and the dog with it and it’s reached its real end of life. So they go and donate that to a charity. Charity will look at that and decide whether it ends up in their thrift environment or not. And then often if it doesn’t end up in the thrift environment, it will make its way to a US or an international textile recycler. Like Brian said, they bale that material and then it’s sold on a spot market basis to recyclers around the world that then sort that material for highest use values.
And that’s traditionally how our industry has functioned for decades, sorting material for highest use values, extracting everything from at the top end, reusable quality clothing down to wiping rags and recycled fibers that are used in many household products like carpet batting and insulation for the hood of your automobile.
Marisa Adler
So if you look at it from a very simplistic perspective, the average consumer will drop off their unwanted clothing or textile items to a thrift store or into a clothing bin. That material, some of it gets sold domestically back to consumers here through thrift markets. The rest of it gets baled, it gets exported to some—there are some concentrated hubs across the world where there’s a lot of sorting and grading that happens and then it gets sent into reuse, reclaimed wiping cloth, and fiber recycling.
Nick Tawil
So there’s three main buckets.
Marisa Adler
Yeah,so about, the stats are about 45% of all the post-consumer textiles that are collected are funneled into a reuse channel. Just looking at this top down holistically, wherever in the world that reuse happens, 30% goes into reclaimed wiping cloth, which is basically you take a T-shirt, you cut it up, you take out all the metal parts and you resell it into an industry that uses it for cleaning or wiping.
Nick Tawil
What are some of the typical industries?
Marisa Adler
Automotive, you have the petroleum industry, the agricultural industry, the hospitality industry. It’s actually one of the secret underpinnings of the used textile trade in my opinion, because people just don’t realize that industry even exists. And there’s a lot of benefits that offsets the need for new wiping cloth material, new production or paper products and things like that.
Eric Stubin
I think reclaimed wipers are roughly about half of all wiping rags sold. And there’s a little fun fact, but there’s actually more than a half a dozen different grades of wiping rags. So depending on absorbencies and the absorbency rates and things of that nature, if it has to pick up a heavy viscous oil material or you’re cleaning up paint, there’s different preferences for different industries.
Marisa Adler
Yeah, it’s highly technical. They’re tools.
Brian London
That’s a whole sector of industry. So yeah, I don’t know if we’ve done an intro, but so I have my private company, Woodhouse and Shapiro, but I also currently serve as president of SMART, that’s Secondary Materials and Recycled Textiles Association. Eric was a past president on the board with me.
Nick Tawil
And so this is the trade association.
Brian London
Yes, we represent the whole spectrum of folks that handle this material one way or another, if you’re collecting it, sorting it, exporting it, importing it, repurposing it. Yeah. So the wiper division is a whole chapter of our industry that I’m not an expert in. We’ll move the material. Eric has been sorting that material for a long time. But yeah, it’s a whole world of its own and interfaces with a lot of big industries too, which I’m sure they probably don’t know the whole background of it either. But just to be clear because among us, we use certain terminology and I’m thinking when we say post-consumer textile, that’s a fancy word. It just means the shirt once I give it—
Nick Tawil
Right, old clothes.
Brian London
Post consumer. Yeah, old clothes. So and that terminology, we have different words for what we mean there, but a post-consumer textile.
Eric Stubin
And it also includes anything that we wear. I like to describe it as anything we wear, meaning footwear, handbags, belts, accessories. It really covers the full gamut of everything wear.
Marisa Adler
Yeah, there’s post—and when you’re thinking in terms of how waste management professionals classify waste, there’s post-industrial, which is off the factory, it’s cutting scraps or things like that. Pre-consumer. So all the things that the brands overproduce or don’t end up selling through in their retail stores, all that’s considered pre-consumer, which is a subsegment of post-industrial. And then the vast majority of the waste comes from post-consumer. That’s everything that’s been sold, worn, used and no longer wanted by the consumer.
Brian London
Yeah, but so we’re looking at these billions of pounds of post-consumer textiles. When we say reuse, it’s useful I think just to kind of conceptualize what that really means. And I mean the stats I’ve seen, something like 70% of the world uses secondhand clothing. Something that probably includes US consumers that buy from thrift. But dozens of countries, it’s the main item that they buy. When people are living on a few dollars a day, it’s really the only affordable option. So that’s something in the profile of that in the book. The different benefits of our industry, again that no one really notices or sees much, is the environmental benefit which we can get into that. All the water and greenhouse gases it takes to create new garments. The charitable benefit. So you don’t even know how many billions of dollars go to Goodwill, Salvation Army, powering huge amounts of workforce training and other services like that.
Marisa Adler
And even the for-profit sector often has a charitable aspect to it.
Brian London
Sure, yeah.
Marisa Adler
Just wanted to mention that.
Brian London
Yeah, we’ll get back to that in a second because the collection part is a huge question too. But yeah, the third big benefit is that it provides affordable clothing to folks that otherwise really would have no option. So you see that every time. And we can get into this too about some of the barriers to trade a lot of times. But you’ll see every time they try to impose a ban or a restriction on used clothing in these countries, the people get up in arms because it’s such a hotly desired product. And sometimes there’s different forces at play, but it’s all around the world, it’s a hotly desired—
Eric Stubin
I’ve always looked at it in the following way in that demand always told the overwhelming story. I mean, demand for these secondhand products is global. And like you alluded to, Brian, two-thirds, I believe, of Africa lives on less than $2 a day. So you could really see, especially when you travel there and not for safari, but when you really travel and you walk in where people live and you see just how ubiquitous secondhand really is, it really gives you a distinct impression and you see the demand. And it’s not only Africa, I mean, it’s across the Americas, it’s throughout the world. And it’s also interesting to point out that today in the United States, this is the moment for secondhand really since COVID. But thrift and vintage almost have never been hotter.
So I feel like there’s a lot—yeah, demand is just global and as well as in the United States today, I mean it’s really all-time fever pitch for secondhand clothing.
Brian London
It’s been a funny thing too in that between COVID and all the different changes, societal changes, secondhand has really maintained its physical presence. It’s like a lot of businesses will get pushed out by an Amazon where you can easily order something. And there are efforts online to have thrift online. We have ThredUp and companies like Fleek, SMART members, thank you, that are working to make it more online. But it really is largely still an in-person experience. So a lot of the in-person shopping is thrift because there’s something unique about those items. So there’s something nice about that whole process. So yeah, for that reason and probably a lot of other reasons of authenticity and getting unique items in a world where fast fashion blows through.
Nick Tawil
For thrift and vintage, has there been a change? So it’s as hot as ever, but has there also been a change in where it’s happening? When you think of high-end vintage, you think of metropolitan areas like New York or Paris or London or LA. And I know Japan has a big Americana vintage market, but is this happening in other places as it continues to be a steadfast thing that consumers want or grow?
Eric Stubin
My sense is that there is large global demand for American vintage. I mean, Americana, American fashion is a big part of global fashion today. And it continues to be a lot of demand throughout the world for American vintage. Vintage, the term vintage has changed a lot over the last decade. Vintage typically sometimes means, what does vintage mean? Yeah, vintage. I mean, I think in the past, well, when I first started in this industry in the ‘90s, it meant ‘40s and ‘50s and sometimes even ‘60s as a decade in terms of what you were looking for. But obviously as time advances, that changes. Now ‘90s is popular and different fashion styles and what the vintage crowd is looking for, whether it’s flare leg, skinny leg jeans, that changes of course annually.
Nick Tawil
So as you’re sorting the stuff, you kind of have to be up on this.
Eric Stubin
Yeah, I mean for the companies that sell it and deal in those markets, they have to be very aware of what they’re selling and what they’re collecting or they’re not going to find it. But yeah, the world is always looking for American vintage and there seems to be continual demand for this, although that changes what constitutes it.
Nick Tawil
What are the—I want to stay on this a little longer. What are the taste preferences for secondhand clothing that’s being sold in vintage thrift shops maybe in the United States versus what Latin America or Africans prefer or Eastern European countries prefer if the secondhand donations make it that way. Are there taste preferences across geographies?
Eric Stubin
I mean my sense is there’s a difference in the post-consumer or the old clothes that you’ll find in Europe are slightly different from that found in the United States. It has a little bit to do with the styling of each market. I’ve heard people in our industry say that the market for T-shirts or what we call the industry jargon is polo. The market for polos or T-shirts is a bit different from Europe compared to the United States. Northern Europe, the climate’s a bit cooler, so there’s more heavies or heavyweight winter, fall type clothing sold in those markets. So you get a little bit more of that in the post-consumer textile waste.
Of course, if you’re shopping for vintage clothing and you happen to live in the north of Europe, you might look for warmer clothes, you’re looking for sweaters, things of that nature. So it really has a lot to do with the markets that these shoppers are in. But yeah, there’s definitely differences between the major markets that supply secondhand clothing because fashion is slightly different all over the world.
Marisa Adler
That’s why sorting gets really complicated sometimes. But it’s also why there’s a home for almost everything that is in a bale, basically. But there’s cultural preferences in different end markets. There’s climatic differences, there’s trends that the industry always has to be on top of for when they’re sorting and grading. I think all of those things come into play. And so how a bale gets sorted and who it’s sent to is highly tailored.
Brian London
Yeah, so Eric could go through all the different items. But largely it’s a story of American soft power influence throughout the world. So in a lot of countries, I mean, I think in most markets a lot of times though, because of our, because of Hollywood, our sports stars, just like a lot of people here, they’ll be looking to have a LeBron James jersey or Jalen Brunson, go Knicks, jersey. Because American culture is kind of what they’re buying also.
Nick Tawil
And at the time of this taping, the Knicks are in game two.
Brian London
Okay, yeah, good luck tonight. And so, yeah, I guess traditionally over the decades, and as America’s role in the world changes or doesn’t change, I mean, that’s been sort of a constant because obviously we’ve been a major force around the world, definitely culturally still, and I think that plays a lot into it. But each country and each region has their own, whether it’s religious, cultural, weather, climate issues, they all have their specific items that they want. And so Eric is, and he can tell more about his company that he already gave the intro. But they were the, have been the longest running sorter here in North America. So they have real expertise in terms of when you get all this stuff from anywhere.
So in our company, we have been a supplier of his for a long time. We’ll send him items from anywhere, from Virginia or Connecticut or wherever. And then whatever it is, he’ll figure out how to get the most value out of it. So his team there will identify, because to make this work with the margins that are so small in our industry, it’s really, it’s a penny business, really. To make it, it’s a huge volume as we talked about. But if you’re not really on top of it and not finding each item its correct home, you’re not going to last. So that’s really the trick and the art of it. And it takes a lot of expertise and I don’t know, maybe Eric, you could speak more.
Nick Tawil
Let me visualize the sorting process. Who’s doing it? Where are they doing it?
Eric Stubin
So the sorting process and probably the best way to explain it is it’s not that different than most recycling businesses. It’s high volume, thin margin as a business. And we as a textile recycler are a little bit different than most conventional recycling because in conventional recycling they might make eight or nine different products. For example, if you’re collecting metals, there’s probably roughly half a dozen to a dozen different metals. Same with paper. But in the textile recycling business, we make 300 SKUs or 300 different products. So we used to like to say that this is not just a MRF, material recycling facility, but a super MRF facility because we’re making 300 of these different products.
And yeah, we outlined earlier the different percentages of secondhand clothing that we might sell to developing countries, wiping and fiber. So within each of those categories, we’re making hundreds of products for export or for consumption. And we’re not physically changing the form of those garments, but we’re wholesaling it to those that do. For example, we’ll wholesale it to a wiper company that might specialize in cutting wipers. And whether that company, previously a lot of those companies were in the US, today they’re more often overseas. Same in the fiber industry as well.
Nick Tawil
You receive these by the truckload or by container?
Eric Stubin
Yes.
Nick Tawil
And how fast can you sort a container?
Eric Stubin
Everything is about scale in our world. Our company was recycling about a trailer load a day up until 2019 and prior to that closer to two trailers a day. So yeah, I mean everything’s down. We were a mid-sized player in this industry. There are companies globally that do many times that volume and really scale is the key there.
Nick Tawil
How many people?
Eric Stubin
In the states we’re 45 people. And internationally labor is a very key component. Labor drives the whole industry. It’s very labor intensive and there’s usually a stat that one employee can handle about a ton or half a ton rather of post-consumer textiles a day or about half a ton can be sorted per employee per day. And that’s generally a pretty good metric in which you can judge the efficiency of a recycler.
Brian London
Yeah it is a fascinating thing to see a trained sorting employee. They’re making dozens of decisions a minute. That’s the only way to make it work. And it is an interesting—and maybe Marisa can talk a little bit more about the technology piece, but it’s really because of all these industries. You look around at any industry between now and 50 years ago and most are totally different. Ours, a lot of it still, because it’s a human touch. I don’t quite even really understand why it hasn’t been more mechanized. I mean, there’s different equipment that could move goods in different ways.
And with all the talk about how does AI affect this or AI affect that, to date, as far as I know from everything I see, most of the sorting of this stuff, whether it’s here or in Karachi or Dubai or Honduras, it’s all kind of the same process. And I bring up Marisa because she’s been an invaluable addition to SMART. So she came on our board, I don’t know, five or six years ago, not from this traditional background. So Eric and my families have been in this for many decades. And Marisa, I guess you’ll go through her history and background, but comes from a different perspective and came to this through a different path. And she really has her thumb on the pulse of all the, a lot of new stuff in the industry that’s looking at whether it’s—well, maybe you could talk more about it.
But anyway, that’s why she’s been a really important addition to SMART because there’s this whole new world which we can talk more about at length if we want, but that looks at the technology side in different areas. And so that’s kind of the question. It’s like, what role does that play? Does it add on and enhance our existing infrastructure that works quite well for what it does, but for the new challenges of today. So I don’t know if you want to talk about a little bit about your background.
Nick Tawil
Yeah. Because when I hear there are identical systems across different geographies around the world, and it’s been being done the same way for a very long time, and there’s volume involved, I think, well, there’s probably room to have so many types of improvements. Just like people often say AI, but computer vision specifically, it feels like it can be a boon for this type of work and not necessarily to replace a sorter, but maybe you said one sorter does about half a ton.
Eric Stubin
Half a ton, yeah.
Nick Tawil
Half a ton, what if they can now with the assistance of some sort of computer vision, they can scale that to 2 tons or 5 tons.
Marisa Adler
And there are technologies that are in developmental stages to support with that. There’s different levels of technology and automated scanning. One that’s the furthest along is to identify fiber composition. And the intent of that is to speed up the sorting of textiles into different bales. Like is it 100% polyester, is it 100% cotton, is it a 50-50 blend? And then those bales of, and let me be clear, non-rewearable textiles. Because we always want to follow the waste hierarchy. My background is in municipal solid waste management. So that’s sort of the lens that I come to this area from. You want to follow the waste hierarchy, do reduction, reuse, repurposing, and then recycling.
So the technology used, the most developed furthest along technology now is near-infrared sensing. That has been used in traditional material recovery facilities and plastics and paper and packaging for many years. It’s being honed for textiles. So you could sort polyester bale, cotton bale, and then those would theoretically go off to a recycler who would recycle each of those fiber bales into whatever products they create. And that hasn’t really developed yet because we’ve gotten a bit of a chicken or egg situation here because those recyclers are very new chemical recycling technologies and they haven’t really commercialized yet. So there’s a bit of a mismatch on supply and demand there and sort of the collaborative market build.
And then on the sorting for reuse side, you have some of the new computer vision and hyperspectral cameras that are being used paired with algorithms and AI learning systems that can start to identify, this is a shirt or this is a pair of pants or something. And on top of that say, oh, there’s a flaw here, there’s a stain here, there’s a rip here, but it still has to be paired with the mechanical movement of the item because you kind of need a 360-degree view and even more than that, maybe even an inside-out view of each garment one by one. And so at that point you need a person anyway to do that. And until robotics are advanced enough where they can do that, and we’re nowhere near that.
So even if the AI algorithms and the hyperspectral cameras are ready and they’re being developed, you still need to pair it with the mechanical functioning of a facility. And so I think that’s the stage that we’re at now. There’s a lot of pilots going on, there’s a lot of development, there’s a lot of investment in that area. And I do think that’s the future. We’re just not quite there yet.
Brian London
It really is a pivotal moment from our industry standpoint, from an industry association, because traditionally, something unique about our industry is that we move an enormous amount of volume all over the world. All these numbers that we’re talking about. But traditionally we’ve always been a group of small family businesses, like Eric’s family, my family, and hundreds of others. And what we found recently because of, I guess because of increased attention for whatever reason, now all of a sudden we have huge brands coming in and getting involved, and they’re throwing huge amounts of investment in things. And then you have policymakers. And we can talk about the legislation that passed in California. They’re looking at, in New York and Washington state, essentially legislating how textiles are collected and handled, post-consumer textiles.
So all of a sudden you have these small companies that as a force we do, I mean, as a group of companies, as a trade association, we do a pretty good job of, I think, punching above our weight in terms of advocating for our members and open trade for our product. But all of a sudden there’s these enormous players involved. And a fear we have sometimes is, number one, how do we incorporate that without destroying part of what’s already working? And how do we get our voice heard? When you have these, a lot of times I’ll hear a policy coming in some country somewhere or a big effort made by a huge investment in a certain recycling technology. And it seems like they hadn’t even really consulted this group of companies that’s processing all this material.
So that’s kind of a big question right now is how do we work all together?
Eric Stubin
How does private sector work together? How do all the pieces come together? How does private sector work with all the other stakeholders, including charities, including innovative partners, to really grow the pie for everyone? And just to put another, underline Brian’s point, my back of the envelope calculation, there’s about 10 billion pounds that the traditional reuse markets have handled globally for decades. We get that number, if you look at the US, that number that I believe is correct, if we had the EPA website here, I think it says about 3.8. There’s about somewhat of an equal number in the EU. And then I pencil in Asia, including Japan, Australia, and then China has its own industry.
And I haven’t seen too many stats at what China’s generating in terms of post-consumer textiles. But it’s a tremendous number that the industry has efficiently found a second life for decades. So I think there’s a lot of innovation coming and we’ve got to find new ways to do it. And the innovation will always be there and markets are willing and able to, we as an industry will be there to support them. But yeah, this is the challenge that we face.
Marisa Adler
I think building on what Eric said, the United States has the highest per capita textile waste generation rate in the world. I think China is bigger on just a mass absolute value amount. And what’s important to recognize though is that we’re still only recovering 15% in the United States of what gets generated as textile waste every year. The 85% we’re not collecting is going straight to landfill and incineration. And so there’s a huge opportunity to recover those materials and find new homes for them, whether that’s in reuse or through repurposing or recycling. And that’s what a lot of the new policy that Brian was talking about is getting at. It’s mostly sort of this, it comes from the waste management perspective, extended producer responsibility. How do we get to zero waste and how do we incentivize that the right way?
And the idea of extended producer responsibility is putting the financial onus back on the original producer. Because then as theory goes, they would design products to be better reused or better recycled at end of life, or maybe they’ll reduce how much they produce in the first place.
Eric Stubin
Yeah. To underline Marisa’s point, one really interesting fact is that, and this fact, this stat is very universal. I think you’ve heard this. When municipalities look at the percentage of, when they analyze their waste streams and they look at the percentages of municipal solid waste, they almost universally find or have found that it’s about 5% composed of old clothes or secondhand clothing. That’s why states like Massachusetts, I think, went into, they technically, they put a ban of secondhand in their legislation, and you’re not allowed to throw away clothing in the state of Massachusetts. But yeah, I mean, that’s a great segue to EPR in California and why they’ve done this.
Brian London
Yeah, do you want to explain more about what happened in California?
Marisa Adler
And so California was the first state in the United States to pass extended producer responsibility legislation for textiles governing the textile waste stream. The way I just described, the producers have to pay usually a per unit fee into a centralized organization called a producer responsibility organization.
Nick Tawil
Who’s that owned by?
Marisa Adler
It’s usually stipulated as a nonprofit. And the whole purpose of that nonprofit is to fiscally manage the recovery system and issue the contract. And usually the board of directors is brands who are producers of the textiles and apparel, the covered products. And they have to answer to the state agency. So there’s always an oversight agency. In California, it’s CalRecycle, which is a part of the Cal EPA organization. And so once the law is passed, then CalRecycle will develop regulations which just additional clarity onto the law, maybe put in some performance standards on how the program needs to operate or what metrics it needs to hit.
But then other than that, the PRO is the one sort of looking at the system, figuring out how it’s going to develop a program to comply with what’s in statute or what’s in the regs, and then a board of directors that kind of oversees that, and then they get the funding from the brands. And so the brands are paying either per piece or per kilogram. It’s different in different places. So California was the first state in the US to pass that law, I think, in the very end of 2024. End of ‘24.
Eric Stubin
Yeah, that’s what I remember.
Marisa Adler
It’s a very long time frame. So it actually won’t be implemented fully. The residents of California won’t see the effects of this until about 2030. And producers won’t pay into it because there’s a lot of—
Eric Stubin
They’re still designing the regulations around it.
Marisa Adler
Yes. The regulatory development process is a couple of years. The program plan is a couple of years, fee setting, all of that. But this is a model that’s been around for many years.
Nick Tawil
Where else in the world has this been around?
Marisa Adler
Europe. The EU has mandated their member states to all adopt EPR and they actually do have a disposal ban across all member states that started January 1st of 2025. And the way that the EU is instructing its member states to comply with that ban is by adopting EPR regulations. Because the last thing you want to do is implement a ban without a plan because then you have a lot of textiles that are no longer going to landfill but have no infrastructure or funding or system to support it. So the point of EPR is to create that.
Eric Stubin
And Marisa, France had the longest running program. And I think the website that you mentioned earlier was Eco TLC dot fr but I think it’s taken on a new…
Marisa Adler
Refashion.
Eric Stubin
Refashion. Yeah. So that program was very innovative as Marisa pointed out, because it was one of the first essentially to tack on a fee for the recycling of every garment is my understanding of it. It’s a few euro cents. I think it’s more than, between, I want to say off the top of my head, between 5 and 10 euro cents per garment that’s charged to the consumer. The PRO or that group, the name of the group again was…
Marisa Adler
Refashion.
Refashion collects that money and distributes it to French or companies that recycle French post-consumer textile waste.
Eric Stubin
So California, Washington, states that are looking at EPR have a model in which to look at. And it’s also interesting to me that all of the stakeholders are part of that model or part of the solution. Because if you think about these are huge macro issues and how could one stakeholder tackle any or just all of it. You really need all the stakeholders working together in concert to help alleviate or move the needle on the issue of post-consumer textile waste.
Brian London
So with all those years of that program, it’s been like 10 years, I guess France has been doing it or more.
Eric Stubin
I think so, yeah.
Nick Tawil
Have there been any definable outcomes from it?
Marisa Adler
The French EPR system is, it hasn’t been modeled as a true EPR system in the sense that traditional kind of purists of EPR think of EPR. So it hasn’t done a lot to change the upstream design and production of textiles. A lot of factors that go behind that, including how much the fees are and incentive and is this just the cost of doing business or what are the penalties? Things like that. But if you look at EPR across different product categories over, I don’t know, the last 20 years in the United States, if it’s well-designed EPR, it has a very clear beneficial impact on the recovery rates of those items and on the design of the products going into the system. Because there’s a very direct financial link right back to the producer.
It gets really complicated in terms of how you structure that mechanism. And it gets really complicated because there’s a ton of stakeholders with varying—I mean this is policy. This is how policy is developed. You’re always going to, you’re never going to have the perfect bill, you’re never going to have the perfect worded law. But it’s really important to have well-designed policy. And EPR is not a magic bullet, but it has an opportunity to really infuse some capital, infuse some funding and think holistically about a system.
Nick Tawil
And can you just differentiate the difference between EPR and maybe we can start talking about something else which is closed loop.
Eric Stubin
But just before we go into that, I mean it’s also interesting to note that Europe diverts about 2x the volume of post-consumer textile waste than we do. They divert it at a higher rate. I think that’s what most of the EU studies show. So they divert a similar amount and it’s more per capita of textiles. So their diversion rate’s higher.
Brian London
Yeah. Which means they’re capturing more.
Eric Stubin
They’re capturing—
Brian London
So less is being thrown out. A lot less.
Nick Tawil
Oh, got it.
Eric Stubin
It goes to the old, everyone knows, I mean Europe politically and from a cultural perspective has always been ahead of the curve in terms of recycling. So they’ve done a much better job at keeping old clothes out of their landfills in general. And the EPR is sort of building on that.
Brian London
Yeah, but so you’re asking about.
Nick Tawil
Does it make sense to talk about closed loop now? Or, I kind of want to, going back to the thrift and the secondhand use. So highest use value concept. We can tie this into maybe earlier in the conversation. But any insights that you guys have taken away from the habits of American consumerism. Seeing all this stuff, seeing so much of it come over the transom over so many years and just be like, what are your thoughts on that? Either what do you think about American consumers specifically? I mean the trend is, I mean the habit is huge. But yeah, you kind of sigh.
Marisa Adler
Pass… No, I’m kidding.
Nick Tawil
Yeah, I don’t know. Or maybe not. Maybe you just, you see these truckloads of clothes come through and you’re like, yeah, just—
Marisa Adler
Well, it’s a river. I mean, I’ve always heard Goodwill describe it that way. It’s a river. They cannot block the river. Any blockage will just create overflows and chaos. I want to say that, but I also want to say we’re still only capturing 15% so don’t hear that and not, you know, divert your textiles and meaning, you know, donate or recycle. But we today are consuming massively more textiles per capita per time period than we ever have in the past. I mean if you look at the consumption graph, it’s almost like an exponential graph. And that’s because of the advancements in just-in-time production and fast fashion and drop shipping, which basically means door-to-door shipping and taking advantage of direct shipments from the manufacturer piece by piece, straight to someone’s doorstep.
And of course all the online e-commerce platforms that we all have access to. And then because it’s so readily available, they can make trends and the trends have just gotten more and more intense and quicker and quicker. We used to have seasonal trends like four a year. Right now it’s like one a week. And so people, especially with social media, can’t be seen wearing the same thing twice on their TikTok or Instagram or anything. And so there is definitely a hyper-consumption mindset of American consumers and the price has dropped because of fast fashion and a lot of other factors. And so it’s more accessible but people are keeping things like half as long, wearing things half as long. And so it’s just way more volume, way more turnover, but way less quality.
And so it has a much lower value and—
Eric Stubin
We’ll get more rags and material for fiber than we will usable clothing. But that was well said. I think that fast fashion is a major contributor, mass market apparel, and that’s the way the industry goes. And as the industry drifts towards that and there’s more consumption of this, of course, the quality of America’s secondhand clothing generally goes down and it’s harder to find durable, longer lasting garments in the post-consumer textile waste stream. But yeah, you can never turn it off. You can’t turn it off. It’s going to consistently flow and that’s why all the stakeholders are constantly trying to look at these issues together.
Marisa Adler
Yeah, yeah. And one of the concerns is with textile EPR legislation and potential disposal bans that come with it. You’re going to start seeing the stream that people have been throwing away. And there’s more, there’s concern that some of that is reusable, high quality because some people just don’t ever donate. But the concern is that we’ll see even more of the lower quality items if we’re forcing people to not throw things away and instead donate them. And so how is that going to affect the overall economics of the system and ability to divert for reuse? It might just kind of bring down the value of the average ton.
Eric Stubin
What’s the theory? I’m sorry, Marisa, can you give it to us again one more time? The idea is that they’re going to—why one more time, I’m sorry.
Marisa Adler
Because we’re going to get all the dirty socks and old underwear and things that people shouldn’t really, that, you know, maybe there’s a recycling market for it.
Nick Tawil
We should start with that. What’s appropriate to donate and what’s not appropriate to donate?
Brian London
Well, that’s been—
Eric Stubin
Yeah, that’s an interesting—
Brian London
Remember, don’t—what was the campaign?
Eric Stubin
I always would say don’t judge your clothes. Someone at SMART once said that in front of a group we were educating, I think the Northeast Recycling Coalition. And they had the term “don’t judge your clothes.” But building on that point, Marisa, I think that every statistic that I’ve seen is that there is a universe of post-consumer textile waste. And as you increase diversion, so do you increase all segments of—I don’t know that if today we are actually recycling 15% of all post-consumer, that means the remainder of post-consumer that’s going into landfill is necessarily all materials suited for landfill. People still make the mistake of throwing out—people, the average American doesn’t think of clothing as something that should be donated or recycled.
Often it’s tossed into the landfill. And there’s a lot of examples from pop culture. I keep a running tab in my mind. But it’s funny, there’s a lot of examples of that. You see it in movies, you’ll see it in books and TV shows. It’s out there. And not everyone thinks of clothing as something that you should donate or recycle.
Marisa Adler
And this is a tricky point though, because different places have different rules about what you can donate. Kind of like why it’s so complicated to just standardize recycling like your curbside recycling. Every place you go has different rules. It’s kind of like the same thing with your textiles and your clothing. Goodwill may have one set of rules. And also, mind you, not every Goodwill has the same set of rules because they’re all independently operated. But a consignment shop obviously has different rules than a donation bin. And so some places, it’s hard to put out the message, just donate it. Because some places don’t want the things that they can’t resell.
And until you have solutions like closed-loop recycling and a higher market demand for some of the fiber recycling, open-loop recycling, it does create a little bit of a drain on the system because then, folks like Brian and Eric could be inundated with a lot of really low value things. I mean, I don’t want to speak for you guys, but just thinking sort of conceptually, what would happen if you turned on that spigot?
Brian London
Yeah. Well, that also brings up the question of just this great unknown and the role, or maybe I would say the lack of data pretty much to date for most of our history of our industry. Every company’s doing their thing, they’re getting stuff in and there haven’t really been great numbers. Number one on, so how much is coming in from where, how much is being generated? If you actually dig into—so we quote this, only 15% of all clothing that’s discarded enters our stream. And that’s an EPA stat. And so I know Marisa and I have talked about this before, I still don’t quite understand. You go and you’re like, well, okay, how’d you figure that out? What are the methods behind it? And it’s kind of opaque.
Maybe you’ve done more research since we last spoke about it, but it’s like we don’t really know. So we don’t know how much and we don’t really know what’s out there in this world. So that calculation came from somewhere. And even if it’s half true, it’s still an enormous amount. But we don’t know that. And there’s a lot of things we just don’t know. But we’re starting to look at and Marisa lives in this world a lot in terms of data because you can’t really do much if you don’t really know the volumes coming in, what they’re, how much it’s going, what are the compositions in end markets. And so we’ve started trying to do a little more data. There’s different groups out there looking at some and we’re starting to get into that world.
Nick Tawil
Is it easier to do that here domestically or overseas?
Eric Stubin
There’s data that’s out there that the government, the US government has measured. I mean, they have the USITC. I have that acronym, United States Trade—I forgot. I hope I have that right. USITC trade data. And that measures the volume of containers that are being exported out of the United States. I mean, I think that was one of the key variables that they used in some of that, in some of the EPA’s construction of that, those data points.
Marisa Adler
I think it depends on which data you’re looking for. If you’re looking at understanding textile waste generation rates and the composition of the textile waste stream, then doing it in the United States makes sense. If you’re looking at traceability and understanding what fraction goes where, that gets really hard really fast because you can put an RFID tag on a bale that’s getting exported, but that bale will land at the first port, maybe in a Karachi export processing zone, for example, in Pakistan, which is one of the world hubs for sorting and grading. And then that bale gets opened and torn apart. That RFID tracker is no longer useful. Each piece in that bale then gets sorted and graded and mixed with materials from the UK or other places in the EU or any other place they’ve imported from.
And then it’ll go off to the first importing market, maybe it’s Kenya. And then the importer imports that bale. Then it gets opened up, resorted, redistributed through sort of a whole chain of market players all the way down to a stall owner in a secondhand market and whatever—
Brian London
Even in neighboring countries.
Marisa Adler
And then if it doesn’t sell there, then it might get rebaled, like aggregated and rebaled and then redistributed or even just directly exported to neighboring countries. It gets really hard to start tracking where everything’s going. Yeah, and so the data and the transparency piece is a really big underpinning of the new, all the new legislation we’re seeing. Even it’s fueling, I think, a lot of conversations at the international trade level. When you’re looking at the UN and the Basel Convention on how do you track and manage, again, I’m going to use a loaded word, textile waste. It’s a commodity. We don’t like to think of it as waste because people affiliate waste with garbage. But understanding where all that data sits and who holds all that, it’s a very decentralized system of who knows what.
And there’s no mandatory or very little mandatory reporting. There’s really not anyone aggregating this on a systems level to be able to understand.
Eric Stubin
There is some data that’s collected or aggregated from, as you mentioned, from a trade perspective and from the volume perspective that could be in orders of magnitude. Give us a sense, from a value standpoint, it might be different, but from orders of magnitude, are there hundreds of millions or how many tons are being exported to various processing centers from the United States? That information could be fairly accurate. And then the other interesting point Marisa brings up is, well, when you look at the term textile waste, it’s hard as someone that processed probably a billion pounds in their career of textiles, when you look at it, the demand tells a story because it’s finished product. So a lot of what’s being called waste—and there is someone prominent in our industry that just wrote a piece on this and says, what’s being called waste could be, they could be terming it waste because of the nature that X percent sold in a market and then X percent had to be wholesaled.
But I can assure you that the industry wouldn’t be able to sell and wholesale billions of pounds annually if this material wasn’t graded in a suitable way that then resulted in markets demanding it. And that’s really, I think, tells volumes about the products that we ship as an industry. Because it has to be right. It has to be graded to a certain extent for the quality. People are often surprised that secondhand clothing is not tattered or torn in most countries, that it’s good, usable clothing that has a second life. A garment that may have been sold for anywhere from $40 to $80 retail will find its way to a developing country and in that market be sold for maybe a dollar. So something affordable. And it gives the consumer in that country a lot of dignity and choice in being able to shop for secondhand products or for products that are unique.
Brian London
Yeah. And for us, the economics really tell the tale, largely because I’m going to say in a free market. But it’s actually even more than that because we’re overcoming enormous tariffs and taxes on—
Nick Tawil
Yeah I was going to go there. There because you mentioned demand, but the demand, the countries with the demand don’t necessarily get the secondhand use donations, right, so what are the forces that are going against that?
Brian London
So, yeah, I mean, traditionally there’s been some elements of protectionism which probably come from a good place. But I think miss some of the economic realities that again in most of Africa where people are living on less than $2 a day, I forget the statistics, but it’s like a used item is maybe 95% cheaper than a new item that could be created in that market. And let’s say in Kenya, in my mind it’s a bit misguided policy and at our trade organization we’re always working to open markets and lower trade barriers to our product. But it’s desired everywhere and so much so that even with, for example, we’re just working in Costa Rica because the duty there is about 50%. Effectively they have, they tack on all these other taxes with it.
But it’s still, even beyond free trade. So the economics of it really tell the tale. But when you’re actually looking at definitions and textile waste and what does this mean, and you start having these different organizations and policymakers and governmental organizations looking at it that don’t really live the day-to-day, they could from a very good-natured place make decisions that if you miscalculate it a little bit, you could stop an entire flow of goods which again in one place are waste and another place are vibrant markets of people. You go to these places, everyone’s looking for, it’s a huge vibrant economy at these places. You go to markets in Kenya and you see enormous demand for the product.
Nick Tawil
So how big are these markets?
Brian London
Oh, I mean tens—
Nick Tawil
Like outdoor mall size markets or bigger or smaller?
Marisa Adler
I mean if you go to the Kantamanto market in Ghana, it’s huge. I mean you can walk and walk all day through all the different aisles of the stalls. That’s probably one of the biggest that exists.
Nick Tawil
All secondhand?
Marisa Adler
All secondhand. All secondhand.
Brian London
Tens of thousands of people there. Wow. But then even downstream there’s—we just did a trip to Costa Rica where, along with some folks from Goodwill, we were tracking items that we sent there. And then the second and third degrees away all have fascinating stories. It’ll go to another trader. Then it’ll go to, in Costa Rica we profiled this one charity that she funds for young women who are victims of incest. The whole charity is funded by items that she finds good deals with. And so you follow all these items even second, third degree away from that, there’s economies that are also hard to track.
Eric Stubin
A lot of ancillary business activity generated from secondhand that some studies I think have tried to measure. There was a UN study a long time ago that tried to measure the ancillary industries that were generated by secondhand trade. Everything from moving secondhand products to tailoring them in these markets. And then, I think more and more you’re seeing that there’s some vertical in the, within these countries that import the materials and maybe they’re even cutting rags or they’re trying to incorporate other aspects of secondhand clothing. But yeah, it’s a tremendous industry. Rivoli’s book says that it’s one of the most competitive industries that she had ever studied. It was secondhand industries just with sheer volume of competition and truly competitive industry.
I think at the end of the day you really wonder, if you support free and open markets, it’s something that’s important. And secondhand clothing certainly fits in, it fits into that description. Most of the times where we’ve, the industry has seen problems, a lot of the bans seem to be, like Brian pointed out, a lot to do with protectionism. And it’s not that different here. There’s different industries that are affected by protectionist viewpoints here in the United States. But that seems to be a major factor across the world as secondhand competes with cheap manufactured apparel from other countries that are manufacturing.
Brian London
Yeah, I just want to circle back to the question about closed loop. So this whole world, and this has been a pretty new world for us. Again, this is kind of more the world that Marisa lives in day-to-day. So we’re talking before about closed loop. There’s—I mentioned there’s enormous amount of investments from brands, from other investment companies. And I was thinking to myself, why did all this money get into this closed loop? So by closed loop, we mean actually taking a shirt, not just reusing it, extending its life or repurposing it, but the actual process of turning an old shirt into a new shirt, which is way more complicated than you think for a lot of reasons. We could probably spend a whole hour or a whole semester talking about.
But so yeah, this whole world of closed-loop fiber-to-fiber technologies has become a big, I mean you go to whole huge conferences of it. And I couldn’t even put a price tag on the amount that’s invested in it. But to date, Eric had a good visual he did with the Venn diagram before about it’s really moving very little in terms of the practical economy so far. So there’s this huge amount of potential that we see. But I’m trying to think of myself too, what prompted all that? Is it that we feel like we’re not capturing stuff in that 85% we assume is all low-end, unusable stuff, that if it entered, because it is true, let’s assume 85% were low-end stuff and we all loaded it to our graders, we would have an issue.
Eric Stubin
I don’t think that’s ever been the case because we have increased—and if you look at, there is a model that’s out there. If you look at the EU versus the United States, the EU diverts 2x the amount of post-consumer that we do here in the States. But their post-consumer does not veer towards only unusable clothing or material that would only be destined for the fiber industry. So I think there’s, as you increase the pie, you get all segments of textiles. All segments of textiles increase along with it.
Marisa Adler
I think the push towards this closed-loop recycling comes from a sustainable materials management perspective of our Earth’s natural finite resources. And at true end of life, like once reuse is no longer an option and everything will eventually get there, how do we keep those materials in circulation? How do we maintain the value and how do we use those to displace the production of new materials? I think that’s sort of the age of where we’re at right now in the textile waste management industry is looking at how do you create those infinite loops and keep materials in circulation forever? And the answer cannot be found in reuse. Eventually it’ll reach end of life.
It can’t be found in mechanical recycling because of the technological limitations of mechanical recycling and the degradation of the natural fibers and what those fibers can be used for. So new emerging recycling processes are what we’re turning to, including things like solvolysis and depolymerization and some of the categories of recycling that are deemed chemical recycling, which is a kind of unfortunate umbrella term because it creates a lot of confusion over what they actually are. And there’s sort of a lot of stigma around, oh, chemicals, hazardous, bad. But I think that’s where this new age approach is coming from.
Eric Stubin
It’s a worthwhile goal. I mean it represents innovation and where the industry and all the stakeholders hopefully will come together to work in it. I think that’s some of what’s happened in various states that are trying to introduce EPR legislation. It almost feels like the legislation was written with a futurist world in mind. And then when the real world markets and innovation catches up to some of this regulations then I think it can all potentially work in harmony. But it might be a little ways till we’re there.
Brian London
But when you look at the economics of it and you see kind of what, prices would be for a material here. So let’s say you got a bunch of low-end stuff you can’t reuse, you can’t repurpose. You can talk a little bit about what we see or hearing about the cost of what’s—there’s interesting technologies that can sort these into the specific fiber types that could in theory and practice on some level turn them into feedstock. But the economics of it, from your perspective, someone handling the material, how do you view that? And what would make that fit into your worldview?
Eric Stubin
I mean it’s hard and I don’t, I think most of the professionals inside the industry, when they talk about it, we all sort of scratch our head and we wonder about the economics and how they might come into play. It’s hard to see today but markets change and so does technology. And when, I’ve always said when markets are willing and able to, the industry will likely find a way to support them. But at the moment it’s tough to find that. Even from, I’ve heard things by, from closed-loop recyclers, they said there’s X percentage of 100% cotton waste or X percentage of poly waste and some of that material is hard to find.
And it certainly seems when you hear apparel talk about, they need design to marry up with the overall strategic plan to recycle more waste. And there’s a little bit of a dichotomy there between design sometimes and recycling. So we need, there’s got to be a holistic move to make the, to make all of the variables come together and get everything moving in the same direction.
Marisa Adler
Yeah, I’ve done some financial modeling on this new textile recycling system and everything has to be exactly perfect for the model not to break and even then, it’s kind of shaky.
Nick Tawil
Well, I knew there’d be way more to talk about than the time we had allotted. Eric, Marisa, Brian, thank you. As is the tradition on the Infinite Loops episodes, there’s a final question. And so it’s a bit of a curveball, but here we go. If we’re going to make you the king or queen of the world for the day, and you can’t kill anyone, and you can’t put anyone in a re-education camp, we’re going to hand you a magical microphone. And you’re going to say two things into that microphone that will incept all 8 billion plus humans on the Earth. And when they wake up the next morning, they’re going to be like, oh, here’s just something I thought of. What would those two things be?
Brian London
Wait, so I’m giving a message to everyone in the world?
Nick Tawil
Yeah. And when you incept them with these two ideas, they will actually go out and do it.
Marisa Adler
Right. So you’re brainwashing.
Eric Stubin
All right, I’m going to go first. Mine is donate, recycle, don’t throw away. Does that count as—that’s three words. Is that one?
Nick Tawil
I’ll allow it. I’ll allow it.
Eric Stubin
Is that what you’re allowing for? You’re looking for two thoughts or two—
Nick Tawil
Two ideas.
Eric Stubin
Two ideas. Donate, recycle, don’t throw away, and don’t judge your clothing. That would be—
Nick Tawil
But also, don’t donate dirty socks.
Eric Stubin
You can donate dirty socks. We’ll find a home for—
Nick Tawil
Ah okay!
Eric Stubin
You can donate dirty socks.
Nick Tawil
Marisa.
Marisa Adler
It probably wouldn’t even be related to textiles.
Nick Tawil
It doesn’t have to be! It doesn’t have to be related to textiles.
Marisa Adler
All right, cool.
Nick Tawil
It can be love thy neighbor. It can be anything you like.
Marisa Adler
I think that’s what it would be. Recognize the reality that life is fleeting, life is short, and so just approach every day like it could be your last. And the second one, I think, would probably be something around love thy neighbor. Treat others as you’d like to be treated. How are you feeling about yours now?
Eric Stubin
About the dirty socks?
Marisa Adler
Exactly.
Nick Tawil
That’s great. That’s great.
Marisa Adler
Go ahead Brian.
Nick Tawil
We need variety. So this is good.
Brian London
Tune in, Infinite Loops podcast.
Nick Tawil
Wow.
Brian London
I guess, kind of like what I was thinking about earlier with shirts, like, whether it’s this industry or anything. Take a look at things sometimes and just kind of ask yourself, what’s the story behind that? How did that get to where it is, where’s it going to go? Dig into kind of what’s the story behind things? Because a lot of times there’s something interesting, and we tend to just kind of, when you see something every day it kind of just becomes like white noise. But there’s a lot of interesting stories around, and I hope we’re one of them. But you guys decide. Maybe we’ll see you chapter two in a few months.
Marisa Adler
Actually yeah. Think critically and act with intention, I think.
Nick Tawil
There you go. Okay.
Brian London
I’ll take that, too.
