Why We Can’t Innovate Our Way Out of Fashion Overproduction

Earlier this month, I had a front-row spot to the aboriginal of textile recovery connected the Innovation Stage astatine the Textile Recovery Summit successful San Diego. I served arsenic 1 of the judges alongside leaders from merchandise stewardship, investment, and precocious manufacturing.

The transportation contention was a compressed mentation of the existent world, wherever founders had minutes to transportation judges that their solution tin alteration a strategy that presently sends tremendous volumes of textiles to landfill, portion brands look mounting unit to beryllium progress.

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Pitch aft transportation offered caller ways to grip the mounting tide of discarded clothing: platforms to standard repair, technologies to benignant faster, systems to alteration fibre-to-fibre recycling. The ingenuity is real, and pitches from Alternew, Fibarcode, IntheLoopAi, and the eventual winner, Intrinsic Advanced Materials, were precise impressive. But from the judge’s table, 1 information is hard to ignore: we are asking “end-of-life innovation” to hole what is fundamentally an upstream occupation of overproduction and overconsumption.

U.S. consumers propulsion distant 10.4 cardinal items of wearable covering each year, astir 4,000 truckloads per week, according to 2024 information from Garson & Shaw. No substance however compelling a transportation sounds, immoderate solution needs to recognize the challenges that these immense volumes of items bring. The volumes of textiles being sent to landfills successful states similar California acold outpace repair projects and recycling innovation efforts.

That’s wherefore the astir important circular infrastructure volition not beryllium connected aboriginal technologies. It’s reusing what we person today—the systems that support wearable covering successful circulation and marque betterment economically viable.

Reuse is simply a large motor of U.S. employment. The secondhand covering assemblage supports an estimated 342,000 U.S. jobs, compared with nether 90,000 successful U.S. apparel manufacturing. In different words, the “reuse economy” is not marginal; it is 1 of the largest job-generators successful the American covering worth chain. In California, a caller study by the collector USAgain shows that improved postulation infrastructure and greater diversion of second-hand covering for reuse would make thousands of greenish jobs and trim emissions.

And reuse is planetary for a reason: it meets basal needs astatine terms points that caller covering often cannot. If it did, it could lone beryllium inexpensive ultra-fast manner covering astatine the disbursal of the environment. In Guatemala, second-hand covering is much than 4 times cheaper than caller covering imports. In 2023, Guatemala imported 131 cardinal kg of utilized covering nether Harmonized System codification 6309, and 98.6 percent of each its utilized covering imports came from the U.S.