‘Overwhelming': what happens to 50,000lb of extra LA wildfire clothing donations?
At Suay Sew Shop in Los Angeles's arts district, mounds of clothes are piled high in a warehouse. The T-shirts, socks, jackets and denim are surplus donations from the LA wildfires that community groups across the city were unable to distribute because they had too much already, or because the items were dirty, damaged or poorly made.
Instead of letting the clothes go to a landfill, where they can cause a host of environmental problems, Suay has rescued 50,000lbs of textiles so they can be cleaned, sorted and upcycled by professional designers and sewers. Since LA currently has no permanent textile recycling or collection, it's up to groups like Suay to save as many textiles as possible before they get dumped or exported.
'To see the overwhelming influx of textiles donations here in Los Angeles in response to the devastating wildfires just shows how the current systems in place have failed us all,' said Suay's co-founder and CEO Lindsay Rose Medoff. 'We have to draw the connections to our everyday consumption and disposal habits. Until we draw these connections, the same overproduction that is impacting our climate and resulting in these disasters will continue to strengthen.'
Experts say a surge in donations can actually impede relief efforts since volunteers have to handle sudden influxes of clothing when they are unwearable or unwanted. Without a climate-informed approach, well-intentioned donations are likely to end up in landfills or polluting deserts and beaches in other parts of the world. A leading industrial polluter, the fashion industry is responsible for about 10% of global carbon emissions, and the rise of 'fast fashion', cheap garments that are only worn a few times, is a major contributor to our environmental crisis.
Suay expects to take on additional donations in the coming weeks as other centers in the Los Angeles area continue shutting down, and say they will find a way to upcycle them into the fire aid relief support they were meant for. Suay was among the first to mobilize, creating a free store for LA fire victims that features stylish clothing and textiles that allow people to replace lost items with dignity. It's open daily and located upstairs from their retail shop, which sells Suay's upcycled fashion and home goods, from mini mesh tote bags made from old sports jerseys to oven mitts remade from flannel and denim, and one-of-a-kind dresses fashioned from vintage T-shirts.
They are asking people to support fire victims by sponsoring a $20 Suay It Forward bag of clothes to be sorted, donated and upcycled into free materials for fire victims and other members of the community in need.
Since 2017, Suay has taken in enormous volumes of clothing and upcycled unused textiles into remade apparel and home goods, diverting more than 4m lbs of textiles from landfills in the process. Their 'zero-landfill, zero-export system' means excess donations are handled responsibly.
'One of the biggest impacts stemming from excess donations is the reappearance of these textiles in developing countries,' said Jessica Kosak, who teaches courses on sustainable systems in fashion at ASU FIDM. 'They don't necessarily have the waste infrastructure we have here in the US, and they can't effectively dispose of these materials, so the result is things end up in waterways, on beaches and in our oceans and that contributes to pollution overall.'
A disturbing 85% of all textiles end up in landfills where they emit methane gas and leach chemicals and dyes into our soil and groundwater. Only about 15% of clothing and other textiles gets reused, even though an estimated 95% of the materials such as fabrics, yarns, fibers and buttons are recyclable. In 2021, approximately 1.2m tonnes of textiles were thrown out in California alone. Last year, the state passed a first-in-the-country textile recycling bill that puts the onus on brands to implement and fund a statewide reuse, repair and recycling program for their products, but it won't be operational until 2028.
'I think disasters like these bring out the best and the worst of our systems, which are really not designed for this volume of any particular product,' said Dr Joanne Brasch, director of advocacy for the non-profit California Product Stewardship Council (CPSC), who co-sponsored the state's Responsible Textile Recovery Act.
But there are things the state can do, sustainability advocates say: host clothing swap opportunities and provide public workshops on how to properly clean and mend clothes so people can learn about maintaining the value of our apparel.
Rather than donating more clothes for fire victims, experts say to consider selling wearable pieces on platforms such as Depop, Poshmark, ThredUp or eBay and give the proceeds to fire victims. Peer-to-peer reselling apps help ensure the item retains its value because a seller is more likely to clean the piece or make any needed repairs and give it the best chance possible to be resold.
Related: Clothes, toiletries – and a free stylist: the LA teen creating a space for peers amid the fires
'You're attaching value even if you're selling a fast fashion item for $10,' said ASU FIDM's Kosak. 'When someone purchases something off one of those platforms, they're going to value it more because they had to go searching for it.' Not everyone has time to sell clothing via an app or digital platform, but taking that mindset of cleaning and repairing any items and treating textiles in a way that you want to receive them goes a long way in ensuring our clothes can go on.
Most of the people who donated apparel for fire victims likely did so with good intentions for their clothing to be reused, while others use disaster as a chance to offload items they didn't want anymore.
But Suay, which has built a digital community of more than 500,000 people on Instagram, and other like-minded activists, are helping more people wake up to the serious impacts of overproduction, overconsumption and lack of infrastructure to handle textile waste responsibly.
'This is a pivotal moment in understanding the volume, our broken waste management for this product and understanding that no one wants a lot of the stuff in your closet,' said CPSC's Brasch. 'One of the easier things individuals can do to relieve the burden of someone else having to do it.'
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Yahoo
25-03-2025
- Yahoo
The Or Foundation, Suay Partner to Tackle Textile Waste in Ghana, L.A.
It's the collaboration the fashion industry didn't know it needed. Forged in the heat of not one but two cataclysmic fires, seven days and 7,600 miles apart, the partnership between The Or Foundation in Ghana and Suay Sew Shop in Los Angeles seeks to address what the organizations describe as the 'disaster after the disasters': the inundation of castoff clothing from well-meaning donors that so overwhelmed California's aid centers that they spilled into the streets, and the destruction of critical infrastructure in Accra's Kantamanto Market that has backed up a major pipeline for the global North's unwanted garments, leaving them with few other places to go. More from Sourcing Journal California's Organized Retail Crime Task Force Recovered $13.5M in Stolen Merchandise Last Year Pact Group and BlockTexx Partner on Fashion Recycling in Australia Circ Raises $25M in Oversubscribed Round led by Taranis While Liz Ricketts, executive director of The Or Foundation and Lindsay Rose Medoff, CEO of Suay, have known each other for years—'pre-Covid,' Ricketts offered—their extended distance and busy schedules made it challenging for their teams to physically connect. When the fires happened, throwing into the sharpest of relief their shared reality of too much textile waste and not enough outlets to manage it responsibly, they realized this had to get together. And quickly. On Sunday, the two organizations came together in Suay's downtown Los Angeles retail shop and production facility to announce '100,000 Bags for Climate Change,' complete with an installation of the snarled clothing 'tentacles' that have become an indelible part of Accra's coastlines. The initiative is both a way to tackle 120,000 pounds of so-called 'disaster relief' clothing that Medoff and her crew have picked up over the past three months and a call to action to fund what she and Ricketts say must be a 'systems change' in textile recirculation based on community-centered solutions. The climate change part is self-evident: Fashion overproduction is part of the reason rising temperatures are powering extreme weather events that increase the risk of wildfires. 'Most people were surprised to see the tentacles in person, realizing that fast fashion's harm isn't just what's visible it's also what's invisible: the chemicals, harmful dyes, polyester and the long-term damage to our bodies,' said Nutifafa Mensah, peer education lead at The Or Foundation, who flew to Los Angeles for the event. 'I hope people now see that this isn't just Ghana's problem. Fast fashion is a global health hazard that affects all of us before it even reaches Kantamanto. No one is isolated from it.' Money remains tight for The Or Foundation, which has distributed $1.5 million in emergency relief to the nearly 10,000 vendors who saw their livelihoods burned to ashes at the start of the new year. But it's still struggling to raise cash to rebuild Kantamanto with essential fire safety measures while continuing to fund programs involving textile waste diversion, skills training and financial education, beach monitoring and cleanups and chiropractic services for the female head porters known as kayayei. So far, only Vestiaire Collective, Debrand, Puma and eBay along with a collective of Belgian brands that include Bel & Bo, Claes Retail Group, e5 Fashion, Noterman Fashion, Pluto, Torfs and Xandre, have contributed, in stark contrast to the outpouring of generosity—many times over the $5 million Ricketts estimates will resurrect the marketplace—from the likes of Nike, Gap Inc., the Walt Disney Co. and Target for restoring burned-out neighborhoods in the Altadena, Pacific Palisades and Pasadena areas. That's where Suay hopes to come in. Sponsoring a 20-pound bag for its 'Suay It Forward' textile-recycling platform costs $20; 100,000 of these bags would help it raise $2 million, split evenly between Suay and The Or Foundation to wrestle with the problem of textile overflow on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The two organizations will also be collaborating to create a 'Textiles aren't Trash' capsule collection, pieced together from the donation surplus that Suay has absorbed, as well as conducting clothing 'sort-a-thons,' where they'll invite members of the community to tally which brands are showing up most often in Los Angeles' clothing waste, similar to the 'Tag Ur It' audits that The Or Foundation has been conducting in Ghana. 'It's important for organizations like Suay in L.A. to show solidarity with Kantamanto because the two communities may be thousands of miles apart geographically but the systemic monster that is overproduction and overconsumption we fight against knows no bounds,' said Sammy Oteng, senior community engagement manager at The Or Foundation. 'This is why Suay has hundreds of thousands of pounds of clothes nobody wants sitting in storage, and on the other hand, the Kantamanto community continue to fall deeper in debt working to recirculate the global North's excess while Accra beaches are being taken over by clothing tentacles.' For Medoff, watching Los Angeles relate to clothing in the wake of the fires has been an education in and of itself. 'It was interesting to see the conversation continue to develop from, 'We need a bunch of textiles' to 'These textiles aren't right; there's too much' or 'They're not good enough,'' she said. 'And this is the conversation that is happening daily in Ghana and other places where they're getting bombarded by textile waste.' For months, Suay's phone was ringing off its hook. There's an intrinsic impulse for people to empty their closets when disaster strikes, even though it might be more prudent—and expedient, human labor-wise—to fork out cash. 'People were calling us with, like, semi-trucks: 'I'm coming from Texas, I'm coming from Reno, I have a truck full of clothes to drop off,'' Medoff said. 'And so you see humanity like rising to the occasion and feeling overwhelmed by wanting to help, but also we have no organized disaster relief when it comes to clothing. And it is a disaster, in terms of clothing and textile waste, which is what Liz and her team deals with on a daily basis.' With the passing of California's extended producer responsibility bill for textiles, there's a shot at doing things differently, Ricketts said. But that will also depend on whether the Golden State follows the French model of 'essentially subsidizing sorting for export' or if it's going to build the infrastructure necessary to ensure that organizations like Suay have the support to recirculate textiles locally. 'So hopefully this partnership then provides a model, a case study, that we can speak to to say, 'This is why money should be going to repair,'' she said. 'Money should be going to upcycling. Money should be going to taking clothing that we know has very low value and turning it into something of higher value. Otherwise, it's always going to be a mass amount of low-value products and the only outlet is going to be to export it. You can't just be putting money into sorting; you have to be putting money into added-value services here in California and elsewhere. And it's not going to happen overnight.'
Yahoo
29-01-2025
- Yahoo
L.A. and Kantamanto: 2 Fires, 2 Responses, 1 Common Problem
The crumpled sprawls of clothing, used and unwanted, wound along the curbs and occasionally spilled into the streets. They were the regurgitated contents of multiple closets: denim cutoffs, printed blouses, spaghetti-strap dresses, far too many T-shirts to count. It's a common enough sight in poorer nations like Chile, Ghana or Kenya that have become the 'away' people talk about when they discard things they no longer wish to wear. The castoffs have resulted in towering, often rotting, monuments to overconsumption that have not so much overtaken the landscape as become an indelible part of it. More from Sourcing Journal What's in Frank & Eileen's First Impact Report? Rooted in Community, Trinidad3 Gives to Those Affected by California Fires The Circular Economy Demands Reformed Trade Codes, Cambridge Reports While the garments that hugged thoroughfares with names like Washington Blvd. and Summit Ave. in the Southern California city of Pasadena hadn't achieved that state or scale quite yet, the parallels still struck Lindsay Rose Medoff as she stood, heartbroken, amid one of the deluges on a smoky afternoon. There would be many more like it. This is what happens when the system breaks down, she said, and when well-intentioned donations for those displaced by the recent wildfires become unmanageable. Medoff is CEO of Suay Sew Shop, a community-centered textile remanufacturer in downtown Los Angeles that quickly set up a 'Free Store for Fire Relief' when wind-swept conflagrations blazed through 27,000 acres, the size of almost 20,000 football fields. Since 2017, its circular textiles program, dubbed 'Suay It Forward,' has diverted more than 4 million pounds of textiles from landfills by upcycling them into apparel and home goods. A testament to creativity and tenacity, Suay's retail shop touts everything from patchwork jackets cobbled together from workwear uniforms to mesh produce bags derived from old sports jerseys. The entire operation is underpinned by a cavernous warehouse of tossed materials across the street just waiting to be reincarnated. It's difficult to say where the abandoned clothes came from, though overwhelmed donation drop-off sites could be a likely source, particularly now that many are winding up. Or maybe people have been dumping their contributions on the streets, hoping someone will be able to use them, though the chances of that are pretty slim. 'It's no one's fault; I think a lot of people genuinely wanted to help and jumped into action,' said Medoff, who prefers not to use the d-word. 'I think it started off as something that was genuine and that just became incredibly overwhelming because no one needed, by far, that amount of clothing.' In the span of a few days, Team Suay has picked up 50,000 pounds of clothing in a steady succession of rented trucks. There's an irony in the fact that the fashion industry's untethered churn is partly to blame for the soaring greenhouse gas emissions that are accelerating climate change and, therefore, supercharging extreme weather events like hotter and hungrier fires. And there's always more where that came from. 'We are getting calls, emails, DMs every day to take on more,' she said. 'We're just so broken as consumers. This abundance of waste highlights a global failure to reckon with our overproduction and consumption habits.' Half a world away in the Ghanaian capital of Accra, on a similar afternoon, Liz Ricketts, co-founder and executive director of The Or Foundation, was also contemplating fire and used garments. In the early hours of Jan. 2, two weeks before the fires in Los Angeles broke out, an inferno of unknown origin tore through Kantamanto Market, West Africa's largest secondhand clothing marketplace. Two people have died, and eight acres of stalls—the equivalent of 60 percent of the market's retail-facing side—burned to the ground. More than 10,000 vendors have witnessed their livelihoods literally go up in smoke. It's difficult to put an exact number to the damage, but Ricketts, whose organization works with the Kantamanto community to find solutions for textile waste, estimates that tens of millions of dollars worth of equipment, infrastructure, clothing bales and other supplies were lost in the blaze. Ghana is the world's largest importer of used clothing. Kantamanto alone, she said, spends $300 million on bales every year, over half of which is paid to exporters in the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe. But vendors typically purchase bales sight unseen. And of the 15 million garments that enter Kantamanto every week, a contested 40 percent also leave as garbage because they're too stained or damaged to resell. This is the end of the line: Those that aren't landfilled or incinerated in ad-hoc burn sites go on to pollute Accra's streets, beaches and waterways. They often end up in the ocean, where they're churned up by the waves and disgorged along the coast in grotesque tangled masses, known colloquially as 'tentacles,' that sometimes have to be chiseled out from the sand. That volunteers at Los Angeles clothing relief sites have complained of discolored or hole-riddled donations doesn't surprise Ricketts. Kantamanto's vendors have been struggling with this for years, particularly with the rise of cheap, low-quality garments—in a phrase, fast fashion—that have left them feeling like their work no longer has dignity and they are selling Westerners' waste. 'For the first time, Americans who are accustomed to putting their clothes in a garbage bag and dropping it off at a charity or 'recycling' bin, many of those donors have become active participants in the secondhand supply chain,' she said. 'For the first time, they are being tasked with opening the trash bags, sorting the clothing and putting their hands on the truth—the truth that there is too much clothing and that clothing is considered disposable.' Ricketts said it was interesting how L.A. and Kantamanto are being drawn together because of shared tragedy and a similar surfeit of low-value garments with few viable outlets. Without off-ramps such as Kantamanto, however, there is no 'away' for Los Angeles. Then there is the way responses to both disasters have diverged. The Walt Disney Co. has pledged $15 million to rebuilding Los Angeles. Target donated $1 million to local and national disaster relief organizations such as the League of California Community Foundation. Walmart committed $2.5 million to support relief efforts. Nike said it distributed $7.8 million in financial and product donations to the likes of the American Red Cross and World Central Kitchen. Skechers has shelled out $1 million to Baby2Baby, the California Fire Foundation Wildfire & Disaster Relief Fund and others. Centric Brands and Gap Inc. made unspecified contributions to the L.A. arm of the American Red Cross and the L.A. Fire Department Foundation. Of the 20 brands that The Or Foundation has stumbled upon with the most frequency during its beach cleanups—including the aforementioned Disney, Gap, Nike and Target—only H&M Group and Puma said they had offered their support to the Kantamanto community, though they wouldn't specify in what way. Inditex declined to comment, while the others—Marks & Spencer, Next, Adidas, Nike, Gap, Primark, George by Asda, F&F by Tesco, Boohoo, Tu by Sainsbury, New Look, Reebok, Tommy Hilfiger owner PVH Corp., Asos, Slazenger, Gildan, Disney, Target and Carters— didn't respond to multiple emails requesting the same. Vestiaire Collective, the pre-owned luxury platform that collaborated with The Or Foundation to release a Black Friday collection of upcycled garments using materials from Kantamanto, donated money to the marketplace. Patagonia, which shared a stage with Ricketts to speak about overproduction at the Textile Exchange conference in Pasadena last October, did not. Again, Ricketts can't muster much astonishment. 'I am happy to see companies committing millions of dollars to L.A., as they should,' she said. 'It's not surprising that the same global fashion brands are not donating to Kantamanto because their customers are in L.A. and not in Accra.' She estimates that it will take over $5 million to reconstruct the damaged parts of the market, minus $1.5 million in direct relief to community members whose lives hang in the balance. It's a sum that's a sliver of many brands' marketing budgets—the same ones that power the engines of overconsumption. In the second quarter ended Nov. 30 alone, for instance, Nike spent $1.1 billion in so-called 'demand creation.' The Or Foundation sprang into action as soon as the fire hit, immediately unlocking $1 million in emergency funds for direct relief. Some of that drew on a controversial $5 million extended-producer-responsibility-like grant that Shein disbursed to the organization over three years, beginning in 2022. While the e-tail juggernaut hasn't rustled up additional funds, instead giving Kenya's Africa Collect Textiles Foundation $5.3 million last week to expand its used textile collection and recycling efforts, Ricketts sees its prior largesse as a demonstration of how EPR schemes should work. Right now, EPR funds in France, Hungary, the Netherlands and, some point soon, California, do not filter to the countries that serve as textiles' final sinks. 'The communities that need the EPR resources should be given the benefit of deciding how those resources should be used,' she said. 'And that is the positive with the EPR fund that we have; it doesn't stipulate that the resources can only go to material-based products or projects. For instance, we can use it for fire safety and the fire relief effort.' Chinazo Ufodiama, a brand and communications consultant who specializes in purpose and responsibility, can't hide her disappointment, however. Staying silent about Kantamanto is particularly indefensible, she said, because brands have been 'quietly outsourcing' their waste management to marketplaces like it to 'cover up mass consumption, diminishing quality and excessive overproduction.' It's also impossible to ignore the stark contrast in the causes that the fashion industry will choose to champion, Ufodiama added. A crowdfunding campaign that The Or Foundation launched for Kantamanto generated just over $221,000 in additional donations. 'When a fire destroyed Notre Dame in 2019, millions of euros were immediately pledged to aid the restoration,' she said, namedropping Kering and LVMH. 'As the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement spilled out from the U.S. into Europe, we saw brands publishing pledges and donating to various organizations. Upon Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the industry rallied around to donate money and relief packages, publicly expressing their support to Ukraine. And we are seeing an outpouring of support from the global fashion community in response to the ongoing catastrophic wildfires in Los Angeles from resource sharing, financial donations, as well as calls for fashion brands to donate clothing and toiletries to those who have lost everything.' Samata Pattinson is the British-Ghanaian CEO of Black Pearl, a 'cultural sustainability' consultancy. She now lives in Los Angeles, where she can feel to her bones the difference, not only in the acknowledgments of the L.A. and Kantamanto fires, but also to the haves and have-nots in and around Hollywood. 'The response—or lack thereof—to the fire in Kantamanto reflects the historic dehumanization of communities burdened by our waste. Black, African communities often receive far less compassion in times of crisis, rooted in systemic inequality and historical injustices,' she said. 'Yet, the working and diverse communities in L.A. seem to be overlooked in a similar way to those in Kantamanto. 'Hollywood' is part of a vast ecosystem in Greater Los Angeles, where the climate crisis affects not only celebrities but also the countless behind-the-scenes professionals whose livelihoods depend on the entertainment and creative industries, and many who do not work 'regular' jobs to support their families.' What's clear to Pattinson, however, is that wildfires, air pollution and other climate challenges affect everyone. 'They do not discriminate,' she said. Neither should compassion nor responsibility for the global fashion system have borders. 'Both disasters highlight the same overarching issue: the fashion industry's impact on people, communities and the environment must be addressed—not only in the wake of disasters but as part of a long-term commitment to sustainability, ethical production, and responsible consumption,' Pattinson added. 'Ultimately, it's about acknowledging that no loss is more significant than another—whether it's in Greater Los Angeles or Kantamanto, where communities are left to rebuild, often without the necessary support.' For the vendors of Kantamanto, the stakes have never been higher. Those who were fortunate to have bales that were stored off-site have set up makeshift storefronts by spreading goods on the ground alongside a nearby railroad, with an umbrella or two in lieu of a shingle. Some have refused to budge from the charred remains of their stalls, where plumes of black, toxin-laden smoke from smoldering synthetic materials uncurled for days, in case opportunistic squatters try to take over. The Or Foundation has been urging people to sleep, eat and stay healthy. Still, anxiety looms as thick and heavy as the air. 'I am tired and I am suffering,' said Akumi Kyei, a 20-year veteran of Kantamanto. 'Before the fire, this market helped people make money to build their homes, take care of their children's education. Now that the fire has destroyed our livelihood, the business has gone down completely. Many people and our customers have heard that Kantamanto market is burnt, and so they believe there is nothing here.' Like the areas in Los Angeles that were consumed by the fires, Kantamanto is desperate to rebuild. But it's an endeavor that will prove to be expensive even before the first construction efforts can take place: debris needs to be trucked out, plans for a more fire-resilient infrastructure must be drafted, timber has to be purchased, a power grid restored, security enhanced. Meanwhile, the affected vendors have bills—grocery, housing, schooling, medical—that will continue to pile up. 'The majority of the things that I had were here in the market,' said Kyum Kweku, also known as Opaa, who has sold women's jeans in Kantamanto since 1996, working from 6 in the morning to 6 in the evening. 'Because I have stayed here for so long, this is where my kitchen is. When I say kitchen, that doesn't mean a typical kitchen. It is a proverb meaning 'this is where I eat from.' This is what I use to pay for my loans and my debts, and also to take care of myself and my family, so when the fire situation happened, I had no money left.' Asked what he needed most, Kweku did not hesitate. 'Right now all the help we are going to need, all stands on money,' he said. 'It's money that we need to rebuild. It's money! Because, I can't tell you all the things that I have lost, but once I have money, I will be able to use that to rebuild and develop my business again.' Julian Baba Otoo, who has worked in Kantamanto for more than two decades and lost all six of her sewing machines in the fire, said she arrived the day after to find 'not a single pin' on the floor.' 'When I came, it was just the land that was bare,' she said. 'So now we are waiting and hoping what God will do for us. If you guys have any help for us, please do help us. Because right now, nothing is in our pockets. Everything has been burnt. Because I never dreamt and expected that this would happen, and that Kantamanto burned to this extent that it did.' Otoo isn't looking for a handout but a hand extended. Or rather, for people to 'hold our waist' so the stall owners can rise up. The secondhand trade is what she knows and she doesn't want to stop doing it. 'If you guys offer me a loan to pay, I will do it and pay for it,' she added. Venetia La Manna, a fair fashion activist and content creator, wonders if the fire at Kantamanto would have been as voracious if brands were taking responsibility for the full life cycle of their garments. La Manna had been calling out Marks & Spencer, the U.K. department store responsible for the largest amount of clothing waste washing up on Accra's shores, even before 2024 came to a close. Now she sees any financial aid it might give as a 'debt' it already owes the Kantamanto community. La Manna, who works with The Or Foundation's 'Speak Volumes' campaign to get fashion purveyors to publicly declare their production volumes, isn't alone in that sentiment, either. An Instagram video that she posted on Jan. 16 asking Marks & Spencer to donate to the relief fund has garnered 330,000 views and 16,000 likes. One person who commented said a donation was the least the company could do. Another urged Marks & Spencer, which calls its sustainability initiative 'Plan A' because 'there is no Plan B,' not to 'shrug away responsibility and accountability.' 'Despite pioneering brands like Finisterre, Armedangels and Vivobarefoot publicly endorsing the campaign, M&S has ignored our requests,' she said. 'By ignoring the demands of the community on the frontlines of the textile waste crisis—with overwhelming support from the 'consumers' M&S claims to care about)—this corporation is, unfortunately, proving itself to be nothing more than a champion greenwasher. We don't just expect better, we demand better and we will continue to build pressure until M&S takes responsibility for its oversupply.' The invisible thread that ties Kantamanto to Los Angeles will continue to do so until brands commit to reducing production volumes and the global North's 'too much' ceases to be a burden, Ricketts said. 'Until we explore this, the impacts of overproduction that contributed to the L.A. fires will remain intrinsically linked to the debt burden that has left Kantamanto without adequate resources to build for fire safety and provide dignified working conditions or to respond holistically to a market disaster of this magnitude,' she said. 'The financial commitments are one thing, but we would also just like to see companies express solidarity. I mean, so much of our work has been trying to help people understand that the secondhand clothing trade is not charity.' For Medoff, the mounds of clothing being strewn around the affected Southern California areas are, in a way, a manifestation of the toll that fashion production extracts. It's also as clear a sign as any that resources and money need to be poured into the creation of truly circular systems, including in Los Angeles itself. 'The fire brought to the surface for all of us to engage with the very heavy environmental load that textiles carry from the time that they're created to the end of their life as the consumer views it,' she said. 'And then it has a whole other environmental load after the consumer is done with it that we just don't see very often. And now we're seeing it because it's in piles all over town, and people are feeling wildly overwhelmed with what to do with it.' The planet, Medoff said, is 'screaming' for change. 'How many fires, how many floods, how many disasters need to happen until we shift course?' she asked. 'Sometimes I'm like, 'Do we have to run out of clean water, clean air? Does every natural disaster really have to happen?''
Yahoo
28-01-2025
- Yahoo
‘Overwhelming': what happens to 50,000lb of extra LA wildfire clothing donations?
At Suay Sew Shop in Los Angeles's arts district, mounds of clothes are piled high in a warehouse. The T-shirts, socks, jackets and denim are surplus donations from the LA wildfires that community groups across the city were unable to distribute because they had too much already, or because the items were dirty, damaged or poorly made. Instead of letting the clothes go to a landfill, where they can cause a host of environmental problems, Suay has rescued 50,000lbs of textiles so they can be cleaned, sorted and upcycled by professional designers and sewers. Since LA currently has no permanent textile recycling or collection, it's up to groups like Suay to save as many textiles as possible before they get dumped or exported. 'To see the overwhelming influx of textiles donations here in Los Angeles in response to the devastating wildfires just shows how the current systems in place have failed us all,' said Suay's co-founder and CEO Lindsay Rose Medoff. 'We have to draw the connections to our everyday consumption and disposal habits. Until we draw these connections, the same overproduction that is impacting our climate and resulting in these disasters will continue to strengthen.' Experts say a surge in donations can actually impede relief efforts since volunteers have to handle sudden influxes of clothing when they are unwearable or unwanted. Without a climate-informed approach, well-intentioned donations are likely to end up in landfills or polluting deserts and beaches in other parts of the world. A leading industrial polluter, the fashion industry is responsible for about 10% of global carbon emissions, and the rise of 'fast fashion', cheap garments that are only worn a few times, is a major contributor to our environmental crisis. Suay expects to take on additional donations in the coming weeks as other centers in the Los Angeles area continue shutting down, and say they will find a way to upcycle them into the fire aid relief support they were meant for. Suay was among the first to mobilize, creating a free store for LA fire victims that features stylish clothing and textiles that allow people to replace lost items with dignity. It's open daily and located upstairs from their retail shop, which sells Suay's upcycled fashion and home goods, from mini mesh tote bags made from old sports jerseys to oven mitts remade from flannel and denim, and one-of-a-kind dresses fashioned from vintage T-shirts. They are asking people to support fire victims by sponsoring a $20 Suay It Forward bag of clothes to be sorted, donated and upcycled into free materials for fire victims and other members of the community in need. Since 2017, Suay has taken in enormous volumes of clothing and upcycled unused textiles into remade apparel and home goods, diverting more than 4m lbs of textiles from landfills in the process. Their 'zero-landfill, zero-export system' means excess donations are handled responsibly. 'One of the biggest impacts stemming from excess donations is the reappearance of these textiles in developing countries,' said Jessica Kosak, who teaches courses on sustainable systems in fashion at ASU FIDM. 'They don't necessarily have the waste infrastructure we have here in the US, and they can't effectively dispose of these materials, so the result is things end up in waterways, on beaches and in our oceans and that contributes to pollution overall.' A disturbing 85% of all textiles end up in landfills where they emit methane gas and leach chemicals and dyes into our soil and groundwater. Only about 15% of clothing and other textiles gets reused, even though an estimated 95% of the materials such as fabrics, yarns, fibers and buttons are recyclable. In 2021, approximately 1.2m tonnes of textiles were thrown out in California alone. Last year, the state passed a first-in-the-country textile recycling bill that puts the onus on brands to implement and fund a statewide reuse, repair and recycling program for their products, but it won't be operational until 2028. 'I think disasters like these bring out the best and the worst of our systems, which are really not designed for this volume of any particular product,' said Dr Joanne Brasch, director of advocacy for the non-profit California Product Stewardship Council (CPSC), who co-sponsored the state's Responsible Textile Recovery Act. But there are things the state can do, sustainability advocates say: host clothing swap opportunities and provide public workshops on how to properly clean and mend clothes so people can learn about maintaining the value of our apparel. Rather than donating more clothes for fire victims, experts say to consider selling wearable pieces on platforms such as Depop, Poshmark, ThredUp or eBay and give the proceeds to fire victims. Peer-to-peer reselling apps help ensure the item retains its value because a seller is more likely to clean the piece or make any needed repairs and give it the best chance possible to be resold. Related: Clothes, toiletries – and a free stylist: the LA teen creating a space for peers amid the fires 'You're attaching value even if you're selling a fast fashion item for $10,' said ASU FIDM's Kosak. 'When someone purchases something off one of those platforms, they're going to value it more because they had to go searching for it.' Not everyone has time to sell clothing via an app or digital platform, but taking that mindset of cleaning and repairing any items and treating textiles in a way that you want to receive them goes a long way in ensuring our clothes can go on. Most of the people who donated apparel for fire victims likely did so with good intentions for their clothing to be reused, while others use disaster as a chance to offload items they didn't want anymore. But Suay, which has built a digital community of more than 500,000 people on Instagram, and other like-minded activists, are helping more people wake up to the serious impacts of overproduction, overconsumption and lack of infrastructure to handle textile waste responsibly. 'This is a pivotal moment in understanding the volume, our broken waste management for this product and understanding that no one wants a lot of the stuff in your closet,' said CPSC's Brasch. 'One of the easier things individuals can do to relieve the burden of someone else having to do it.'
