Earlier this month, I had a front-row seat to the future of textile recovery on the Innovation Stage at the Textile Recovery Summit in San Diego. I served as one of the judges alongside leaders from product stewardship, investment, and advanced manufacturing.
The pitch competition was a compressed version of the real world, where founders had minutes to persuade judges that their solution can transform a system that currently sends enormous volumes of textiles to landfill, while brands face mounting pressure to prove progress.
Pitch after pitch offered new ways to handle the mounting tide of discarded clothing: platforms to scale repair, technologies to sort faster, systems to enable fibre-to-fibre recycling. The ingenuity is real, and pitches from Alternew, Fibarcode, IntheLoopAi, and the eventual winner, Intrinsic Advanced Materials, were very impressive. But from the judge’s table, one truth is hard to ignore: we are asking “end-of-life innovation” to fix what is fundamentally an upstream problem of overproduction and overconsumption.
U.S. consumers throw away 10.4 billion items of wearable clothing each year, around 4,000 truckloads per week, according to 2024 data from Garson & Shaw. No matter how compelling a pitch sounds, any solution needs to understand the challenges that these vast volumes of items bring. The volumes of textiles being sent to landfills in states like California far outpace repair projects and recycling innovation efforts.
That’s why the most important circular infrastructure will not depend on future technologies. It’s reusing what we have today—the systems that keep wearable clothing in circulation and make recovery economically viable.
Reuse is a major engine of U.S. employment. The secondhand clothing sector supports an estimated 342,000 U.S. jobs, compared with under 90,000 in U.S. apparel manufacturing. In other words, the “reuse economy” is not marginal; it is one of the largest job-generators in the American clothing value chain. In California, a recent report by the collector USAgain shows that improved collection infrastructure and greater diversion of second-hand clothing for reuse would create thousands of green jobs and reduce emissions.
And reuse is global for a reason: it meets basic needs at price points that new clothing often cannot. If it did, it could only be cheap ultra-fast fashion clothing at the expense of the environment. In Guatemala, second-hand clothing is more than four times cheaper than new clothing imports. In 2023, Guatemala imported 131 million kg of used clothing under Harmonized System code 6309, and 98.6 percent of all its used clothing imports came from the U.S.
In El Salvador, due to consumer demand, secondhand clothing now accounts for nearly one-third of all clothing imports. Across 21+ million garments observed in a recent study of used clothing in the country, 99.6 percent sold for under $15, with $3 being the most common price point. That is what affordability looks like in practice.
Discussions about downstream waste in relation to the secondhand clothes trade deserve serious attention. But the response has to be evidence-based, not driven by assumptions that collapse the very channel that keeps clothing in circulation for longer while sustaining green jobs, providing affordable clothing to low-income families, and replacing the need for resource-intensive new clothing production.
Several studies of used clothing imports show that waste is usually below 5 percent, with findings from our recent report on Guatemala indicating textile waste percentages between 9.2 percent and 11.8 percent in unsorted bales, dropping to around 5 percent in sorted streams. And importantly, many importers prefer unsorted “ropa cruda” because it supports local sorting, local jobs, and pricing that works for local demand. A blunt push for mandatory pre-export sorting may sound like “better control,” but it can also shift value and employment away from recipient countries without meaningfully improving outcomes.
The Innovation Stage left me optimistic about creativity, but also convinced that we are still avoiding the central question. Yes, we need better repair pathways and better recycling technology over time. But those tools cannot carry the weight of the entire system if the industry keeps flooding recovery pipelines faster than any solution can scale. We cannot innovate our way out of infinite growth in clothing volume.
If brands and policymakers want circularity that is credible at scale, they should prioritize measures that reduce waste and keep clothing in use longer, design for longevity and reuse, build collection infrastructure that enables global reuse, and ensure that EPR success is measured against waste prevention and longer product lifetimes.
Real textile circularity starts upstream: producing less, producing better, and then keeping clothing in use longer, through robust reuse systems that already operate at scale. Innovation matters. But without a serious commitment to address overproduction and overconsumption, it will never be enough.
Lisa Jepsen is CEO of Garson & Shaw LLC, a global leader in the secondhand clothing trade, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. Lisa’s lifelong commitment to reuse and sustainability began in childhood out of necessity, wearing clothes handed down or creatively repurposed, including her first dress, crafted from her mother’s wedding gown, itself made from World War II parachute nylon.
In the 1970s, whilst working as a teacher, Lisa organizedclothing drives with her students and sold donated garments at charity flea markets to support development aid in Southern Africa. This experience laid the foundation for a lifelong career dedicated to promoting clothing reuse. Lisa began working full-time in the secondhand clothing sector in 1994, initially in Poland and later in the Netherlands, supplying wholesalers in both Eastern Europe and Africa. In the late 1990s, Lisa co-founded Garson & Shaw Ltd in the UK, which would later evolve into Garson and Shaw LLC in the U.S.
With over 25 years of leadership in the industry, Lisa remains a passionate advocate for reuse and a champion of circular solutions worldwide.