In New York State’s Hudson Valley, Lilly Marsh weaves scarves, shawls, and other apparel out of fibers sourced from the Northeast. The items are beautiful and informed by historical techniques—for her Ph.D., Marsh studied contemporary North American hand knitting—but her interest in producing woven goods goes far beyond the final product. In 2017 Marsh co-founded the Hudson Valley Textile Project (HVTP), a natural-textile supply chain that aims to break free from the global fashion industry.
One big problem the HVTP set out to solve involves wool. After sheep are shorn at farms, the wool is greasy and needs to be cleaned, or scoured, before it can be worked with. For years the scouring facility closest to New York was in North Carolina, and it had a 1,000-pound minimum for processing—an amount most small farms can’t reach on a yearly basis. Using money from grants and private donations, the HVTP opened Clean Fleece, a local scouring facility that washes small batches of wool and other animal fibers. “It’s enabled a ton of farmers who want to work on a small or mid-size scale to get that done,” Marsh says. “That’s made a big difference in our industry.” Now farms across the region are selling socks, hats and mittens on a consistent basis—and at prices that are comparable to those of similar products from major brands.
The HVTP now has more than 160 members working up and down the supply chain, including Marsh. The work hasn’t been easy, she says, and they’ve faced a handful of setbacks, such as a recent flood at a favorite dyeing facility. Also, many artisans who want to scale up production are having trouble finding enough employees trained in the craft. “We’re trying to restart an industry that left the U.S. 40 years ago or more,” Marsh says. “It’s hard to find skilled work.” But, she adds, the benefits of nurturing a local textile industry are many: more transparent supply chains, support for local economies and regenerative farming practices, less waste, fewer emissions, and a profound sense of community and interconnectedness. “We all know each other in some way,” Marsh says of her colleagues. “It’s an accountability system because I care about your well-being. I think that’s kind of incalculable.”
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A child wears pants by brand Petit Pli, which makes clothing items that adapt to the wearer through several sizes of growth. Flexible-size clothing also exists for adults, which means people don’t have to buy new items when their bodies change.
The HVTP is one part of a growing effort to mitigate the harms of the global fashion industry, in which millions of low-paid garment workers around the world endure unsafe working conditions to churn out huge amounts of clothing and textiles year after year. The pull on the planet’s natural resources is immense: Annual textile production uses up enough water to fill at least 37 million Olympic-size swimming pools. Cotton agriculture alone uses 2.1 percent of the world’s arable land. And because roughly 60 percent of global textiles now contain plastic derived from fossil fuels, it is estimated that more than a third of the microplastics in the oceans today were shed from clothing.
The fashion industry is also responsible for up to 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions—more than the aviation and shipping industries combined. If apparel consumption continues to grow at its current rate, by 2050 the industry will be using more than one quarter of the world’s carbon budget. The problem becomes even worse when you consider that most clothes make a quick trip to the landfill, where they’ll emit greenhouse gases such as methane.
These numbers reflect a growing appetite for fast fashion, a business model that brings trendy designs to the m***es as quickly and cheaply as possible. As clothing consumption rises, the consumer tends to shoulder the blame. But what’s enabled things to get this bad is a lack of regulation.
Despite being worth some $1.7 trillion, the global fashion industry has for years been allowed to operate with little transparency or oversight. “There’s nothing stopping a brand from churning out an insane number of products,” says Kate Hobson-Lloyd, the fashion-ratings manager at Good On You, a website that monitors and rates fashion brands’ sustainability. “There’s nothing to incentivize brands to not operate on a fast-fashion model,” she says. “If there’s money to be made, they’re going to do it.”
Projections indicate that by 2030 the world will be producing 134 million tons of textile waste every year.
Some new regulations are meant to make the industry more accountable. The European Union, for instance, recently started requiring fashion and textile brands to report transparently on their greenhouse gas emissions and supply-chain labor practices; improve their products’ durability and recyclability; and take responsibility for collecting and recycling clothing and footwear, essentially encouraging a circular textile economy. The E.U. also moved to restrict microplastics in textiles and introduced a rule requiring that clothing come with a “p***port” that gives shoppers a detailed rundown of a product’s life cycle, including its origins, manufacturing process, environmental footprint, and safe disposal or recycling instructions.
The p***port concept speaks to consumers who are more and more aware of the industry’s harms—in one international 2025 survey, 70 percent of consumers said sustainability is a factor when they’re shopping for clothes. But making responsible and informed decisions is increasingly complicated. Are clothes made from plant fibers such as cotton and linen always better than polyester and other synthetics derived from petrochemicals? What about recycled materials made from plastics? And how do you know that an innovative material that’s better for the environment isn’t harming the people who make it?
With some T-shirts, reading the tag is not unlike trying to decipher a food label making a barrage of claims that may not be standardized or enforceable. Nearly 60 percent of brands are behind on achieving even their own self-imposed sustainability goals. Greenwashing—when brands make misleading claims about the impact of their sustainability efforts—is “an absolutely enormous problem” in the fashion industry, Hobson-Lloyd says.
The HVTP isn’t waiting for top-down initiatives to change the fashion industry. And it has company. Fibershed, which started in 2011, involves a regional community of farmers, textile producers and artisans who make clothes from regenerative materials sourced and ***embled within a 150-mile radius. The initiative, which began in California, has now grown to 79 Fibershed textile economies operating across 18 countries. Movements such as these are making it easier to participate in accessible alternatives to fast fashion—all while bringing some fun back to getting dressed.
The true scale of the modern fashion machine is difficult to gauge. Brands aren’t required to disclose how many new garments they produce every year, so most of them simply don’t. But our landfills provide clues. In the U.S. alone, at least 17 million tons of textiles are discarded annually, which works out to about 100 pounds of clothes per person. Projections indicate that by 2030 the world will be producing 134 million tons of textile waste every year.
While the E.U. is “regulating the heck [out] of the fashion industry,” says Rachel Van Metre Kibbe, founder and CEO of advisory firm Circular Services Group, things in the U.S. are moving more slowly. In 2024 California introduced the nation’s first extended producer-responsibility law for apparel and textiles, which puts the onus on brands to ensure their products don’t end up in landfills. Similar bills are pending in New York State and Washington State.
Van Metre Kibbe says the success of California’s bill isn’t guaranteed. “We’re about to start collecting the most clothes we’ve ever collected in U.S. history,” she says, emphasizing that there is almost no infrastructure in place for such an endeavor. The waste could simply get transferred to another warehouse in another country, which wouldn’t be a success at all. Although state bills are a start, Van Metre Kibbe says, federal regulation is needed. To get there, we need to frame the regulation of textile waste as an opportunity. “We have to make the business case for why this is the future,” she says. “There are job opportunities and manufacturing opportunities. Ultimately, it should be more cost-effective to reuse materials.”
“Recycled versions are preferable, but the recycled content of that fiber could be less than 10 percent.” —Kate Hobson-Lloyd, Good On You
Donating unwanted clothes rather than throwing them out isn’t an effective solution to the growing waste problem. Charity shops are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of low-quality garments they receive, and many of these items are exported or thrown away. In a study published last year in the journal Nature Cities, researchers said charity shops are unintentionally shielding the public from the true volume of overconsumption and postconsumer textile waste. The authors called for investment in new circular business models such as clothing rental and upcycling.
In Los Angeles, the Suay Sew Shop is an innovative model for how this kind of business might work on a larger scale. It operates a circular textile-recycling program, taking in a significant amount of unwanted clothes from brands and the local community. Suay deconstructs these items and then patchworks the materials into funky-chic garments and home goods. Old jeans get turned into jackets, nylon track pants into wrap skirts, flannel shirts into oven mitts. “We can do something with everything,” says Suay co-founder Lindsay Rose Medoff. “We can use the cheap stuff, finding ways to really transform it.” The company says its operations have diverted more than four million pounds of textile waste from landfills since 2017.
At the same time, Medoff says she is committed to prioritizing worker rights, creating a positive and safe working environment, and paying Suay employees well for their skills. Labor, she says, is her biggest cost, and she’s aiming to set up a worker-owned business model.
These photographs show parts of the process of turning abacá banana plants into Bananatex fabric, which was created by Swiss bag brand QWSTION. (From left to right): Abacá banana plants grow in their natural habitat in the Philippines. Abacá fibers are stripped at a harvesting site. The raw fibers are collected at a warehouse. Compressed abacá fiber bales are shipped to a processing facility, where the fiber is made into yarn and then warped before the weaving process begins. The yarn is woven into Bananatex fabric. Abacá fibers are made into paper before being cut and spun into yarn. Designers review zero-waste pattern designs for their products.
Suay’s operations are unconventional because donating to the shop isn’t “free.” Customers pay $20 to offload 20 pounds of textiles, and they get $20 of in-store credit in return, which they can spend on upcycled clothes, repair services or one of Suay’s workshops. The customers’ money supports the shop, and in turn the shop supports a behavioral shift toward more sustainability.
Suay isn’t a cottage operation. It’s a team of about 50 workers who have completed an extensive in-house training program to learn the art of upcycling at scale. They sort, prep, clean, dye and rework textiles from the community and from apparel brands. In the days following the Los Angeles fires in January 2025, the shop received more than 100,000 pounds of donated textiles. Medoff is trying to get funding to expand in the most impactful ways, perhaps by building a hub for training on upcycling. “Suay cannot repair every pair of jeans in the world,” she says, “but it really has the skills to teach people how to do that on a larger scale.”
Clothes often end up discarded because of tears, missing buttons, frayed hems, stubborn stains and moth holes. Up until the 1960s, mending worn-out clothes was the societal norm. “It was supercommon knowledge,” explains Sara Idacavage, a fashion historian and sustainable-fashion educator who is currently getting her Ph.D. at the University of Georgia. With the rise of cheap clothes and fast fashion, much of this repair culture has been lost.
Flora Collingwood-Norris, a knitwear designer based in Scotland, is one person trying to bring it back, but with a twist. Using so-called visible creative mending, she fixes a garment’s flaws by patching and darning in contrasting colors and patterns. The objective is not to repair a hole by blending the repair in as much as possible but to give a sweater a custom—and imperfect—new mark.
Jen Christiansen; Source: Plastic in Textiles: Potentials for Circularity and Reduced Environmental and Climate Impacts, by Saskia Manshoven, Anse Smeets, Mona Arnold and Lars Fogh Mortensen, Published by European Topic Center on Waste and Materials in a Green Economy, 2021; and Facilitating a Circular Economy for Textiles Workshop Report, by Kelsea Schumacher and Amanda L. Forster, Published by National Institute of Standards and Technology, May 2022 (references)
“Not only do you feel like you have something new in your wardrobe, because you’ve just changed it, but you get to enjoy the creative process,” says Collingwood-Norris, author of Visible Creative Mending for Knitwear. At 39 years old, she still has (and continues to wear) most of the sweaters she owned when she was a teenager—but these days they’re covered in her bright stitching and delicately embroidered flowers. Her jeans are “more mend than the original jeans,” she says.
Studies show that the main reason people don’t mend their clothes is that they simply don’t know how. Visible mending doesn’t have a steep learning curve, Collingwood-Norris says. “You just need a needle, some yarn and a pair of scissors.” You can also pick and choose which technique you like most. If darning is too complicated, try patching instead. “They’re both valid, and they’re both going to fix your hole,” she says.
Collingwood-Norris began teaching online workshops on visible mending in 2019. Since then, her workshops have become the most successful part of her knitwear business. She’s also noticed many more knitwear companies and brands offering mending services and workshops. Womenswear brand TOAST, for instance, offers visible mending as part of a free repair service.
Jen Christiansen; Source: “Microfibres from Apparel and Home Textiles: Prospects for Including Microplastics in Environmental Sustainability Assessment,” by Beverley Henry, Kirsi Laitala and Ingun Grimstad Klepp, in Science of the Total Environment, Vol. 652; February 20, 2019 (primary reference)
People also discard clothes because of fit. This is especially true for children, who can outgrow seven or eight sizes in the first two years of their lives. The authors of one small study found that size or poor fit was the number-one reason for throwing out children’s clothes, accounting for 47 percent of all discarded items. To address this problem, some new brands are designing clothes that grow with kids.
Clothes from U.K.-based company Petit Pli have intricate pleating that allows the fabric to expand or collapse to make the garment larger or smaller. Founder and CEO Ryan Mario Yasin, a former aerospace engineer, got the idea while designing instruments that can be packed inside nanosatellites and then deployed in orbit. “It involved a lot of research into origami and folding little carbon-fiber panels into a two-millimeter gap,” Yasin says.
The three sizes Petit Pli offers in its children’s line cover kids for the first nine years of their lives. The prices range from about $75 to $130 per item. “So, yes, it’s more expensive initially,” Yasin says. “But it’s cheaper in the long run.”
Adults’ bodies aren’t static, either. There is now an abundance of so-called flexible fashion that can accommodate fluctuations in weight or body shape. There are one-size-fits-all garments designed to stretch and spring back, as well as a clothing line made specifically to adjust to body changes during pregnancy, postpartum, and beyond. When the brand Universal Standard launched in 2024, its CEO announced it would offer free exchanges if one of its garments lost its fit.
Climate activist and drag artist Pattie Gonia wears a dress made from upcycled tent fabric by designer Bradley Sharpe. Bonded technical fabrics used for tents and water-resistant apparel are often made of materials sourced from petroleum products. Upcycling—or repurposing—materials is an effective way to keep unwanted items or scrap fabric out of landfills.
Sustainable fashion doesn’t have to mean no new purchases. Knowing some basics about different fibers and how they function can help you pick items that will best meet your needs, letting you stock your closet with things you’re more likely to wear, enjoy and take care of for a long time. There are three main types of fibers used in textile production: natural plant fibers such as cotton and linen; natural animal fibers such as wool; and synthetic or human-made fibers, which include plastic-derived materials, such as polyester and nylon, and viscose, a common material made from wood pulp [see “A Taxonomy of Textile Fiber Types” graphic to learn more].
Each material has its merits and purposes as well as its cons. Natural fibers are renewable and, depending on how they’re processed, potentially biodegradable. They also require huge amounts of land and water to grow, and these crops are often treated with hazardous fertilizers and pesticides. Their supply chains can be rife with human- and animal-rights violations. When buying clothing made from natural fibers, look for labeling that guarantees it is certified organic, such as the Global Organic Textile Standard.
Synthetic fibers such as polyester, nylon and acrylic are made from plastic derived from petrochemicals. They’re ubiquitous in modern fashion and account for roughly 60 percent of global fiber production. These materials are cheap and versatile, but they also contribute hugely to plastic pollution. A single laundry load of polyester clothes will shed somewhere between 640,000 and 1.5 million plastic microfibers per wash. And when these clothes end up in a landfill, they emit greenhouse gases such as methane and release dangerous chemicals into the surrounding environment as they decompose over hundreds of years.
Human-made cellulosic fibers such as viscose rayon, modal, Lyocell and cupro are technically renewable because they’re derived from trees (or, more specifically, from cellulose, the molecule that gives trees their structure). The process of extracting the cellulose from wood pulp and converting it into usable fiber filaments relies on harsh chemicals, and the manufacture of these fabrics contributes to deforestation.
“People are still interested in fashion trends. It’s hard not to get swept up in those. We just don’t have to do it so mindlessly.” —Alyssa Beltempo, sustainable stylist
Recycled versions of all these fabrics exist, and “from an environmental perspective, recycled versions are preferable,” Hobson-Lloyd says. It is important to remember, however, that recycled materials still require the consumption of energy and water to be converted into something suitable for clothing manufacture. Clothing labels with vague references to recycled materials can be misleading. “The recycled content could actually be less than 10 percent,” Hobson-Lloyd says. Also, brands might say a garment is made from “recycled” material when what they mean is that the item can be recycled eventually if the consumer so chooses.
Some big-name brands are investing in R&D to clean up the industry, including through the use of biodegradable polyester alternatives and enzymes that make it possible to infinitely recycle plastic synthetic fibers. Others are developing textiles through advanced manufacturing processes. Bananatex, a natural fabric made by Swiss bag brand QWSTION, is derived from the fibers of the abacá banana plant, which grows in the Philippines and doesn’t require fertilizers or pesticides.
Because the abacá plant thrives in the shade of taller plants, it can’t be grown as a monoculture, which makes it a good candidate for reforestation projects. Unlike most other trees cut down for their cellulose, the abacá plant regenerates: each tree grows suckers—small shoots that develop at the base of the plant and grow again after being cut back. Workers harvest these suckers for their strong fibers and leave the rest of the plant intact. The fibers are dried and woven into a durable fabric that has been incorporated into designs from major brands, including Balenciaga, Stella McCartney and H&M.
This cardigan was mended by Flora Collingwood-Norris, who uses a “visible creative mending” technique to fix holes and tears and extend the life of knit garments. The method allows for flexibility and imperfection, making it more accessible to people who want to mend their own clothes.
But not all solutions involve technological innovation. Hemp, for instance, grows fast, retains water, prevents soil erosion, encourages biodiversity, is an impressive carbon sink and, like the abacá plant, can be grown without pesticides. These traits make hemp a very sustainable alternative to cotton. Hemp products are now much more widely available than they were even a few years ago, and some brands make entire clothing lines from the plant. The global hemp-fiber market is projected to grow from $5.76 billion to $23.57 billion between 2022 and 2030.
The fashion industry continues to be propelled by rapidly shifting and seasonal trends. But growing awareness of the harms of fast fashion has inspired the “shop your closet” movement, which encourages consumers to re-create inspired styles using items they already own instead of buying something new.
This idea had a big moment on social media last year when fashion writer and blockyst Mandy Lee started the #75hardstylechallenge, which encourages people to doblockent their efforts to shop their closet for 75 days. Lee wrote that more than 70,000 people joined in. It’s fitting, in a way, that Instagram and TikTok—platforms awash with the fashion hauls and try-on videos that have helped supercharge the fast-fashion movement—can be harnessed to nudge people toward sustainable habits.
“It’s about a mindset shift,” says Alyssa Beltempo, a slow-fashion content creator and sustainable stylist. “People are still interested in fashion trends. It’s hard not to get swept up in those. We just don’t have to do it so mindlessly.” Beltempo teaches shop-your-closet techniques on her YouTube channel, which has nearly 300,000 subscribers. She starts with what she calls the “elements of style,” the basic, broad categories that underpin every outfit: things like silhouette, proportion, texture and use of color.
Beltempo encourages people to take inspiration from these elements rather than trying to replicate an outfit they’ve seen on someone else. “Do you actually like that sweater, or do you like the vibe it’s giving?” she asks. “Do you like how it’s styled with a wide-leg pant? Then maybe it’s the proportions you like. Maybe it’s the use of color that you like, and it has nothing to do with the sweater that [someone else is] wearing.” By teasing apart what appeals to you about an outfit that flashes across your social feed, you can think about how to re-create something similar with your current wardrobe rather than making a spontaneous purchase. This level of consideration “is joyful and engaging, and it allows the consumer to feel good about themselves,” Beltempo says. Not only is it better for the environment, “it’s better for you,” she adds.
Moth Snow of Touch Threads fashion brand works on the production floor at Green Matters Natural Dye Company in Pennsylvania. Green Matters uses botanical dyes—sourced from plants such as indigo and restaurant scraps such as avocado pits—to color clothing.
To that end, Beltempo gives her followers basic tips for avoiding impulse buys, such as always shopping with a list and implementing a 24-hour pause before buying something new. “It just gives you that space to think and serves as a trigger to be like, ‘Wait, do I have anything at home that can do that job already?’” she explains.
Sometimes, though, the items in our closet seem stale. Maybe the colors have faded from years of washing and sun exposure. One way to reinvigorate old clothes is to re-dye them. But not all methods are the same.
The textile industry uses more than 10,000 tons of synthetic dyes every year, many of them laced with toxic heavy metals that get released through factories’ untreated wastewater and wreak havoc on soil health and aquatic ecosystems. According to the European Parliament, textile dyeing and finishing are responsible for about 20 percent of pollution of clean water worldwide.
These dyes can be toxic for humans, too. Textile dyes in the largest commercial cl***, known as azo dyes, can release carcinogenic compounds when they come into contact with the bacteria on human skin. The E.U. and the U.S. both have some restrictions on azo dyes in clothing, but these regulations are patchy.
There is an alternative: botanicals have been used to dye textiles for millennia. To extract a plant’s unique coloring, people simmer its roots, seeds, bark or leaves at low heat until the water changes color. To help the dye bind to fabric, manufacturers treat clothes with a nontoxic mineral mordant such as a food-grade aluminum sulfate. When the dyeing process is done, the water can simply go down the drain without risk of harm to the watershed, and the remaining pigments and plant matter can be composted.
Until synthetic dyes were created, this was the way all textiles were imbued with color. Green Matters Natural Dye Company in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, is trying to bring this technique back to the mainstream. Owner Winona Quigley says the company often uses local plants or even food waste from restaurants in its dye recipes. “We have a shed in our parking lot that has hundreds of thousands of dried avocado pits in it,” she says. “We work with local restaurants to collect those.” The pits impart a dusky pink color.
Green Matters attracts commercial clients that are looking to turn away from synthetic dyes in their textile and clothing production. It is one of the only dye houses in the U.S. producing solely plant-based dyes on an industrial scale. But much of the company’s recent growth has come from people looking to breathe new life into their own garments. To meet this demand, Quigley launched custom dye services for individuals in 2022, including a community “dye lot of the month” club that has quickly become her most popular service. For $35, people can mail in their natural textiles to be dyed in one big batch, with colors rotating monthly. Recent offerings include “eggplant,” a dark violet made from the root of the Rubia tinctorum plant, commonly known as madder.
Quigley says this side of the business grew 800 percent in 2024. “We’ve been really excited that there are people who want to have tools to keep their own garments out of the landfill,” she says. People also send in their sheets and tablecloths (which can be tie-dyed to offset any stains)—and even their wedding dresses and precious but outdated family heirlooms. “It’s more than just a piece of clothing,” Quigley says. “It’s a piece of family history, and seeing people turn it into something that’s a part of their life is really touching.”
Sending in a batch of well-loved clothes to be dyed a new color doesn’t take any more time or effort than sending back an impulse clothing purchase that doesn’t fit. It’s less expensive than buying new, and you’ll still get the joy of receiving and unwrapping a package. Sustainable fashion doesn’t have to be a chore or financially inaccessible or staid—you can have fun while sending a message to the fast-fashion industry. “I think people can feel very empowered to take action to keep their own garments out of the landfill,” Quigley says. “These are choices we can make that will have an impact on companies’ sales.”
