“[Other schemes] take the product, pick the best, find a way to resell those, and then bundle everything else as mixed rags and ship it offshore,” says Trashie founder and CEO Kristy Caylor, who also founded zero-waste fashion brand, For Days, and ethical luxury retailer, Maiyet. “For us, it gets sorted into 253 grades onshore. Every item might be touched seven times before it finds a grade, which means we can retain the highest value for the most products.”

The partner facility which carries out all sorting was, according to Caylor, “about 80% of the way there,” already equipped with a “very precise” grading system. This means that Trashie isn’t necessarily the only service with well-sorted and graded goods. However, to meet Trashie’s expectations, the facility established a designated area for the company, adding extra pre-sorts, first sorts, and fiber-based sorts to its process. “The [grades are] really specific,” says Caylor. “They are quilted coats [sorted into] children’s size small and medium going to one person… They are T-shirts, quality 7, 100% cotton, going to farmers. It’s the best process we can build today.”

Trashie uses clips of workers picking through mountains of textile waste at its grading facility and footage of clothing strewn across shorelines to drive home the importance of managing discarded clothing properly. But is its system really better equipped to avoid clothes ending up in landfills across the globe compared to other take-back schemes?

Caylor says about 40% of what’s received by Trashie stays in the U.S., including all recycling. Clothes in wearable condition are earmarked for reuse, while damaged, worn-out items are recycled or downcycled—turned into products like industrial rags, insulation, or carpet padding. Trashie also works directly with several fiber-to-fiber recyclers, undertaking sorting tests and pilots. The company states that approximately 74% of collected clothing goes for reuse, that between 15% and 22% goes to fiber recycling (including downcycling), and that around 5% to 6% is marked as waste, which is landfilled onshore in the U.S.

Trashie’s founder emphasizes the urgency of high-level sorting and grading in order to responsibly syphon the right items into the right waste streams, but Liz Ricketts, cofounder and director of The Or Foundation, argues better sorting alone isn’t the solution. The Or Foundation operates within the ecosystem of Kantamanto in Accra, Ghana, a secondhand clothing market where around 40% of what arrives every week goes unsold and leaves as waste (in fact, somewhere between 4% and 5% is considered waste in every single bale of garments).

While clothing collected by Trashie may not necessarily end up at Kantamanto, the market has become emblematic of the flaws of the broader global secondhand export system. The scale of imported waste into the country from the Global North is having catastrophic effects on local ecosystems, therefore Ricketts is doubtful that tweaks to the existing system—even those that seek to be best in class in transparency and grading as Trashie does—can affect major change.

“The clothing arriving in Ghana is already pre-sorted,” Ricketts tells Atmos. “The problem is the lowering quality of clothing that has been produced over the last 20 years in terms of materials, fit, and construction, which has the whole secondhand supply chain fighting over 10% of the clothing that currently enters the global supply chain.”

On its Stop Waste Colonialism site, The Or Foundation argues that “even better sorted clothing will be disposed of eventually, if not right away, so exporting excess to receiver countries that lack waste management systems comparable to those of the sender countries is never going to end well.” However, it’s worth noting that Ricketts says a ban on waste imports is not the answer, and calls for reduced production volumes and a globally accountable EPR system, which directs funds to receiving communities to finance local circularity efforts.

Trashie takes a “matchmaking approach” to exportation, sending “warm coats to eastern Europe in the winter, beat up T-shirts to field workers in Southeast Asia, and sweaters to South America in [the U.S.’s] summertime,” according to the company’s website. What doesn’t stay in the U.S.—the country simply can’t absorb it all, according to Caylor—is exported to countries including Latvia, Ecuador, Cambodia, Dubai, and Mexico.

Each bale is tracked by what Trashie calls a “best-in-class” data system. Currently, it shares tracking data with corporate partners who offer the Take Back Bag to their customers, but it doesn’t yet have an exact date for launching a customer-facing equivalent.

Both the tracking process and the “90% kept out of landfill” figure apply until items are received at the other end. In other words: if a garment is discarded as soon as it’s been rehomed through Trashie’s scheme, it would still count towards the “90% kept out of landfill” figure in the company’s eyes.  However, to avoid such waste scenarios further downstream, Trashie says it puts buyer agreements in place, and asks receivers to validate a garment’s or bale’s next use. In fact, Caylor demonstrates how close to the tracking process she is when she discusses how some self-claimed recyclers in the system were, it turned out, reusing the clothes instead.

“Everyone’s trying to find some margin in all of it, so we require agreements for materials and garments,” she says. It’s clear Trashie isn’t running an anonymized, low visibility system, but the reality is that there are limitations to Trashie’s oversight as there are with any retailer or exporter, hence the upcoming introduction of “digital product passports” in the EU to fill the glaring information gap and track where products end up. Once an item has made its way into the hands of the third or fourth person along the chain, it’s almost impossible to say precisely where it will end up.

 

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Ricketts describes the secondhand clothing trade as “supply driven,” meaning exporters can only send clothing that citizens have chosen to donate or discard, while Caylor says there is demand given that so much of the world’s population wears used clothing exclusively. “You just have to get the right product and the right package to the right person,” Caylor says.

It’s clear Trashie aims to inhabit a more responsible, precise corner of the export market, aiming not to overburden but to serve demand. But as long as the oversupply of low value products remains a problem, those in receiver markets who suffer from the burden of tonnes of clothing cast offs will likely not look upon exporters—whatever their intentions—as the answer.

Caylor doesn’t shy away from the realities of today’s fashion model. “As an industry, we’re still in a place where people are making so many products with so many poor materials and we’re throwing them in the trash,” she says. “I just can’t find the market mechanism for slowing down this consumption pattern. As long as there’s a five-dollar bikini, somebody’s going to buy it. So, how do we become a facilitator for a collection mechanism that resonates with consumers and provides some value?”

Some of Trashie’s social media influencer partnerships perfectly illustrate the issue in hand. One content creator posted a video stating “POV: you order outfits for every vacation” as the reason she needs a Take Back Bag, while another claimed she needs to clean out her closet because she wants to buy more stuff for an upcoming trip. “That’s girl maths,” she says.

In some cases, Trashie’s Take Back Bag has been used by some of the influencers  as a get-out-of-jail-free card for overconsumption. Fashion psychologist Dr Dion Terrelonge refers to it as moral offsetting. “It absolves the person from engaging in these behaviors that are not the most moral or ethical,” she says. “They can tell themselves [shopping is] OK because they’re recycling with Trashie.” Though Trashie may provide temporary emotional distance from wasteful behavior, and ease feelings of guilt around shopping, Terrelonge says guilt could also be a step change towards more responsible behavior.

 

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But TrashieCash can also have a part to play. Getting $20 off more new clothes or a free beauty product in return for sending sometimes barely worn clothes to be resold or recycled ostensibly fuels yet more consumption. However, Terrelonge explains how the financial incentive could nudge positive behavior change. “If a person sees making a decision as leading to a favorable outcome for themselves, the brain’s reward center is going to say, ‘Yes let’s do that,’” she says. “If you are a person who is motivated by rewards it will influence you to make more pro-social decisions.”

Once an individual starts making those decisions and getting positive reinforcement, healthier habits could build over time. This could explain why experience-based rewards like cinema tickets, money off grocery shopping, or discounts on takeout food are popular incentives, according to Caylor. Or it could be, as Terrelonge suggests, that these rewards represent the better deal that seasoned consumers are inclined to look for.

Any reduction in consumption is positive, but for meaningful change to happen the needle must firmly swing in the direction of buying less every single day for consumers, particularly those in higher and middle income countries. The U.S., where Trashie operates, has the third highest carbon footprint for fashion consumption, according to the Hot or Cool Institute.

Though the company posts startling facts about waste and overconsumption to shock people into action, the obvious antidote—drastically slashing production and consumption levels to avoid generating clothing waste in the first place—isn’t always prevalent. In fact, when Trashie users are creating content about using Take Bag Backs as a mechanism to consume even more, it’s arguable that the exact opposite is being communicated. Heavy reliance on the phrase ‘recycling’ poses issues too. To the majority who are unversed in the messy reality of the global secondhand market, it’s a moral hazard, painting a picture that used clothing slots neatly into a well-oiled circular system, therefore acting as a greenlight for continuous consumption because the risks and consequences lie elsewhere.

In Caylor’s vision of utopia, all fashion would be made with regenerative materials. Clothing could be collected and recirculated simply. But today, the largely plastic-based, high volume model prevails, and so clean-up efforts such as Trashie’s remain necessary, though they don’t all have to follow the same model.

Sewing and production shop, Suay, has remade and recirculated six million pounds of textiles within the space of a few years and is on track to reuse 80 million pounds of textiles over the next five—and everything is handled locally. At its cavernous Los Angeles studio, Suay, which is creating a lab and fellowship programme to teach upcycling skills to garment workers, makes upcycled garments and linens, runs community dye baths, and offers custom studio production services for individuals and brands.

It also has a recycling scheme: the Suay It Forward bag that allows citizens to send their unwanted garments to the factory, and which, like Trashie’s, costs $20. In return, customers get $20 in Suay credit, another example of the necessity of incentivizing even when it seems counterintuitive.

While Trashie is a facilitator, Suay is 100% vertically integrated and undertakes all remaking and recycling at its HQ with the goal of converting to a worker-owned model. “It’s about investing in actual humans that are capable of being the solution to the clean-up that our planet so desperately needs,” says CEO and cofounder Lindsay Rose Medoff.

The company has a mail-in rate of around 40%, meaning the majority of service users stop by Suay, and are able to see the inner workings of a circular fashion model and the skilled manual laborers who undertake the work.

“When you shop with Suay, believe in Suay, or put your dollars towards Suay, you’re actually turning the dial into something that is going to make change for future generations,” says Medoff. “You’re not just getting rid of something; you’re an active participant changing a system that is super broken.”