Textile waste is one of the largest and fastest-growing waste streams worldwide. Each year, an estimated 92 million tons of textile waste is generated globally — a number expected to rise without significant intervention from the fashion and textile industries. In the United States alone, textile waste has almost tripled from 1990 to 2018. Currently, only about 15% of textile waste is recycled, both globally and in the U.S. Of this small fraction, roughly half is reused in secondary markets as apparel, while the other half is downcycled into products like rags and shoddy. Less than 1% is recycled back into new textiles.

To decrease the impacts of textile production and increase the levels of textile recycling, we need to change the design paradigm for fashion, create new approaches to collection, develop high throughput sortation technology (e.g. sortation of usable from non-usable apparel, sortation, and disassembly by materials class), develop and demonstrate advanced processing technologies for fiber-to-fiber recycling, and identify and validate viable end-markets for are generated each year 20% of clean water pollution and 9% of microplastic pollution in oceans of annual GHG emissions recycled textiles.