Inside Goodwill’s bid to build a textile recycling powerhouse

Goodwill Industries International has been a giant in what is today called the circular economy since 1902, reselling used clothing, housewares and bric-a-brac to millions each year.

Now the global nonprofit is looking to cement its pioneer status once again, seeking to help build out North America’s threadbare textile recycling infrastructure. Goodwill leadership believes it has the reach, and it’s building the relationships. But the challenge, for now, is the lack of policies to help realize Goodwill’s long-term ambition.

In its exploratory steps toward this vision, Goodwill found that 60 percent of the cotton, polyester and polycotton textiles it can’t sell can be turned into new textiles with existing mechanical or chemical recycling technologies. 

“Now, those aren’t necessarily recycling technologies that are built out in all the markets, but those are available today, which was enormously encouraging,” Goodwill President and CEO Steve Preston told Trellis. 

Unique scale

That key result of a two-year, $1.28 million pilot study, backed by the Walmart Foundation, involved 25 Goodwill organizations in Canada, Michigan, and the Northeastern and Southeastern U.S.

Goodwill shared the details Aug. 16 at its first 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 New York City nonprofit partnered in the pilot. “The size and scale of the Goodwill network place it in a unique position to help pioneer solutions to the overproduction of textiles.”

Some 17 million tons of textiles entered landfills in 2018, nearly 6 percent of overall municipal solid waste, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. And only 14.7 percent — 2.5 million tons — of clothes and bedding were recycled.

Other Goodwill pilot partners included the Rochester Institute of Technology and sorting systems provider TOMRA of Norway. Startup Sortile, based in New York and Santiago, Chile, uses near infrared technology and AI to identify fiber types.

Next, Goodwill, with the Walmart Foundation, will embark on a $2 million study to trace where used textiles go in the global market. 

Goodwill is pursuing new partner organizations

The latest findings prove that Goodwill can be the collector and partner to recyclers, Goodwill of the Finger Lakes CEO Jennifer Lake told Trellis.

Goodwill, headquartered in Rockville, Maryland, is laying the groundwork for some of its 154 independent North America organizations to become local hubs that supply fabric feedstocks, the raw material for textile recycling. Many Goodwills are forming regional collaborative models where, over time, they intend to sort and deconstruct textiles.

“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 said. “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?” 

That requires more partners that haven’t previously come together, according to Preston.

“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 diving into recycling?

• The solution needs building: Unlike with metals, cardboard and some plastics, recycling largely doesn’t exist yet for textiles.
• Textiles have an outsize environmental impact: “If we can begin to resell more of that — and what doesn’t resell or isn’t available to be resold gets put back into the recycling stream — you actually begin to address a large environmental issue for which there are no solutions,” Preston said.
• The feedstock is in hand: Goodwill’s supply of post-consumer textiles, among its several billions of pounds of annual donations, is relatively uncontaminated. “That is very desirable from a partnership perspective for businesses interested in the feedstock,” Lake said.
• The opportunities abound to support future tech jobs: “We think that putting these hubs together can expand job growth,” Preston said. “To the extent that we use more technology … there 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 effort. “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.”

Ultimately, about 5 percent of donated textiles land in a landfill, according to the nonprofit Green America.

Among the circular innovations that Preston hopes will increasingly arise across Goodwill, local branches are experimenting with partnerships to recycle textiles, plastics and glass. In Florida, for instance, Goodwill-Suncoast is spinning unwanted textiles into socks with upcycled yarn company Osomtex.

Source: Goodwill-Suncoast

Goodwill is uniquely positioned for a textile recycling economy

• The feedstock: Goodwill found a new value for 4.3 billion pounds of goods last year, according to the organization. 
• The reach: 80 percent of the U.S. population lives within 10 miles of one of Goodwill’s 3,300 locations.
• The experience: “For over a century, we have been in materials management and done it 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 engaged in the pilot.
• The connections: “We have a powerful convening role in this space, part of which because we have a remarkable footprint … remarkable capabilities around logistics and movement of goods, a massive labor force,” Preston said.

Policies are a missing link

What’s missing are policies to spur Goodwill’s textile-recycling-infrastructure vision forward.

“Having local hubs to process materials for recycling simplifies the logistics, but that is also on the assumption that our recycling facilities can be economically viable at small, distributed scales as well,” Marcian Lee, a research analyst at Lux Research said. Unfortunately, that’s not the case, he added. “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,” Kibbe said. It would provide $14 billion of 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,” CEO Preston said. “The recyclers are going to be looking for longer term contracts so they can justify significant investments to build out their infrastructure.”