This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
As the chief executive of a textile reuse company, I spend a lot of time thinking about what happens to clothes after people are done with them. It is my work, and it deeply impacts the planet.
I’ve lived and worked in California for more than 25 years. I know the pride Californians feel as a national leader in sustainability. That reputation is well-earned in many areas, but when it comes to textiles, California is falling behind.
Nearly 1.2 million tons of textiles are landfilled in California each year. The state spends around $99 million annually to dispose of clothing that, in many cases, still has useful life in it. In the United States, about 85% of discarded clothing ends up in a landfill or gets incinerated.
The problem goes beyond what consumers throw away. The fashion system is built on overproduction and overconsumption. Americans buy far more clothing than they did a generation ago, much of it lower quality and designed for short-term trends rather than long-term use.
About 5 billion pounds of customer returns are landfilled in the U.S. every year.
Many people assume recycling will solve this problem. In time, it should play a bigger role. Unfortunately, less than 1% of collected textiles are recycled back into fibers for remanufacturing, and fiber-to-fiber recycling remains expensive, chemically intensive and difficult to scale.
That means California can’t recycle its way out of the textile crisis yet. What California can do is build a stronger system for collecting clothing and keeping usable textiles in circulation longer.
Senate Bill 707, also known as the Responsible Textile Recovery Act of 2024, gives California the framework. The law shifts the cost of managing end-of-life textiles away from taxpayers and onto the producers that put these products on the market.
That basic principle of extended producer responsibility has already proven effective in other sectors. Textiles are long overdue for the same accountability.
Done well, this law could divert hundreds of thousands of tons of clothing from landfills, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and creating 1,000 to 2,500 green sector jobs in California.
But the law will fall short if the state ignores one of the most practical, scalable tools already available: clothing collection bins.
Collection bins are one of the easiest, lowest-friction ways for people to part with unwanted clothing. They’re available around the clock, require no appointment and meet people where they already are, at shopping centers, supermarkets and other familiar locations.
People want to do the right thing with unwanted clothes. But it has to be convenient and accessible. If we make it hard for people to donate or reuse clothing, more of it will end up in the trash.
Many local collection rules in California were written before recycling became a priority. Zoning restrictions, permit costs, parcel-based limits and inconsistent municipal regulations are quietly choking the expansion of the collection infrastructure. In places such as downtown Los Angeles, Oakland and Irvine, the rules are so restrictive textile collection can only happen on private land.
In our research, collectors operating across California estimated they could increase collection volumes by 50% to 75% if these regulatory barriers were eased. That could make the difference between SB 707 becoming a working system or a missed opportunity.
California is at a pivotal moment. The state’s textile recovery system is being designed in practice, not just in theory. New regulations will need to be created and implemented.
The clothes on our backs will one day be part of California’s waste problem. They can also be part of its climate solution. The fix is within reach, but only if we scale up the infrastructure to support it.
