Fast fashion brings in fast cash.

There are about 113 million metric tons of textiles produced every year in the US.

The fashion market revenue was about $365 billion.

So that kind of gives an indicator of like how huge that market is.

One organization helping people and businesses rethink waste is Homeboy Industries, long known for transforming the lives of the formerly incarcerated.

They officially launched Homeboy Threads in 2023, a certified social enterprise offering ways to reuse and recycle clothing and textiles.

We started getting approached more by companies that were asking us if we could do anything with textiles or help them out with apparel.

That would often requires paying more than it cost to landfill things to recycle them.

So we started a little bit of a pilot project.

One of the fun parts about the job, too, I think, is finding new channels for things.

Right.

Our first step we have a really skilled group of people working in triage who basically get a pallet of a ton of things that are all mixed together, usually, and then designate if that item should be resold, donated or recycled down, cycled from there.

We have a team that works to separate different fiber type and then aggregates that material, bales it, and prepares it to send downstream to recyclers.

Every step in the process we're doing as much as possible to keep apparel and items out of landfill.

Last year, we processed about 1 million pounds of material.

In terms of this being a good working model.

What we're really good at is the sortation process and making the correct decisions on where items should go so that we can channel them to their best use.

Clothes go through.

At first they come off the pallet.

We separate them from wholesale donation recyclable.

So e-commerce.

So this is E-com.

After we're done quality control we come here, put them on these wooden hangers right here and we send them to be listed.

Once we finish, that process is sent to be photographed.

I view the item as a customer would.

When I receive the item, I want the item to be the way that it says.

I hear in the descriptions what it is, the size, the color, the brand.

These are all the little details that we want to make sure that we have in here.

That way we know the customer is satisfied at the end of the day with the product that they received.

The business right now is really about helping brands and manufacturers reduce their footprint and their environmental impact by increasing the amount of recycling and reuse of their products.

It's estimated that approximately 15% of clothing and other textiles are currently reused, but 95% of materials used in clothing and textiles can be recycled from zippers and buttons to even certain fabrics.

We might just need to look at that cardigan differently.

How do you influence the manufacturers in the brand and the retailers?

And the buyers, to get to a point where we embrace circularity?

That's the million dollar question.