Textile Waste 101: The Truth About Pre- and Post-Consumer Waste

WORDS: SEERAT VIRDI

LAYOUT: SCOTT TRAUSCH

Toward an Understanding of Textile Waste

Every piece of clothing has a story—but for millions of garments, that story ends in textile waste. While overflowing landfills grab headlines, a significant percentage of clothing waste never even makes it off the factory floor. Offcuts, overproduction, and discarded materials pile up behind the scenes, wasting resources and adding to the environmental burden.

At Everywhere Apparel, we believe in rewriting this story by closing the loop on textile waste. Our maximally sustainable system is built around giving these materials a second life—reducing unnecessary waste while creating high-quality, responsible fashion that keeps textiles in circulation and out of landfills.

Let’s break it down.

The Problem: Textile Waste is Everywhere

The fashion industry generates an estimated 92 million tons of textile waste every year—a number projected to reach 134 million tons by 2030 (1). That’s the equivalent of a garbage truck full of textiles being dumped in a landfill every second (2).

This waste isn’t just a byproduct of consumer habits—it starts at the very beginning of the supply chain, long before garments ever reach store shelves.

Textile waste falls into two main categories:

Pre-consumer waste: Materials discarded during production, including fabric scraps, production rejects, and unsold stock that never reaches consumers.

Post-consumer waste: Garments discarded after use—whether worn out, outgrown, or simply unwanted.

Both contribute to the growing crisis of textile waste in the fashion industry. To move toward a future with less waste, we need to rethink how textiles are produced, used, and repurposed.

Pre-Consumer Waste: The Waste You Never See

Pre-consumer waste is everything discarded before a garment reaches a customer. These materials come straight from factories, they are often clean, sorted by material content and color, which makes them easier to recycle.

Fabric offcuts from pattern cutting, defective pieces that don’t pass quality control, overproduction where brands produce more than they can sell, and prototype and sample waste from early-stage designs all contribute to the problem. Even with careful planning, 10–15% of all fabric is wasted in production (3), amounting to millions of tons of avoidable textile waste each year.

And the impact of this waste is staggering. Textile production already consumes vast amounts of resources – textile production alone is responsible for up to 8-10% of global carbon emissions (4) and 20% of global wastewater (5). Every discarded yard of fabric means wasted water, energy, and raw materials. Instead of repurposing these textiles, many factories send them to landfills or incinerators.

Post-Consumer Waste: The Clothes We Leave Behind

Post-consumer waste is what happens when clothes are worn out, outgrown, or are simply no longer wanted. Recycling post-consumer waste is trickier than pre-consumer waste. Many garments are made from blended fabrics, making it difficult to separate natural and synthetic fibres⁶ (6). Dyes and chemical treatments further complicate the process, and zippers, buttons, and other hardware must be removed before recycling can even begin.

While pre-consumer waste is largely accounted for in supply chains, post-consumer waste presents a bigger challenge because it lacks clear ownership. Once garments leave the retail environment, responsibility for their disposal falls on consumers, charities, and second-hand markets. This has led to a global crisis where 85% of textiles end up in landfills or incinerators (7).

Today, however, across California, and the rest of the US, the infrastructure required to effectively collect, process, and recycle garments at-scale is practically non-existent. In many cases, unwanted clothing is instead dumped in developing countries, where it overwhelms local waste management systems, creating both
social and environmental hazards (8).

Fixing this requires a fundamental shift in the way fashion is designed, consumed, and discarded. Despite challenges, advances in textile recycling are making it possible to recover more fibres than ever before. Creating recyclable garments from the start is a critical step in closing the loop on post-consumer waste and embracing circular fashion.

The Turning Tide: Regulation is Coming

For years, incineration was the industry’s dirty secret—a quick and easy way to deal with unsold stock. But that’s rapidly changing.

The EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Fashion aims to ban the incineration of unsold goods (9), ensuring textiles stay in circulation. France leads the EU nations in this regard, having banned the destruction of unsold clothing since 2020 and requiring brands to donate, recycle, or repurpose excess stock (10). And, in the U.S., California’s Responsible Textile Recovery Act (SB707) introduced in late 2024 is the first Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) law holding brands accountable for post-consumer waste.

With established and emerging regulations on all levels of government, the fashion industry can no longer afford to burn or bury its mistakes—it needs smarter, circular fashion solutions.

The Everywhere Apparel Approach: Circularity in Action For decades, fashion has treated waste as an unavoidable byproduct. But waste isn’t inevitable—it’s a design flaw.
At Everywhere Apparel, we work to correct that flaw by turning pre-consumer waste and post-consumer waste cotton into new, high-quality, 100% recycled apparel.

Our Approach: Circular Fashion in Action

For decades, fashion has treated waste as an unavoidable byproduct. But waste isn’t inevitable—it’s a design flaw. At Everywhere Apparel, we work to correct that flaw by turning pre- and post-consumer cotton waste into new, high-quality, 100% recycled apparel.

How We Close the Loop

Our first-of-its-kind circular supply chain and novel processes transform discarded cotton textiles into CirCot™ yarn for our stock program of sustainable blanks, eliminating the need for virgin fiber, reducing water use, and avoiding harsh chemical treatments.

We also collaborate with musicians, brands, and organizations to recycle pre-consumer waste and post-consumer waste, ensuring that excess stock and deadstock don’t become landfill waste. The organizations we work with get a guarantee of responsible, sustainable recycling and logo destruction while also freeing up resources tied to warehousing these materials.

And we don’t just make circular products as a reactionary measure against textile waste—we actively partner with brands to help them reduce waste from the start.

Leveraging our expertise in material transformation and sustainability, able to consult with brands to help them audit waste streams and identify material recovery opportunities, integrate recycled textiles into their supply chains, and design with circularity in mind, ensuring materials can be repurposed instead of discarded.

A Future Without Cotton Textile Waste

The way forward is clear: supporting circular systems is no longer an option—it’s a necessity. By choosing recycled materials, designing for circularity, and supporting companies committed to reducing textile waste, we can create a future where fashion no longer contributes to landfill overflow. Together, we can shift the industry toward sustainability—one recycled garment at a time.