Is Trashie the Secret to a More Sustainable Wardrobe?

These processes are imperfect. Mechanical processing isn’t able to break apart every type of fabric and works best at deconstructing clothing that’s 100 percent one type of fabric, such as 100 percent cotton, silk, wool, or polyester.

“With textiles, part of the problem is a lot of the fabrics are blends—there’s a lot of polyester blended with cotton,” says Reiley. “If you’re trying to recycle that material, it’s hard to get the cotton and the polyester separated again, to reuse only the cotton to make a recycled cotton fabric.”

Chemical processing is promising, but it’s still very much in development, and is expensive to implement. But that’s not perfect either, says Reiley, because it requires toxic chemicals that can end up in the air, water, and soil. 

Reuse, of course, doesn’t require that kind of processing; the clothes get sorted out and, says a Trashie representative, sent to wherever they’re most likely to be worn, often based on seasonality. But—of course there’s a but—issues crop up with reuse, as well. 

“Large numbers of discarded clothing from the United States are shipped to [developing] countries, and then it piles up there and they really don’t necessarily want it,” says Reiley. “A lot of those countries already have their own textile and clothing industry to produce their own clothing, and so they really don’t need our discarded secondhand clothing.”

A 2024 report from Greenpeace found that in 2022, 134,409 tons of used clothes were imported into Ghana; much of what’s left for reuse, however, is in fact unsellable, either lacking functionality for the local market (such as an incorrect season) or is in poor condition.

These clothes are thrown in landfills or burned, which causes severe, harmful contamination of water, air, and soil. “What was once a reasonable system of reusing secondhand clothes that had value to the market in Africa has spun out of control, because of the fast fashion business model,” says the report. And resellers in Africa are operating on increasingly tight margins because the clothes they receive are of increasingly lower quality. 

“There’s never a perfect solution,” Reiley says.