Trashie Wants to Make Donating Clothes Fun

If you’re like most people in the US, you do some variation of this dance once a year: You clean out your closet, pile unwanted items into an giant blue Ikea bag, and haul it off to your local Goodwill or clothing donation bin after it sits in your room for a requisite two to three weeks. You probably even pat yourself on the back for acting sustainably.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but that’s not exactly how it works. Even though most Americans do technically donate their used clothing instead of throwing it straight into the garbage, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates 84% of these “donations” end up in landfills or incinerators anyway.

“I think consumers in the US don't think about the end,” says entrepreneur Kristy Caylor. “We think that if we drop it off at Goodwill, it's all good.… But there are different ways of handling most consumer waste. Some are good, some are not good. It's just a very opaque process for the most part.”

Caylor is on a mission to change that. After decades of working in the fashion industry at such companies as Gap and the luxury ready-to wear brand she co-founded, Maiyet, she knew that sustainability in fashion needed to become more than buzzwords. But she also knew that real change on a systemic level would happen slowly. The more acute issue facing clothing waste? People don’t know what to do with the stuff they don’t want.

“Somebody asked me the other day, what are you disrupting?” she says. “I'm like, the trash. Literally.”

And so Trashie, Caylor’s clothing recycling start-up, was born. Launched last year, Trashie aims to provide an alternative to the Goodwill or Salvation Army routine. Customers purchase one of its brightly colored “take back” bags (which start at $20), stuff it with clothes, and send it back through the mail. Your shirt may be donated to be worn again, or recycled to become a cleaning rag. Once their textiles are processed, customers receive $30 back in “TrashieCash” per bag, which they can use to buy gift cards or get discounts at places like Lululemon and Nordstrom, or nonclothing items such as makeup, movie tickets, or even groceries.

The most important part, according to Caylor? Trashie aims to make donating your clothes fun. One of the unique aspects of her brand is not only the gamification of the process but the company’s embrace of a brightly colored aesthetic, which reads more hot start-up than dreary do-gooder.

“If we can give the typical consumer an alternative, and get them into this cycle of saying, Okay, great, I'm not going to throw it in the trash, I’ll do it this way instead. And if we can make that really fun, and make it a brand experience, not a downer ‘green’ experience, but really play into belonging to the community, then literally put money back into their pocket…if I can start to capture products before they go down landfills, that's meaningful.”

Ahead of Earth Day, Glamour chatted with Caylor about the current thrifting-boom-slash-fast-fashion dichotomy, how people can make a difference in clothing sustainability, and why we should put more value into each thing we own.

Glamour: Trashie aims to solve a big problem, clothing waste, in a rather simple way, by working with individuals one at a time to get them to recycle items responsibly. How did you decide on this approach?

Kristy Caylor: I really felt like any type of [fashion] circularity innovation was probably going to come from more of a start-up space. For me, with such a deep background in the industry, I also knew that we had to find a solution that…couldn't just be “the right thing” to do. For consumers and businesses, it has to solve a pain point. It has to create value. There's got to be a way we can do that, which there was just really no formula for. And I was like, we can solve that problem.

In your experience working in the fashion industry abroad, you got to see firsthand the enormous mountains of trash created by clothing waste in the US. How did that change the way you view fashion and sustainability?

The quantity of products that we make at any given time is just so massive. So that's step one, we have to do that better and more responsibly. But then you connect that to the fact that 85% of it within a year often ends up in landfill. So this idea that we're walking into a store buying five items of clothes that we might wear twice.… It’s just insane how much we are consuming.

I think a lot about how social media has made us feel weird about posting an outfit twice and how that contributes to this fast-fashion waste problem.

Yeah, that’s commonplace where people are like, oh no, you've got to change it up and be fresh. With the price points the way they are, it’s made it very accessible to consume a lot of units, and then it puts pressure on the upstream supply chain to keep cost flow, that volume stays there, and it’s just a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Do you think we take our clothing, for lack of a better word, for granted?

There’s a human component of manufacturing I think is really important to remember. Every time I buy a garment it takes three, four, five people to make it. Why am I not respecting them? Or the raw materials, the cotton that went into it? That's the disconnection. There’s value there that I think we lost connection to. And so we toss it. We don’t think we're tossing anything of value, and I’m like, that's valuable. Let’s find a way to harness that value for good.

I’ve personally observed an interesting trend happening in fashion right now, where it seems like we are dealing with two extremes. Thrifting and upcycling clothes is extremely popular and trendy, perhaps more than ever before, but it’s also common for people to buy huge “clothing hauls” from retailers like Shein. What’s the disconnect there?

We’ve done some focus groups, and the conversation that comes out of those is really fascinating. If you look at the high level polling of people, 80% care about sustainability, if not higher. But when I get people into a room, there are similar dynamics where people are thrifting and also shopping at Shein. When they talk about thrifting, they do it because it’s cool and it’s smart, not the sustainability part. It's like, oh, it’s cool and it’s hard. Look what I found. They're doing it because it’s less expensive, the thrill of the hunt, and the fact that what you find is a signal of how good you are at it. I actually found in those conversations almost an active rejection of the fact that it was sustainable, which I found really amazing. There’s also a lot of skepticism about greenwashing, people thinking, oh, it’s all fake.

How do you and Trashie go about solving this disconnect?

The way I think about it and what we work toward is real sticky systemic change. If you rely entirely on customer sentiments [about sustainability], you're just never going to get there. You have to think about how, again, how am I solving a pain point? How am I providing a great experience? How am I putting money back into the consumer’s pocket?

I think we all—myself included—would like to think that when we donate clothes to places like Goodwill we are doing good, not just throwing our things away. What’s the reality?

The reality is Goodwill doesn’t need all of our trash. So they'll take out what they can sell and then sometimes dispose of the rest and try to find a really inefficient market for it. Those corner bins, people will take those, throw them into a huge bale, like a 2,000 pound bale and ship it offshore. So those terrible pictures that you see of the Chilean desert and the beaches of Ghana, often you’re shipping the entire bucket blindly to a country that has no sorting capacity in waste management. There will be things in there like dirty diapers or coffee bags, people are not responsible that way. So that's happening. People I think feel like they're donating to a cause. Let’s donate clothes to Ukraine. Ukraine does not need your heels, your bar tops are not really servicing that at this point. It’s a filtration system to try to generate revenue. It’s just a really old model.

What is Trashie’s model for dealing with clothing waste?

Where we see our role is creating a better system. Let’s create a better sorting and grading system. Let’s create a better network of recyclers and resellers. I mean there’s an interesting statistic, which is 70% of the world’s population wear used clothing. We could find a need for a lot of this stuff.… So we step in and say, Okay, how do we take this product, process it well with a lot of transparency, and find the next best place for it? We're still going to have some trash…but if we can chip away at it, you can make a meaningful difference.

We have a big collection facility in Texas. We sort and grade, which basically means we go through everything by category, so men’s winter wear, kids accessories, everything goes through category sort and then it goes through various levels of quality sort and material sort. Everything that comes in ends up at one of 250 buckets, that many grades. Then those have different uses. Some are reused if you can find the market. Some is recycled, and turned into things like carpet, padding, installation.

As part of this story, I solicited some of my colleagues at Glamour to bring in clothes to donate for our own Trashie bag. Here’s some things they brought in. Where will they go?

A new, plain oversized sweatshirt: This is likely reusable, so it could go into the “vintage” market in the US.

A used thin cotton sweater from Zara: This will likely go toward cotton fiber recycling in the US.

A used pair of workout leggings from Old Navy: This will likely go to athletic resale in Central America or US wipers used for industrial cleaning.

Readers may be surprised to learn that they have to pay for a Trashie bag (one bag starts at $20), since all other ways to donate your used clothing are free of charge. Why is that?

Waste isn’t free. We all pay for garbage collection. I think it was important for us to communicate that.… I think there's a lot of commitment and pride in opting in and being part of it. It feels like a very community driven, community led thing. The products are really fun, that’s intentional. The colors are really bright. It sits in your home, you actually have a relationship to it and so it becomes a product you bought to do the right thing, but it's really doing the smart thing. And then on the back end, once you do the right thing, you get that money back, so it creates a free shopping opportunity. So you're like, pat on the back, we're doing the right thing, you feel lighter and better for not having all that crap in your house and then you get to go shop and you get kind of increased value from recycling, and you’re still netting out ahead financially. I think it is that relationship that we've built that works really well for people.

Your products have a very bright, playful aesthetic. How did you develop it?

I think the assumption is that if we want to be sustainable, we have to be really serious. I also think historically, if the aesthetics aren't there in a sustainable product, nobody's going to make that choice first and foremost. I don’t think sustainability has to be packaged and a green box with a natural ribbon.

Is it resonating with consumers?

Yes, it’s been really wonderful to watch the pure growth of it and the sense of belonging on the community side. All of our content on social, much of it is user-generated, and it’s just really cool to watch people find joy cleaning out their closet.

Stephanie McNeal is a senior editor at Glamour and the author of Swipe Up for More! Inside the Unfiltered Lives of Influencers.

Originally Appeared on Glamour