15 Circular Textile Waste Solutions for Designers & Brands
By Jharna Pariani
For designers and brands seeking ways to responsibly mitigate their textile waste from pre- and post-production, these organizations will help provide you with circular solutions to help manage your waste. What each one of them accepts varies from textile waste in the form of fabric offcuts, scraps, deadstock fabric rolls, yarns, and unsold inventory.
Location: Australia
Circular Sourcing is a marketplace where businesses can buy or sell any amount of designer deadstock and quality surplus fabrics. Once registered and approved as a “seller”, businesses get to choose their minimum and maximum amounts for cut lengths or can simply choose to sell by the roll. This marketplace also accepts “remnant” fabrics that are less than 5.5 yards and encourages all kinds of quality materials to be listed with faults that are considered to be small enough to be cut around.
Accepts: Fabric off-cuts, deadstock fabric rolls
2.FABSCRAP
Location: New York & Philadelphia, USA
FABSCRAP was born out of the need to meet New York City’s commercial textile recycling needs. They work with designers and brands in the area offering fabric scrap collection to further shred them and create insulation, carpet padding, furniture lining, and moving blankets. Scraps collected are also available for sale for reuse by students, artists, crafters, sewers, and teachers.
Accepts: Fabric scraps, offcuts, and deadstock fabric rolls
3.SUAY LA
Location: Los Angeles, USA
Built around a clear ethos of keeping textiles in circulation for longer, SUAY LA accepts both fabric scraps and garments to upcycle them and offer them a new lease on life. Fabric offcuts and garments made from denim, cotton, wool, leather, silk, and polyester are accepted. However, SUAY does not accept children’s clothing and fabric scraps smaller than 18” x 18”.
Accepts: Fabric scraps, offcuts, and unsold inventory
Location: New York, USA
Queen of Raw is a blockchain and AI-powered platform where fashion brands and retailers can buy and sell deadstock materials. The blockchain platform offers an added layer of traceability for its sellers to help them map, identify, and trace waste throughout their supply chains in real time, allowing them to minimize excess waste efficiently.
Accepts: Deadstock fabric rolls
5. UPPAREL
Location: Australia & New Zealand
UPPAREL helps breathe new life into fabric and garment waste by reusing where possible and recycling when necessary. Items received in fit-to-wear condition are hand-sorted and passed on to trusted charity partners, while the remaining textile waste is either repurposed by local designers or transformed into their revolutionary material, UPtex. UPtex is a recycled and recyclable material with a wide variety of applications including indoor signage, homewares, acoustic paneling, and packaging.
Accepts: Fabric scraps, offcuts, and unsold inventory
6. FABCYCLE
Location: Vancouver, Canada
FABCYCLE is a textile waste collection service that works directly with local apparel manufacturers like factories and fashion designers to collect fabric scraps, off-cuts, deadstock, and ends of rolls. Deadstock textiles collected are then made available for sale to local makers and crafters. FABCYCLE primarily works with organizations that either have a more considerable amount of textile waste or a consistent flow of textile waste.
Accepts: Fabric scraps, offcuts, and deadstock fabric rolls
Location: Texas, USA
The Welman Project is a charitable organization accepting all manner of fabric, yarn, leather, scraps, notions, and patterns that can be repurposed for creative reuse in classrooms across the Fort Worth Independent School District. These donated materials are made available for free to educators at accredited public and charter schools, as well as some qualified nonprofit private schools.
Accepts: Fabric scraps, offcuts, yarns, and trims
Location: Ireland
Hedgehog Fibres is an Irish hand-dyed yarn and fiber studio accepting unused skeins and yarn waste to have it respun into their own Tweedy yarn. Tweedy yarn is created by using a percentage of the yarn waste received and blending it with other wool yarns by re-carding and spinning it into new, usable yarn.
Accepts: Only yarn scraps and unused skeins
9. Helpsy
Location: New York, USA
Helpsy is a B Corp-certified organization helping designers and brands manage unwanted inventories. 95% of what they collect is reused, upcycled, or recycled. Clothing items are first sorted by their partners and then divided into grades. Higher grades are resold to thrift stores while lower grades get turned into rags for industrial use or used in stuffing and insulation.
Accepts: Unsold inventory
Location: New York, USA
Wearable Collections is a waste management company that helps designers and brands divert unsold clothing from landfills by either repurposing or recycling their waste. About 50% of collections get reused as clothing and sold in secondhand markets, while the rest are upcycled as rags, or shredded into fiber that’s used for purposes like insulation, carpet padding, and mattress stuffing. If designers need their clothes to be recycled for proprietary reasons as opposed to being reused as secondhand items, Wearable Collections charges a small fee per pound.
Accepts: Unsold inventory
11. MAKE ANEEW
Location: New York, USA
MAKE ANEEW is a B2B circular operations business helping designers and brands recover value from unsold garments through repair, remanufacturing, and fiber-to-fiber recycling. Usable garments are either repaired or redesigned into an entirely new product, while unusable clothes are fiber-to-fiber recycled to give the materials a new life by turning them into nonwovens and yarn that’s ready for new product production.
Accepts: Unsold inventory
Location: Netherlands
Bleckmann is a Dutch fashion logistics and e-commerce fulfillment company offering circular solutions to brands through “The Renewal Workshop” by either repairing and reselling reworked products as second-life inventory or minimizing waste for any unsellable items through recycling and upcycling.
Accepts: Unsold inventory
13. Tersus Solutions
Location: Colorado, USA
Tersus Solutions helps brands and retailers extend the life of unsold inventory by offering a range of services that include cleaning, repairs, re-commerce, recycling, and upcycling. Garments are either brought back to a resalable condition through cleaning and repairs, recycled through their proprietary clean-tech and separation processes, or upcycled into a completely new product that helps reset its lifecycle.
Accepts: Unsold inventory
14. BVH Services
Location: Ottawa, Canada
Through services like remanufacturing, repair, re-commerce, deconstruction, and recycling, Canada-based BVH Services offers a range of solutions to help brands create a circular economy for their product. Unsold stock is given a new lease of life through upcycling and repairs or is deconstructed into usable parts or recycled through mechanical and chemical methods. BVH Services also offers a full suite of re-commerce services to help give returned, damaged, and overstocked garments a second chance.
Accepts: Unsold inventory
15. TerraCycle®
Location: New Jersey, USA
TerraCycle® is an innovative company that has become a global leader in recycling hard-to-recycle materials. Brands and designers can purchase a Zero Waste Box™ specifically for recycling unsold clothing which can be sent to their facilities where they are then sorted, cleaned, and turned into recycled raw materials. The new recycled material is then sold to manufacturing companies that produce the end products to complete the circular journey.
Accepts: Unsold inventory
About The Author:
Jharna Pariani is a fashion writer and creative strategist whose work is rooted in honesty and deep observation of the world around her. When she isn’t busy penning down her thoughts, she moonlights as a video editor creating fashion and food reels on Instagram for several brands and influencers