A Walmart Foundation-supported pilot program opened the path for Goodwill locations to become textile recycling hubs.
Since 1902, Goodwill Industries International has been a leader in what is now known as the circular economy, reselling used clothing, housewares, and bric-a-brac to millions of people each year.
The global non-profit is now aiming to reestablish its pioneer reputation by assisting in the expansion of North America’s deteriorating textile recycling infrastructure. Goodwill leadership feels it has the reach and is developing the partnerships. However, the current difficulty is a lack of policies to enable Goodwill to achieve its long-term goals.
In its preliminary steps toward this aim, Goodwill discovered that 60 percent of the cotton, polyester, and polycotton textiles it cannot sell can be converted into new textiles using existing mechanical or chemical recycling processes.
“Now, those aren’t necessarily recycling technologies that are built out in all markets, but they are available today, which was enormously encouraging,” Goodwill President and CEO Steve Preston told Trellis.
That was the primary finding of a two-year, $1.28 million pilot project funded by the Walmart Foundation, which featured 25 Goodwill groups in Canada, Michigan, and the Northeastern and Southeastern United States.
Goodwill announced the facts on August 16 during its inaugural national sustainability summit in Washington, D.C.
“No other nonprofit collector has explored solutions at this scale before,” said Karla Magruder, president and founder of Accelerating Circularity, in a statement. The pilot project was cosponsored by a nonprofit in New York City. “The size and scale of the Goodwill network place it in a unique position to help pioneer solutions to the overproduction of textiles.”
According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, around 17 million tons of textiles ended up in landfills in 2018, accounting for nearly 6% of total municipal solid trash. And only 14.7 percent, or 2.5 million tons, of garments and bedding were recycled.
Other Goodwill trial participants included the Rochester Institute of Technology and TOMRA, a Norwegian sorting systems manufacturer. Sortile, a startup based in New York and Santiago, Chile, employs near-infrared technology and artificial intelligence to identify fiber kinds.
Next, Goodwill and the Walmart Foundation will collaborate on a $2 million study to track where used textiles end up in the global market.
Jennifer Lake, CEO of Goodwill of the Finger Lakes, told Trellis that the latest findings show that Goodwill can be both a collector and a partner for recyclers.
Goodwill, headquartered in Rockville, Maryland, is establishing the basis for some of its 154 independent North American organizations to serve as local hubs for fabric feedstocks, the basic material used in textile recycling. Many Goodwills are creating regional cooperation models with the goal of sorting and deconstructing textiles over time.
“It’s also very valuable or essential for the technology developers and investors in those projects to understand, because they need to be able to arrange that feedstock,” Preston told me. “What are the economics? What does that ecosystem look like to bring it from where it is today to where it needs to go tomorrow?”
According to Preston, this will need the formation of new partnerships.
“It’s the people who design the technology, the people who build plants, the people who can supply the product, the buyers on the other side to make sure that whatever they recycle into, you know, spun polyester yarn, that they will know that it’s going to be economically viable.”
Why is Goodwill entering into recycling?
The solution requires building: Textile recycling, unlike metals, cardboard, and some plastics, is still in its early stages.
Textiles have an outsized environmental impact. “If we can begin to resell more of that—aand what doesn’t resell or isn’t available to be resold gets put back into the recycling stream—yyou actually begin to address a large environmental issue for which there are no solutions,” Preston told reporters.
The feedstock is on hand. Goodwill’s source of post-consumer textiles, among its billions of pounds in annual donations, is reasonably clean. “That is very desirable from a partnership perspective for businesses interested in the feedstock,” Lake told reporters.
There are numerous options to boost future tech jobs: “We believe that combining these hubs will increase job growth,” Preston added. “To the extent that we use more technology… there are any number of other really interesting technological AI and manufacturing advances here.”
“The reality is that existing large-scale reuse organizations—both for-profit and nonprofit—are already perfectly positioned to support regional circularity with the operations they have in place today,” said Rachel Kibbe, CEO of advisory firm Circular Services Group and its American Circular Textiles initiative. “These organizations have the logistics, the networks, and the infrastructure necessary to collect, sort, and redistribute materials on a scale that can significantly reduce waste and keep valuable resources in use.”
According to the group Green America, approximately 5 percent of donated textiles end up in landfills.
Local branches are experimenting with partnerships to recycle textiles, plastics, and glass, which Preston believes will lead to more circular innovations at Goodwill. In Florida, Goodwill-Suncoast collaborates with repurposed yarn firm Osomtex to spin waste fabrics into socks.
Suncoast collaborated with Osomtex to create new socks from discarded materials. Source: Goodwill Industries.
Goodwill is perfectly positioned for the textile recycling business.
The feedstock: Last year, Goodwill determined a new value for 4.3 billion pounds of products, according to the charity.
The reach: 80 percent of the United States’ population resides within 10 miles of one of Goodwill’s 3,300 stores.
The Experience: “For over a century, we have been in materials management and done so in a reasonable and socially conscious way that creates jobs in local communities and supports the human service sector,” said Lake, CEO of Goodwill of the Finger Lakes, which participated in the trial.
The connections: “We have a powerful convening role in this space, partly due to our remarkable footprint…” Preston described the company’s amazing capabilities in logistics and goods movement, as well as its large worker force.
Policies are the missing connection.
What is missing are policies that propel Goodwill’s textile-recycling infrastructure vision forward.
“Having local hubs to process materials for recycling simplifies logistics, but that also assumes that our recycling facilities can be economically viable at small, distributed scales,” Marcian Lee, a research analyst at Lux Research, said. Unfortunately, that is not the case, he explained. “That’s where financial incentives will be an important factor for balancing out the accounts.”
“One critical step is to support legislation like the Americas Trade and Investment Act,” according to Kibbe. It proposes $14 billion in incentives for domestic textile recycling. “This act aims to provide the necessary funding and resources to modernize reuse and recycling facilities, improve collection systems, and ensure that materials are properly processed.”
“Brands can very much play a role because they’re ultimately going to be purchasers of the recycled material,” Preston, who is the CEO, said. “The recyclers are going to be looking for longer-term contracts so they can justify significant investments to build out their infrastructure.”
