More startups are offering garment take-back services for brands — but few are actually recycling the textiles

In other words, the old jeans will not be turned into new jeans.

Here’s the rub: Recycling of old textiles into new clothing doesn’t yet exist at scale. And the reality of what happens to old garments after they’re collected is often far messier than advertised. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 84% of clothes end up in landfills or incinerators. An investigation by the environmental campaign group Changing Markets Foundation, for example, found that clothing that entered H&M’s take-back program was often destroyed or dumped, per The Business of Fashion. 

Enter, take-back as a service. In the last few years, a slew of tech-savvy startups have cropped up to help brands deal with the messy logistics of unwanted clothes. The methodology varies from company to company, but generally, they collect unwanted textiles — often surplus, damaged and returned merchandise — from individual consumers and retailers. From there, the providers sort, categorize and assess the quality of those materials to determine if the life of the garment can be extended, usually in the form of reuse, resale and, in fewer cases, textile-to-textile recycling. 

Regardless of the nuances of the process, the objective is the same: keep textile products out of landfills. Roughly half a dozen companies that offer some variation of take-back services interviewed for this story described circularity as the ultimate goal of their businesses. But the apparel industry is a ways off from reorienting itself in such a way. 

“The global nature of the secondhand clothing market is very grave, and there’s not a lot of transparency,” said Amelia Eleiter, co-founder of Debrand, one of the startups that provide take-back services interviewed for this story. “I’m really worried that if we don’t build these take-back as a service models properly, we’re going to have a much larger problem on our hand, or at least a more exposed problem on our hand, with the sheer amount of apparel that we are not sure what to do with.” 

New players emerge

Founded in 2008, Debrand represents one of the more veteran players in the take-back space working to set up the building blocks of a circular economy. It works with brands including Lululemon and Victoria’s Secret on end-of-life apparel and footwear solutions. Debrand says it has diverted over 4.5 million pounds of textile waste from disposal in the last 18 months. The majority of textiles that get sorted at Debrand’s facilities go to open-loop recycling — that is, they are downcycled into different products, such as upholstery. Much of the textiles Debrand takes in are also resold, reused or donated. Textile-to-textile recycling is a very small percentage, Eleiter said in an interview.

Part of the challenge with circularity is that textile recycling is still nascent, and in order to scale the technology, it will need a massive injection of regulatory and corporate buy-in. Until then, take-back as a service startups say they’re helping to put together the necessary building blocks to bring about circularity in the future.

Earlier this month, Debrand opened its first U.S. textile sorting facility in Columbus, Ohio. The new 32,000-square-foot facility, which will include automated sorting equipment, is part of the company’s ambition to develop textile recycling infrastructure to support a circular economy. The facility will have the capacity to process upwards of 20 million pounds a year, said Eleiter.

Another much newer player is SuperCircle, a circular technology startup. Founded in 2022 by CEO Chloe Songer and COO Stuart Ahlum, SuperCircle was borne out of their sneaker brand Thousand Fell, which lets customers send back their shoes in any condition to be recycled in exchange for a rebate. Within the first 18 months of business, about 40% of their customers sent in sneakers.

“We learned you could get consumers on board if they’re incentivized, and rebates are an effective, easy way to do that,” said Songer.  

But textile recycling is also a costly endeavor. According to Songer and Ahlum, it costs between $30 and $40 to recycle a pair of shoes. With Thousand Fell as a proof of concept, Songer and Ahlum realized that in order to bring textile recycling to scale and make it profitable, they would need retail partners — and lots of them — to build up sufficient inventory of textile waste to recoup the cost. SuperCircle would also need to build sorting, processing and logistics infrastructure. 

Today, SuperCircle works with more than 50 brand partners, including Parachute, J.Crew and Reformation, as well as 30 recycling partners. Over the last 18 months, the company has diverted more than two million garments from landfills. How it works is SuperCircle helps brands launch and operate branded take-back programs through which customers can send in used apparel and earn rewards. SuperCircle also partners with brands to take in excess and damaged inventory. Brands send their used materials to SuperCircle’s recycling facility in Las Vegas. From there, machines chop off any extraneous, non-textile features like buttons and zippers. Then, products are sorted based on their fiber type. Once enough material of a certain kind has been collected, the textiles are sent to one of SuperCircle’s 30 recycling partners.

Getting customers on board

One reason fiber-to-fiber recycling is difficult to achieve is because garments are usually made with blended fibers. Also, the technology doesn’t exist yet to recycle clothes with chemical coatings. As a result, about 38% of the garments SuperCircle diverts are able to be recycled into brand-new clothes. Garments that can’t go through fiber-to-fiber recycling are chopped up into industrial materials like insulation and carpeting. 

Part of SuperCircle’s value proposition is transparency. The problem with many take-back programs is that once clothing enter the secondhand apparel market, joining a deluge of cast offs from thrift stores and online resale platforms like ThredUp and The RealReal, it becomes difficult to track and trace the clothes. Despite the rise of startups like SuperCircle, the global rag trade is still a largely manual system in which clothes are generally to countries like Chile and Ghana for re-wear. Yet much of it is originally made from cheap synthetic fibers that are difficult to repurpose that it ends up in a landfill.

SuperCircle attempts to combat this industry norm by digitizing the sorting and processing as much as possible. Each item is tracked, so retailers know where their garments wind up. Brands also get access to real-time data about the performance and environment impact of their individual take-back program.

Until textile-to-textile recycling solutions begin to fully scale, Canada-based Debrand helps brands reduce waste in other ways. In 2021, for example, the company partnered with direct-to-consumer brand Everlane for a two-year pilot program to cut down on returns. Everlane had amassed more than 150,000 units of damaged returns since 2019 and wanted to find a useful alternative for the products other than donation or disposal. 

The solution? Refurbishing damaged or returned items for resale. That can include buffing out scuffs on a shoe’s toe or running a lint roller over products. 

“We’ve actually been able to halve the amount of damaged returned items we receive by tightening our quality control process in the return workflow so that we can get as much product back into that high-quality, sellable inventory as possible,” said Katina Boutis, Everlane’s director of sustainability.

Giving take-back services a makeover

To Kristy Caylor, founder of textile collection startup Trashie, the key to making circularity a reality is getting more shoppers involved. That starts with making it a fun alternative to the usual drudgery of dropping off clothes at the local thrift store. Launched last year, Trashie is one of the newer entrants in the take-back space, but it’s already made a splash with its playful, Gen Z-coded marketing. 

How it works is if customers buy one of the startup’s neon-colored take-back bags, which start at $20 a pop, fill it with clothes of any brand or condition, and return it through the mail with a prepaid shipping label. In exchange, customers get $30 back in “TrashieCash” per bag, which they can use to buy gift cards or get discounts at brands like Nordstrom and Lululemon. Shoppers can also buy non-apparel items like Sephora makeup, AMC movie tickets or groceries from Walmart. With this model, Trashie has diverted 95% of what it collects from landfills.

The remaining 5% Trashie receives is usually literal trash. “On occasion, somebody sends in half a raincoat. We got a VCR tape one time,” said Caylor. “There are certain things that come in that we just can’t responsibly do anything with, and so we have to landfill those.” 

In the last 12 months, Trashie has sold more than 435,000 take-back bags, diverting 6.6 million items, or 3.8 million pounds of stuff, from landfills, according to the company.

But are store credits, rebates and other incentives counter-productive if they only encourage customers to buy more stuff? To Trashie’s Caylor, the incentive-driven approach is vital for brand participation, which will be necessary to make a circular economy a reality. “To be successful, these programs need to drive positive profitability for the brand partner,” said Caylor. “They actually make money on selling the bag, and customers come back twice as much, twice as fast, which is really powerful for their economics.”

The customer loyalty element is particularly crucial since responsible disposal of textile waste is more often than not the costlier option, according to SuperCircle’s Songer. “It’s a trade-off for them,” she said. 

Despite the rise of take-back startups, the promise of circularity will hinge on getting producers to pay for the reuse and recycling of the items they make, according to Rachel Van Metre Kibbe, founder and CEO of both Circular Services Group and American Circular Textiles Group.

In 2011, Kibbe founded Helpsy, which started out as an online retailer stocking sustainable clothing until it merged with a clothing recycling company in 2018, making it the first B Corp clothing collection company in the world. Like other operators in the take-back space, Helpsy partners with nonprofits, businesses and even thrift stores to reuse, resell and downcycle excess clothes. Kibbe left Helpsy in 2019.

“I now know that can probably only be accomplished through policy,” she said. 

Indeed, Debrand partner Lululemon has come under fire for alleged greenwashing, according to a lawsuit filed against the retailer. According to the company’s 2022 impact report, its scope 3 emissions — indirect greenhouse gas emissions that are produced indirectly within the company’s supply chain — grew to 1.2 million tons of carbon dioxide, up from about 748,000 in 2020. The retailer has previously rejected the lawsuit’s accusations. 

Legislation could be coming for retailers. In California, the proposed Responsible Textile Recovery Act of 2024 would require producers in the state to fund a program for reusing, repairing and recycling textiles. If passed, it would be the first of its kind in the U.S. The bill has garnered support from several waste industry groups, but some brands have opposed parts of it.

Still, a key aspect of a circular production model is one in which there is less manufacturing and selling of new clothes. And there isn’t much data to suggest that the secondhand apparel industry, including take-back programs, are offsetting enough production to have an effect. More than 100 billion garments are produced each year, which is double what it was 15 years ago, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

Players in the take-back space are aware of the massive paradigm shift that would need to take place to incentivize brands and consumers alike to produces and buy less.

“With the price matrix being the way it is, it’s hard to see a spot where we could force a slowdown in unit consumption unless there was a change in the economic dynamic,” said Trashie’s Caylor. “But if we can make the supply chain better, and if we start to produce products that have lower footprint pre- and post-use, and if we can create systems for effectively claiming that product back, and we scale recycling capacity and technology, we can start to reduce the harm.”