Clothing Recycling: Why Is It So Hard?

In 2016, I founded Armoire, a clothing rental company serving ambitious women. We’ve taken inventory lifecycle management seriously since day one. We pride ourselves on diverting clothing from the landfill, and have performed over 17,000 garment repairs and created over 700 upcycled styles. Armoire has donated nearly 9,000 garments to nonprofit organizations to date, most recently, to our fantastic local partner, Dress for Success Seattle. But some garments we retire from inventory don’t meet our quality standards for donation, thus we started looking into clothing recycling options. Read on for more on that.

But First, Market Demand

Many of our members join Armoire to access style variety without the financial and environmental costs of participating in fast fashion. The service dramatically changes members’ relationship to clothing and traditional retail habits: in a fall 2022 customer survey, 75% of members shared that they reduced shopping frequency after subscribing to Armoire for three months, and 91% wear an item from Armoire at least once a week, minimizing new clothing purchases. Also in that survey, “sustainability” emerged as a primary motivation for our customers’ loyalty for the first time in company history. 

This customer sentiment is not unique to Armoire clothing renters. The World Economic Forum reports that consumers are increasingly preparing to spend more on sustainable products. And retailers are responding. It’s difficult to buy a pair of joggers these days without seeing a pop up or spotlighted content about a brand’s sustainability initiatives. 

Armoire has built a customer base that is bought in. They’re not joining Armoire because they want to rent a specific piece from a certain luxury designer. They’re opting into a sharing economy that helps them experience clothing variety for every aspect of their lives. Compared to the apparel industry sell-through rate of 69%, Armoire inventory has a 98% usage rate because members vote on and determine what we purchase. These same customers have pushed us to make more sustainable operational investments as well, including our 100% recycled and dual-use packaging from EcoEnclose.

How We Tackle Clothing Recycling

Fashion is the second most polluting industry globally, so we anticipated there would be a robust ecosystem of potential clothing recycling partners to consider–that we might have several great options given the market opportunity. Instead, we encountered a complicated network of opaque operations and required minimums to exclusively serve industry giants. We learned about a few offerings that left us wondering what clothing recycling even means. One firm promised us a video of shredded clothing as their final deliverable. 

We attempted to find the right clothing recycling solution via Threadcycle, a public education campaign of King County and Seattle Public Utilities. But the King County transfer stations that offer Threadcycle textile recycling do not include Seattle in their service areas. What’s more, many Threadcycle partners are nonprofit organizations who sort textiles to be donated, but don’t disclose where they go thereafter. This didn’t meet our transparency requirement–we’re putting in effort to recycle our clothing, and we want to make sure that’s actually happening. 

We have since found Looptworks, a Portland, Oregon-based company partnering with businesses to transform excess textiles into usable materials. Their website is full of free educational content, the brand partners they cite are reputable, and they answered our call–a low bar that few Threadcycle partners were able to clear. On this call, we learned that we don’t meet the required volumes to work directly with Looptworks, but through partnership with another local Seattle company, we’re able to bridge the gap. As of May 2023, we’re working with Dügood to recycle our retired inventory. 

Dügood is a family-owned and operated junk removal and donation pickup service for people and businesses who care. Founded in Ballard on the triple bottom line principle (people, planet, prosperity), Dügood takes the time to sort through every pick-up they receive to find it the best second home possible. They achieve this thanks to their ever-growing list of vetted partners that focus on reuse, recycle, and repurpose, as well as partners supporting struggling members of the community. Partnerships are a huge part of what makes Dügood successful, a strategy that brought them to Armoire and Looptworks. They are 1% for the Planet Certified, and will combine our clothing for recycling with other local-area clothing pickups for delivery to Looptworks at the quantities that make sense. They empathize with the challenges associated with going the circular, responsible route, and together we are collaborating to make the circular economy more accessible and honest to everyday people and businesses.

There’s money to be made in positioning a company or an initiative as eco-friendly, but there’s a serious lack of governance thereafter. When profit or perception is the priority, organizations are not always incentivized to do the right thing, or required to do the sustainable thing that they’re selling. Building a circular economy is complicated, expensive, and it takes time. It also requires more strategic marketing–you have to find the people who care enough to spend more until the foundations and processes are in place. 

But in exchange for those extra consumer dollars or government grants, we must demand more accountability, including oversight and support from our government agencies. I’m thankful to Dügood and Looptworks for helping us achieve more responsible disposal of our retired inventory, and hopeful that this will get easier over time–especially in a city like Seattle, which has so much natural beauty to lose in getting this wrong, and so many potential circular economy customers to create in getting this right. 

What You Can Do

We’re eternally grateful for our customers who care about sustainable clothing practices. Together, we can make a difference—and we’re here to make it an enjoyable, rewarding journey. If you’re new to this mission, welcome. Here’s what you can do to support the cause:

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