Stakeholders: Fabscrap Highlight

get third party stakeholders involved.

Third party stakeholders like Renewal Workshop, Pure Waste, and Fabscrap can help streamline your upcycling initiative and make utilising fabric waste easier. We got the chance to speak with Fabscrap, a New York City-based non-profit that works with fashion businesses located in the NYC area to help them responsibly get rid of their textile waste.

Although this toolkit is geared toward assisting UK brands, businesses like Fabscrap are a part of this toolkit because the infrastructure of their upcycling programs can still be applicable and aspirational for UK-based brands. While the UK may not have the infrastructure for these upcycling methods at this point in time, learning about programs like Fabscrap can provide inspiration for how the UK can approach these practices in the future.

Does Fabscrap have different services depending on the brand?

"[Yes], the bulk of our revenue is split between fabric sales and service fees. So the fabric sales are going to be the revenue we make from selling fabric through our warehouse and our shop, and our online store. We used to do popups and then we also do Instagram flash sales.

Through our recycling service, we have our brown bag material and our black bag material. Brown bag material is going to be anything that's reusable. This is something that the brand has to decide for themselves. So anything that's reusable our volunteers will sort through the reusable stuff. If brands have rolls that they're saying are reusable, those ones are actually free of charge for us to pick up because that's very, very reusable. We really want to incentivise them to say that the the roll is reusable and then allow us to redistribute it. The bags full of reusable material [have a] service fee for $45 a bag." [Black bag material is] anything that brands are deeming proprietary. So that could be a pattern that they've created themselves."

"Fabscrap is a New York City- based non profit working to make the fashion industry and then also other industries and businesses that are producing textile waste, more sustainable by diverting this textile waste from landfill. [The textile waste] either gets properly recycled, or it gets made available for folks to reuse. We are working with more than 450 brands right now, primarily in the fashion industry. This includes Express, J Crew, Oscar de la Renta- really a wide range of fashion brands in terms of size. Some are more mass, some are more luxury but we also work with interior design brands, costume departments, TV and film set production, universities- especially universities with fashion and design programs. There's a lot more businesses that are producing textile waste than one might initially think when you think of like, you know, textiles going to waste or to recycle fabric."

Rachael Stein, Fabscrap's Community Coordinator

What are the logistics behind Fabscrap's program?

"What we do is with the help of a lot of our volunteers we sort through the textile waste for fibre contents. A lot of what we get are headers. They're little swatches of fabric that are attached to a piece of paper or cardboard. There is usually a lot of information from the fabric mill that made the header. So we check those for fibre content because not all fibres can be shredded for recycling. Spandex unfortunately can't be shredded. But we still want to save that from landfill. We make it available for folks to shop. Sometimes we work with gyms as well, and they use spandex scraps to stuff punching bags and other exercise equipment, which is pretty cool.

For the rest of the fibres we sort those for fibre contents. We have to deconstruct the headers and that all has to be done by hand [which is] quite time and labor intensive. [For] our robust volunteer program we work with an industrial shredder. They take the fabric scraps and they grind them down into shoddy, which is a fibre pulp. It's basically an eco-friendly fibre film. It gets used to stuff pillows. On the more commercial scale it's compressed and used as carpet padding or used in moving blankets as insulation. That's the recycling portion of what we do. Pre-pandemic we would have a shred day where we transport this material to the shredder once every one to two months. Every trip we transported, 10-15,000 pounds of material to be shredded. We do sell some shoddy, but we don't bring back all of the shoddy. We just bring back some of it and our shredder is the one who is helping redistribute the rest of it."

How does the sorting of the discarded fabric work?

"[At our warehouse we have] sorting stations set up for all of our volunteers. Each volunteer is at their own table with their own box or bag full of textile waste. That box or bag is from one particular brand. Another thing is that we track everything that we sort. Basically everything that we do at Fabscrap we track data. So when our volunteers are sorting, we want to know out of 50 pounds of waste that Brand A brought to us, how much of it is spandex? How much of it is going to be shredded and turned into shoddy? How much of it is reusable? How much of it is paper recycling? Our volunteers are at their own volunteer table. They have to sort for fibre content because like I mentioned, spandex can't be shredded. Seven bags are around our tables. We have the spandex bag. We are tracking certain 100% fibres. We source a hundred percent cotton, polyester, and wool which are really common fibre types. We want to understand the volume of weight of those that's coming through Fabscrap because in the future we're hoping there's going to be fibre recycling. That will mean these little scraps of a hundred percent cotton, for example, can be turned into a hundred percent cotton yardage.

Our last fibre content bag, we call our shred bag. That's going to be for all other fibre contents. A hundred percent silk, for example, or a hundred percent rayon, a hundred percent Tencel, or viscose, those will go into our shred bag and eventually get turned into shoddy. We have the bag for paper recycling, and then we also have a bag for trash. Of course we want to divert as much from landfill as possible, but we still receive some material that we can't recycle or we can't reuse. Our volunteers are also sorting for anything with reuse potential. Basically big pieces of fabric that can be upcycled and those we save for reuse. We also get a fair amount of garments sometimes. These are like production samples, mutilated garments if the garment is in perfect condition, there's nothing wrong with it at all. There is a lot of boxes of garments that have small mutilations like a snip in the back or it was swatched or some of the fabric has been cut out- that sort of thing. Or maybe it wasn't quite finished. Those garments we save as well, and we make it available for folks to shop.

Our community will be like, 'wow, this is this really great dress.' And they [can] make this little fix and [then] it's very wearable. Our volunteers are sorting through the bags, according to all of those categories. Some of it gets recycled and turned into shoddy. Some of it gets reused. Spandex is kind of its own category. It's still reuse for us because we do sell it. But it's not quite the same level of reusability as yardage.

For the rolls of fabric that we get, we don't always know what the fibre content is, so we can do a burn test and [find out that] this has a plant natural fibre, or this has an animal natural fibre, or we think it's a blend or this one's obviously a hundred percent synthetic. So we can guess at what the fibre content is, but we're probably not going to know with complete certainty unless it's labeled, which doesn't always happen. Overall most of our fabric is some if not all synthetic fibres and a fair amount of spandex as well. Even if it's 1% spandex it still can't be shredded because it melts in the high temperatures of the shredding machine [and] gums up the machinery."

What about the reuse portion of Fabscrap's program?

"For the reuse portion a lot of the material that we receive is very reusable, which is great. So this is everything from yardage, rules of fabric we get yarn cones, zippers, trims, leather skins- all kinds of material that's in perfect condition or usable condition can be upcycled into something new.

So all of that material we make available for folks to shop at thrift store prices and that's something that's really important to us because this is material that we want to be accessible to people. So through our volunteers who come and help us sort the fabric, they can take five pounds of fabric for free. For folks who are shopping at our warehouse space, almost everything is priced at $5 a pound, so you can get quite a lot for a pound. Then last year, just over a year ago, we opened our first retail shop in Manhattan in a more accessible location. It's more of that traditional fabric shopping experience. So it's priced by the yard, but the prices range from $5 to $15 a yard, which is still significantly less than buying new fabric. I say new mostly because our fabric is also new it's just unused excess fabric that brands weren't using, but it's not like somebody wore this yard of fabric and now it's being discarded. It's still pre-consumer commercial waste. We handle only pre-consumer commercial waste so again, that's only the textiles that companies are throwing away or getting rid of- no used clothing. No old bedsheets towels or that sort of thing."

In 2019 Fabscrap made 993 pick-ups and collected 259,521 pounds of unwanted fabric waste.

In 2019 11,456 students, designers, artists, and crafters got their materials from fabscrap

Can you speak more about how you deal with proprietary material?

"If you think of, for example, Burberry plaid is very iconic and if you see the plaid, you know it's Burberry. So Burberry, wouldn't want everybody to be able to use their plaid fabric. We have a whole second warehouse space for proprietary material only. We have staff members that we recently brought on that are exclusively sorting black bag material and that's only for recycling. So none of that's going to get reused. The black bag material, both the bags and the rolls, those have a higher service fee. There's a couple of reasons [for that]. Firstly, the reason we charge service fees at all, versus it being a donation [is] you really want brands to be taking responsibility for the waste that they're producing. Even if they weren't using the Fabscrap service, they would still have to pay for that waste in commercial hauling. I think a lot of individuals don't necessarily think of that but businesses always have to pay for it. So [the] prices of our services are fairly comparable to what the brand would be paying anyway to toss it. We have a higher service fee for Black Bag for proprietary material than we do for the reasonable material, because we want to incentivise reuse and we really want a brand to be absolutely sure that what they're saying cannot be reused really can't be reused."