The Sunday after the wildfires hit L.A. County, volunteers sorted through piles of clothing outside of L.A. Climate Week's host, the nonprofit Collidescope Foundation. Even as they packed dozens of 13-gallon trash bags with items sorted by gender, age, and type, mountains of more donations were stacked floor to ceiling inside.
In a crisis, Los Angeles residents like Halle Berry packed up their dresses, sweaters, jeans, jackets, and more for wildfire victims. It's a heartwarming gesture, but donation hubs ended up with more used clothing than they could realistically pass on to wildfire survivors. Furthermore, some of the clothing people donated was dirty, worn, or unusable, Next City reports.
"The clothing donations that we have received have been a little overwhelming for us, especially with our capacity here in this space," says Olivia Peay, volunteer coordinator for Collidescope's impromptu donation center (donations were moved to a space donated by co-working space Intersections LA). "It's been difficult to try to find more distribution centers that are willing to accept these clothes."
Now, sustainability initiatives and textile recyclers like Black Pearl, Suay Sew Shop, and Trashie have stepped up to handle the excess, drawing attention to the ongoing role that fast fashion is playing in the climate crisis.
'Stop Donating Your Trash'
Mutual aid groups and everyday citizens leaped into action after the Palisades and Eaton fires forced over 100,000 people to evacuate their homes, setting up donation hubs to distribute food, masks, clothing, and hygiene products. They asked people to donate—and Angelenos did. Volunteers have been left to sort through the abundance and beg on social media: Stop donating your trash.
In a natural disaster, people are just trying to help, explains Samata Pattinson, founder and CEO of Black Pearl, a cultural sustainability company.
"And it's lovely, but it's also a moment for reflection of, well, why do we have so much and why is so much of it stuff we'd forgotten about?" she says. "So there's a way to reassess our relationship with what we now consume."
Black Pearl is working to make sure that all clothing donations at the Collidescope donation center are thoughtfully distributed and reused.
Their first priority: Getting items to families in need, especially new items donated by local clothing brands. When clothing manufacturers make too much, those items are typically thrown away or sold at a deep discount; Black Pearl is working to instead take that excess and match it to wildfire survivors.
Used items that are left can go to homeless shelters, pet shelters, art and design colleges for students who need textiles, and theater groups that need costumes.
Other companies have stepped up to handle the massive scale of clothing donations. Suay Sew Shop, an L.A.-based recycled fashion brand and retailer, has collected 50,000 pounds of clothing from overwhelmed donation sites, storing them for future upcycling.
On Jan. 17, about 100 volunteers helped the mail-in recycling startup Trashie load up a truck with 23,000 pounds of clothing from the Santa Anita Park pop-up donation center. Last week, the company collected an additional 50,000 pounds of clothing to send to its Texas-based recycling center.
"This is what happens during a natural disaster— there's excess clothing donations," says Annie Gullingsrud, Trashie's chief strategy officer. "They're mishandled, right? They're put into some storage or they're set somewhere. They get moldy; they end up in landfill."
Trashie normally handles 80,000 pounds of clothing on a weekly basis through its clothing recycling program, so the company was ready to step in. Customers across the U.S. can purchase a Take Back Bag to mail in used clothing and receive credit towards rewards.
Gullingsrud says that about 70% of a Trashie bag's contents get reused and about 20-25% is recycled. She estimates that about 60% of the clothing collected at Santa Anita Park is reusable.
"What we recommend is, donate what you would wear," she says.
"Things Don't Just Disappear"
Could this be a teaching moment for Americans who consume too much fast fashion?
"You can buy a dress for $2, so we have this influx of poorer quality disposable fashion," says Pattinson of Black Pearl. "People don't feel like they have to hold on to it for so long, because, you know, next week, I can get something new. So we're kind of creating this perfect storm of excess."
And it's not just on the consumer side—clothing producers are making too much, with 85% of discarded textiles ending up in landfills and incinerators. When you donate clothing to a thrift store, only about 20% of it is sold in-store. The rest is recycled, thrown away, or sent overseas to be sorted and resold.
This creates a "waste issue" for countries like Chile and Ghana, says Pattinson. People assume that their used clothing is going to help people, but that's not the case.
"I'm a British-born Ghanaian, so I know this really well. Like, 'Oh, we're just helping the poor kids in Africa that don't have clothes,'" she adds. "They have their own designers. They can make clothes … they want their local economies to grow, not just based on our waste."
In a disaster situation, donating clothing can create more work for already overwhelmed relief centers. "We're always educating people about the fact that things don't just disappear," says Gullingsrud.
Once excess clothing donations are sent to Trashie's recycling center, they go through a multiple-step grading and sorting process. Some items that are not needed will be sold, some will be recycled and some will be stored so that L.A.-based organizations can request specific items in the future.
Pattinson hopes that people can rethink their relationship to clothing—as a means of storytelling and self-expression, not just over-consumption.
"It's about buying, it's about mending, it's about customizing, it's about getting pre-loved. I think our wardrobe should be a curation of all of those things, not just all new things that we buy and wear once and forget about," she says. "They should be a collection of stories."
This story was produced through our Equitable Cities Fellowship for Social Impact Design, which is made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.