Getting Scrappy About Waste

While the environmental impacts of the fashion and apparel industries are plenty, there may be none more visible than the towering mountains of waste associated with the garment lifecycle. According to a report by the Ellen McCarthy Foundation, one garbage truck of textiles is sent to the landfill every second around the world, adding up to more than 17 million tons of textiles a year sent to landfills in the United States alone.¹ ² While they sit in landfills and degrade slowly over hundreds of years, these massive piles of textile waste leach chemicals into the environment, release the potent greenhouse gas methane, and shed microplastics into the water we drink and air we breathe.³ Beyond the environmental impact, this waste represents an economic loss of billions of dollars’ worth of material.

Excess Inventory

A vast majority of this waste is generated after a piece has already been produced as brands discard excess inventory and consumers throw out unwanted clothing. We’ll tackle the issues contributing to these actions (fast fashion, lack of extended producer responsibilities, lack of recycling infrastructure, overproduction, etc.) and the ways ISAIC is trying to address them (on-demand manufacturing models, connected garments, consumer education, etc.) in a future blog post.

 Scraps

The remaining textile waste is typically a result of design and production processes. Designers and brands rely on complex shapes and sizes of fabric to create clothes. In a cut and sew manufacturing facility, like ISAIC, patterns generated from a designer are typically sent to the cutter where they are then cut out of fabric into specified 2-D shapes. The scraps that result from these cuttings (the white space in the image above) cannot generally be used for other production and are thus considered waste. It is estimated that around 10-15% of all fabric used for textiles and garment production is wasted during the cutting process.⁴ Imagine the equivalent of 1 in every 10 pieces of clothing in your closet as the waste created by scraps.

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At ISAIC, we’re dedicated to combatting this type of production waste. Using advanced cutting machinery and software, ISAIC is optimizing yield percentages of fabric to minimize inefficiencies and decrease waste production at the source. Until zero waste designs are more widespread, however, ISAIC will unavoidably be creating scrap when cutting complex rounded shapes out of rectangular rolls of fabric⁵ but are working to find as many alternatives to the landfill as possible. Clients like Turtle Gloves retrieve their scraps from ISAIC to use as filling for thermal dog beds they create from upcycled material for donation to veterans and their medical service dogs. For other scraps, we donate larger pieces to Arts and Scraps, a local community organization that supports makers and creatives as well as educational programming around recycling. For smaller scrap pieces, we reserve a portion for continued staff training on printing, embroidery, cutting, and stitching techniques. We are also beginning to evaluate contracting textile recycling services that ensure scraps are thoughtfully reused or repurposed. We recognize that production related waste is our largest waste stream, and one we are keen on actively working towards reducing and taking responsible actions over.

Joe Lybik is a native Midwesterner, a passionate Detroit Tigers fan, and graduate from Yale University where he studied Environmental Engineering. Connect with him on LinkedIn

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¹ http://changingmarkets.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/FOSSIL-FASHION_Web-compressed.pdf
² https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/textiles-material-specific-data
³ https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/new-study-reveals-higher-microplastics-in-london-air-compared-to-other-cities
⁴ https://www.academia.edu/3762020/From_15_to_0_Investigating_the_creation_of_fashion_without_the_creation_of_fabric_waste
⁵ https://www.commonobjective.co/article/design-lessons-in-zero-waste

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