In the United States, a nonprofit organization called FABSCRAP is working to pull discarded fabrics from the manufacturing side of the fashion industry out of landfills. Over the past decade, it has collected fabrics and materials from clothing brands that were originally going to be destroyed or thrown away, seeking outlets for them in reuse, regeneration, education, and creative exploration, and making recovered designer fabrics available to students, artists, designers, and more than 10,000 volunteers.

In the words of its co-founder and creative executive director, starting from "waste" rather than an unlimited supply of new fabrics may actually inspire more creativity in designers—the unpredictability of materials forces creators to experiment, solve problems, and learn new skills. FABSCRAP wants designer fabrics to be as accessible as possible: in addition to thrift-store-style pricing, volunteers can take fabrics home after serving, and the organization also donates materials to charitable organizations and educational programs.

The organization repeatedly emphasizes a concept that is often conflated: textile waste is not a single waste stream. Clothing discarded or donated by consumers is "post-consumer" waste, which is what most recyclers focus on; the "pre-consumer" waste generated by designers and manufacturers differs in source, volume, and disposal pathways, and is precisely the part FABSCRAP specializes in collecting and handling. The interviewee believes that people often only see the discarded clothes in their own closets, and therefore underestimate the scale of waste generated across the entire supply chain.

The biggest challenge in the early days was taking on the fashion industry's enormous demand with a nonprofit budget: recycling services proved to be a missing link in the industry, yet there was a lack of physical and operational infrastructure to absorb the incoming materials, and many processes had to be figured out through experience. The organization describes itself as "building industry-scale solutions with nonprofit-level resources."

Unlike most nonprofits that rely on donations, FABSCRAP charges brands for recycling and waste-diversion services to cover the real costs of collection, sorting, processing, and transportation. It argues that infrastructure is often overlooked in sustainability discussions but is key to substantive change; at the same time, providing solutions alone is not enough—design, production, sourcing, operations, facilities, and even management must all understand how materials are used and how they become waste, forming a shared consensus.

On its tenth anniversary, the organization's next-stage goals point to the even larger gap in pre-consumer waste: exploring truly circular ways of working with brands so that design and material recovery are considered from the very beginning of a product's life. It emphasizes that the goal is not just to recycle more, but to prove that viable alternatives exist at multiple stages of the product cycle. The interviewee also hopes that design and production departments will move from the end of the process to the center of solutions, and calls on schools to update curricula to keep pace with the redefinition of the designer's role.

Source: How FABSCRAP Is Giving Fashion’s Textile Waste a Second Life — PhotoBook Magazine · Originally published on 2026-09-11