How to Reduce Textile Trash? Start Small and Think Local, Experts Say

Irina McKenzie’s small textile reuse it centre, Fabcycle, is filled from floor to ceiling with rolls of fabric, boxes of buttons, thread and other odds and ends.

All of the materials here, from the fabric to the tables it’s cut on, have been donated to be reused. The store collects deadstock — new material left over from the Lower Mainland’s textile manufacturing industry — and sells it to designers and artists at up to a 70-per-cent discount from its original value.

While this helps divert tens of thousands of metres of fabric from becoming waste, Fabcycle’s efforts make barely a “blip” in the retail waste stream, McKenzie says.

Retail waste is a largely unregulated, fast-growing waste stream. Late last year, waste reduction expert Anna Sacks’s TikTok videos went viral after she asked retail workers to share stories about products they were ordered to trash. In response, workers revealed they’d been ordered to destroy a staggering range of non-perishable items — everything from unsold pots and pans to bras, shoes and sheets.

Non-perishable items could always be donated instead of trashed, Sacks points out. So how did we get here?

When China joined the World Trade Organization in 2000, clothing became more affordable and we started shopping more, according to a 2018 report on British Columbia’s clothing waste. This change in shopping habits meant we also started throwing out more clothes.

Canadians trash 500,000 tonnes of clothes each year — 40,000 here in B.C., according to the same report. It also notes that up to 95 per cent of these clothes could be reused or recycled.

A tonne of clothes would look like a heap as tall as you can reach and as wide as you can stretch your arms, McKenzie says. Altogether, Canada’s 500,000 annual tonnes of retail waste would weigh the same as 125,000 elephants, or 285,000 cars.

In B.C., there are no regulations controlling what retailers do with their own products, leading some to destroy rather than donate unsold stock and trash returned products. While unsold product that is then destroyed only makes up a small amount of the waste generated by the industry, it quickly adds up. “Even a small percentage in the textile industry — we’re talking about big numbers,” McKenzie says.

One third, or 380,000 tonnes, of Metro Vancouver’s annual waste is generated by businesses, says Andrew Marr, director of solid waste planning for Metro Vancouver. Residential, and construction and demolition make up the other two-thirds.

Retail waste is counted as part of business waste, so the exact amount of trash generated by retailers isn’t known, though Marr says it forms a “significant portion” of business waste.  Additionally, it’s a waste stream that creates a disproportionate environmental impact because of the water and energy required to make products, and because of microplastics that are released when a product is washed or trashed, Marr says.

Metro Vancouver’s Think Thrice campaign, launched in early 2020, aims to reduce retail waste by increasing consumer awareness about what happens to trashed clothes. The campaign’s website breaks down the difference between true quality and a flashy price tag, teaches basic DIY repairs and encourages shopping second-hand.

Besides buying less, the main proposed solution for retail waste is a circular economy, where products at the end of their lives are used to make new products.

Globally, we consume more than one billion tonnes of material and feed only 8.6 per cent of that material back into a circular economy. Changing the current global take–make–waste economy into a circular one could reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 39 per cent and cut virgin resource use by 28 per cent, according to the not-for-profit Circle Economy. 

A major retail shift towards a circular economy won’t happen unless the industry starts sharing its sustainability research and resources, says Sara Blenkhorn, director of Leverage Lab, an organization that works with textile industry stakeholders to address industry challenges.

Businesses might be hesitant to adapt when their competition can continue to offer cheaper, less sustainable products. But socially conscious consumers and the rising pressures of climate change are increasingly changing how business is done, Blenkhorn says.

“Companies are making and saving money — you can crunch the numbers, it’s 51 to 81 per cent to the bottom line — by investing in a sustainability strategy over three to five years,” she says. 

Government could help level the playing field by offering incentives to companies investing in sustainability, suggests the 2018 report on B.C.’s clothing waste, which was produced by Leverage Lab. The paper also recommends industry collaboration, investment in a circular economy, and consumer and industry education to make the circular fashion business model mainstream.

Early last year, France introduced legislation to prohibit retailers from trashing products. Companies instead have to donate their excess. 

France is a step ahead of Canada in diverting waste from its landfill because it has less space to dump garbage, Blenkhorn says — and therefore has to get more creative. 

Metro Vancouver’s Marr says if the provincial government was to try and regulate retail waste, it would likely look like a version of an Extended Producer Responsibility program, which already applies to products like plastic bottles and paint. An EPR program gets the producer to help foot the bill for a product’s end of life, either recycling or disposal.

Charging producers a fee for each of their products that end up in a landfill could create an incentive for that producer to make longer-lasting products, Marr says. (The Ministry of Environment did not respond to questions about if it would consider regulating retail waste.) 

Vancouver-based designer and small business owner Amelia Trofymow says she would support an EPR program but would like to see larger companies pay proportionally for the waste they create. 

“In factories they use massive laser cutters that are restricted to their patterns,” she says. “The extra fabric around those lines often gets thrown out instead of reused.”

Big corporations, Trofymow says, are “creating the most waste and are not being held accountable.” To reduce waste herself, Trofymow buys fabric to fill orders and cuts patterns to avoid excess scraps.

The textile industry could “substantially” cut water waste by slashing the number of shades of available denim and figuring out what to do with the textile scraps, Trofymow says.

Scraps make up around 15 per cent of textile waste and can be incredibly difficult to recycle, Fabcycle’s McKenzie says. Different materials get mixed together and often end up in the landfill instead of being sorted.

Fabcycle gives away free bags of scraps to anyone interested — bags filled with strips of Gortex, stacks of soft cotton and brightly coloured swatches. 

The small mishmash bag might seem like an apt metaphor for the available solutions to the onslaught of retail waste, but McKenzie and Blenkhorn say they’re optimistic. 

“Everyone is becoming an activist and rightfully so,” Blenkhorn says. Now is the time for savvy companies to read the writing on the wall.