Headquartered in New York, the nonprofit Fabscrap has, since its founding in 2016, recovered pre-production waste from more than 900 apparel brands and currently maintains about 400 regular clients; but its leadership admits that the industry's next step depends on whether brands and fabric mills are willing to bring circular thinking into the upstream design stage.

Key Points

  • Fabscrap was founded in 2016 by Jessica Schreiber, an employee of the New York City Department of Sanitation, and co-founder Camille Tagle took over as executive director in 2025; over ten years it has processed pre-consumer (i.e., production-stage, not consumer-discarded) waste from more than 900 brands.
  • The organization uses a "pay by volume discarded" model: small batches are charged by the bag, while pallet-level large batches are charged by the pound after weighing on receipt; in 2025 Tagle completed a donation audit and found that 24% of brands contributed 84% of incoming material, and adjusted the fee structure accordingly, raising sorting efficiency by 58% within 18 months and reducing the pending backlog by 159,407 pounds.
  • Over ten years, more than 10,000 volunteers have taken part in sorting, but qualified cotton and polyester feedstock suitable for "textile-to-textile" recycling never exceeded 4% of total donations in the first eight years.

From Design Studio to Warehouse: A Distinct Waste Stream

Fashion's waste crisis often appears in images of Ghanaian beaches and Chilean deserts, while Fabscrap handles another kind of invisible waste: design samples, swatches and development prototypes. This pre-consumer waste accounts for roughly 12% of a brand's total fabric consumption. Founder Schreiber was prompted to bring the idea to a TV startup show and secure seed funding precisely because brands kept asking her "what to do with leftover fabric" and she had no answer; Tagle, who once designed luxury eveningwear, joined a year later and calls the industry's waste culture at the time almost "criminal."

All donations must first be weighed and catalogued before sorting. Tagle stresses the need to track data separately by brand—"you can't reduce what you don't measure." Each brand receives an annual impact report covering recycled weight, number of collections, and whether those materials ultimately go to reuse, downcycling or landfill. Reusable whole pieces of fabric, less-flawed samples and small pieces of leather circulate through an online store and a physical thrift shop, the organization's second-largest revenue source after brand service fees; the rest—torn, soiled or too small—goes to a North Carolina partner to be shredded into insulation, with volunteers having to remove stickers, pins, buttons and zippers piece by piece.

The "Proprietary" Label and the Cost of Standardization

Tagle points out that a sizable share of landfilled material comes from items brands label "proprietary" before donating. The category is meant to prevent branded logos or design features from returning to the market, but brands often abuse it: "There's really no reason a piece of leather with no brand markings whatsoever should be labeled proprietary."

On the other hand, there is currently no room for automation. The swatches Fabscrap receives vary wildly: some come with metal or paper hangers, others are fixed to cardboard or paper with staples or glue and labeled with fiber content, and sizes are inconsistent. Tagle's assessment: "Every swatch is completely random. Without standardization, you can't automate anything." Development samples are hard to standardize, but swatches have room. In late 2024, Fabscrap published a white paper recommending the industry adopt "smart swatches" that are easy to disassemble for recycling: under two yards in length, no backing material, with fiber content, weight and country of origin marked by a single small sticker; it also launched a Smart Swatch Scorecard that grades swatch designs by component count and ease of disassembly.

The Key Bottleneck: Recycled Feedstock Is Far Harder Than It Seems

Over the past decade, capital and industry have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in "textile-to-textile" recycling, mainly around cotton and polyester. But textile contamination is extremely tricky—polyester may carry sequins, cotton may be blended with spandex. Tagle says outsiders widely assume fabric recycling is easy, "when in fact it is very, very difficult." In its first eight years, Fabscrap tracked cotton and polyester separately, hoping to accumulate usable feedstock to donate to recyclers, but qualified material never exceeded 4% of the total. The volunteer program, however, proved an unexpected gain: more than 10,000 people have taken part in sorting, which is both public education and a way for the organization to build community. Tagle says handling waste others won't touch is a huge challenge, "and it will probably take the next decade to solve."

For the used-clothing and textile recycling industry, Fabscrap's ten years offer an upstream sample: the bottleneck in pre-consumer waste recycling is not the willingness to collect, but the lack of disassemblable, identifiable standardized solutions at the design end—which is in fact the same chain as the problems faced downstream in sorting and regeneration.

Source: After 10 Years, Fabscrap Knows What Circular Fashion Is Missing · Originally published 2026-10-08