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America's clothing waste problem may be bigger than new recycling technology can handle on its own.
At a textile innovation summit in San Diego, one executive argued that the more immediate answer is not better technology, but instead keeping wearable garments in use for longer so people spend less and fewer clothes are thrown away.
What's happening?
According to 2024 data from Garson & Shaw, Americans discard 10.4 billion wearable garments each year, or roughly 4,000 truckloads every week.
In an opinion piece for Women's Wear Daily, Lisa Jepsen, CEO of Garson & Shaw LLC, emphasized that figure after serving as a judge at the Textile Recovery Summit's pitch competition alongside leaders from product stewardship, investing, and advanced manufacturing.
The startups she evaluated pitched repair services, faster sorting technology, and fiber-to-fiber recycling solutions. But Jepsen argued that too much faith is being placed in "end-of-life innovation" to address what she called an "upstream problem of overproduction and overconsumption."
In her view, even highly advanced recycling tools will struggle if brands keep making more clothing than repair and recovery systems can absorb. She also noted that California's volume of discarded clothing already exceeds existing repair and recycling capacity.
Why does it matter?
The case for reusing clothing is financial as well as environmental. Jepsen said secondhand markets around the world provide affordable clothing for families that need low-cost options.
In Guatemala, for example, she noted that used clothing sells for less than one-quarter of the price of new clothing imports. In El Salvador, secondhand garments account for nearly one-third of all clothing imports, and in a study of more than 21 million garments, 99.6% sold for under $15, with $3 as the most common price.
She also said reuse has sizable economic benefits in the U.S., where the secondhand clothing sector supports an estimated 342,000 jobs, compared with fewer than 90,000 in domestic apparel manufacturing. The article further cited a USAgain report finding that better collection systems and stronger reuse channels could create thousands of green jobs while lowering pollution.
Overall, keeping clothes in use longer can help consumers save money, support jobs, and reduce demand for resource-intensive new production.
What's being done?
Jepsen highlighted summit pitches from Alternew, Fibarcode, IntheLoopAi, and winner Intrinsic Advanced Materials, which covered repair, sorting, and recycling. Even so, she said the key infrastructure is not something futuristic but the simpler work of reuse. That means collecting wearable clothing, repairing it, reselling it, and making it easier to keep garments circulating instead of discarding them.
She also urged brands and policymakers to measure circularity by whether it prevents waste, extends product life, designs clothing for longevity and reuse, and builds collection systems that support reuse globally — rather than focusing only on what happens once clothing becomes waste.
"Real textile circularity starts upstream: producing less, producing better, and then keeping clothing in use longer," Jepsen concluded. Otherwise, she warned, "We cannot innovate our way out of infinite growth in clothing volume."
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