Friday, 4th October 2024
Alissa at Donate NYC arranged a networking meeting for while I was there. It was amazing to hear from the varied organisations and the view from the 18th floor in the financial district was…well….
Some of the organisations present that are working at scale and I wanted to say some things about were:
Materials for the Arts - Run, and funded by the NY city of cultural affairs, with the aim of supporting the arts with free goods. Operates out of a 35000sq ft warehouse, working with many partners and film and TV taking in donations of excess goods and redistributing for free.
House of good deeds - Leon, the founder is a power house of activity and knowledge, joining the call from his van while picking up donations, and able to articulate their mission and impact with ease while doing so. Everything is volunteer run, and all 2 tonnes per month is donated and redistributed for free. Overheads are paid for through donations. They also run events to bring people together and spread their message.
NYC fair trade coalition - amongst offering “support for ethically aligned businesses” they run the Sustainable Fashion Community Centre (SFCC) a textile reuse operation in Harlem out of a free space. Until recently everything was volunteer run. All items are $1, swapping is possible, yearly membership for $11, or volunteer in exchange for items. Basically, making redistribution of textiles and supporting the community at the same time as easy as possible, while also bringing to life the connection of people to 'stuff'. Ten tonnes of items were rehomed last year and each customer is e-mailed their impact on their receipt.
Fabscrap - Working with both pre and post consumer textiles, to reduce waste and keep everything circular. Work with over 850 fashion brands, taking pre consumer waste and either reusing, upcycling or shredding. Around 55% of all textiles are reused (via a 10000 sq ft warehouse sold as fabric, medables or products), the rest recycled. The volume is staggering, 6-8000 lbs per week and often items are donated to other, smaller organisations.
Serge, the founder's story was so inspiring - he worked in oil and gas but wanted a change of career for good. After much research (and a push from Obama saying that green jobs were the future!) he set up his textile recycling business. It now processes75 tonnes of post consumer textiles per month across all 5 boroughs. Everything is sorted for reuse/recycling and works with other locally as far as possible to distribute reusable product.
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In addition, a huge amount of more localised community reuse was happening more focussed on fulfilling a need for affordable items.
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Both Fabscrap and Green Tree are providing a service, for a fee, that also contributes environmental benefit and that’s what pays the bills. Partnerships are key. Andrea Reyes, Executive director of the SFCC spoke to me about this too and their charging structure for providing corporate volunteering and presentations (something we are in the process of implementing a Merry-go-round too).
Yet again, I'm reminded that the reuse community need to see themselves more as experts, providing a unique service that costs money to provide.
SFCC's corporate offering
Tackling consumerism
Underpinning all of these conversations and somewhat the elephant in the room is the vast VOLUME of textiles that there are in this city, and the need to tackle that head on. Several people agreed there is an appetite for consumer focussed retail and I was pleased to hear support for my ‘build it (really really well, using all the same motivators and tools as mainstream retail) and they will come’ theory. It worked well for Merry-go-round - I still maintain, with no evidence whatsoever, that the growth in the children’s goods resale market put Mothercare out of business.
Left to right - Serge Lazarev (Green tree textiles recycling), Rachel Seruti (Fabscrap), Andrea Reyes (NYC Fairtrade coalition), Alice Dugan (NYC Dept Sanitation), Alissa Westervelt (NYC Dept Sanitation). Several others not pictured joined the meeting online.
On the way out, I asked Serge why no-one was talking about furniture or homewares. Why was there so much focus on textiles? Judging by his face he thought I was mad, but there’s just no market here he said. There is a deep culture of putting things out on the street and it being gone within 24 hours. Most furniture in small NYC apartments is cheap IKEA and does not stand up well to reuse. The bigger stuff is sold privately.
Local and private reuse markets are thriving here - more on that in a future post.
Diagram from Fabscrap's website showcasing their process.
What would help?
I asked this selection of reuse organisations what one thing would make things easier and help them to become more sustainable - The clear winner was money, to allow them to do more as the need was clearly there. Secondly, an ask for more awareness-raising and marketing of their services and what they do.
With all of the organisations I heard from, there was a common theme of some sort of barrier or threat to their operations whether it was space, income, coping with volume, or being able to access the right goods for their community.
Previously Alissa and I had also talked about the need for technology to play a more important role in allowing scaling up, especially in helping to sort and grade. This was infact the theme of the last RREUSE conference I was at in 2022, but will only work for scaled operations and is another reason to create depots to capture goods from a range of partners at scale to grade for a range of end markets.
The issue of location and premises was discussed, and although space is a premium in Manhattan, there are a lot of empty spaces and the idea of all strip malls converted into reuse parks came up. Just because a space is available though, doesn’t make it the right fit. I’m keen to speak to Andrea more (yes, she wears multiple hats like a lot of people in this sector and also lectures in fashion marketing) about how we understand future consumer retail and shopping behaviours to align and target sustainable shopping on the same parameters.
Serge from Greentree textiles recycling talking baout fast fasion and recycling
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