TEXTILES.ORG
Most of us are familiar with Goodwill’s stores as the last stop for worn and unwanted apparel and home textiles. For 120 years the non-profit organization has prevented useful products from going to waste while providing job training and placement services to individuals with barriers to employment in local communities.
Textile donations in the thrift shop business that can’t be sold are processed into rags, fiberfill, and insulation; exported to secondhand markets to be sold at a fraction of their value; or eventually landfilled or incinerated.
Goodwill’s recently-announced foray into textile-to-textile recycling, in cooperation with materials regeneration company Reju and waste management leader WM, makes perfect sense. The collaboration will expand Goodwill’s handling of discarded textiles from reuse and recycling to extracting full value from the materials.
Over the past two years Goodwill Industries International (GII) took a deep dive into valorizing waste textiles as feedstock for new fiber, teaming with fellow nonprofit Accelerating Circularity for a pilot study funded with a $1.28 million grant from the Walmart Foundation.
Over 25 local GII organizations came together to form four regional hubs, based in Canada, Michigan, the Northeast and Southeast of the U.S., to focus on scaling textile reuse and recycling. Each hub put together business plans outlining a strategy to create feedstock from nonwearable textile donations, including aggregating, sorting, and analyzing fiber content.
A key finding of GII’s study was the suitability of 60 percent of their post-retail textiles for use as recycling feedstock by current technologies. “Our sorting studies have primarily used near infrared (NIR) scanners to identify the fiber composition of textiles, which includes devices developed by Matoha and Sortile,” says Brittany Dickinson, director of sustainability at Goodwill. “We are also in conversation with leading automated sortation equipment providers as we build our plans for scaling this work.”
Dickinson adds, “Goodwill is focused on developing the skills and systems to transform textiles into feedstock that meets recyclers’ various specifications. We are in conversation with many of the leading and emerging textile-to-textile recyclers, and we are working to ensure that we can meet their needs at commercial scale. With our more than 3,300 stores located within 10 miles of 83 percent of the U.S. population, Goodwill has the infrastructure and the public trust to serve as a collection point for textiles.”