‘More Than a Store’: Why Goodwill Wants to be a Force for Textile Circularity
Goodwill wants to be known for more than selling people’s castoffs.
For more than 120 years, the charitable retailer has been a vital but frequently overlooked player in municipal waste management, creating job opportunities for the marginalized and in need by finding new outlets for old housewares, books, toys and clothing.
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Now, Goodwill wants to play a more active role in textile circularity—and not just spinning one person’s fashion regret into another’s sartorial score. It and fellow nonprofit Accelerating Circularity recently concluded a two-year million pilot, which was funded with a $1.28 million grant from the Walmart Foundation, to develop the skills and infrastructure to aggregate, sort and process textiles for reuse and recycling.
Up next is a $2 million traceability study, also funded by Walmart, that will support what it describes as a “multi-stakeholder initiative to follow the global journey of secondhand textiles” so it can understand where its goods are going, even if they’re being sold by third parties.
The idea behind both schemes is to figure out how Goodwill can better keep textiles out of landfills, both in North America, where the organization is based, and in the marketplaces of countries such as Chile and Ghana, which have become the “final sink” for the dregs of Western overconsumption.
As textile-to-textile recycling ladders up in scale in the United States and Europe to meet mounting consumer and regulatory appetite for lower-impact materials that clean up rather than add to fashion’s ballooning waste problem, Goodwill thinks it can play a role in helping with the systems shift that’s needed. In fact, it’s already built that way: 80 percent of the American population is within a stone’s throw of a Goodwill location.
“One of the biggest things to come out of this work is that first and foremost, Goodwills can really work together and be a partner for circularity,” said Jennifer Lake, CEO and president of Goodwill of the Finger Lakes, which serves the Rochester, Syracuse and Finger Lakes areas in upstate New York.
Goodwill works on a federated model, comprising 154 individual and independent affiliates that operate 3,300 locations across the United States and Canada. While there are sometimes concerns about whether everyone can “row the boat in the same direction,” as Lake put it, the results of the first study showed there was a willingness to combine oars to ensure that the stuff locations were already receiving was reaching recyclers in a harmonized and consolidated manner.
There is plenty of grist, too, as the 2022 pilot discovered. Most of the materials identified during a particularly laborious fiber-composition analysis phase were cotton, polyester and poly-cotton blends. Roughly 60 percent of this was amenable to existing mechanical or chemical recycling technologies.
The initiative also created four regional textiles hubs in Canada, Michigan, the Northeast and the Southeast that represented 25 Goodwill locations in total. These hubs sorted and graded post-consumer textiles to identify reusable materials that could be resold and nonreusable ones as feedstock that were up to recyclers’ specifications. It’s such hubs, said Steve Preston, president and CEO of Goodwill Industries International, that are a missing piece of the infrastructure necessary to drive efficiency and economies of scale.
“We really need to have a number of our regions working together to generate sufficient volume to feed the industry, and that’s why that’s so important,” he said. “We can both aggregate volumes to provide feedstock, and we understand what we get well enough to have confidence that the feedstock will be there.”
Walmart isn’t a name that jumps immediately to mind when textile circularity is mentioned, but the big-box giant’s philanthropic arm has been a keen investor of the work that is going on behind the scenes, even helping underwrite Accelerating Circularity’s initial trials in 2021.
“The Walmart Foundation invested in Goodwill Industries International to help keep textiles out of landfills and increase the volume of material recovered for reuse and recycling,” Julie Gehrki, vice president and chief operating officer at the Walmart Foundation said in an emailed statement. “Ultimately, by investing in traceability of items not sold in Goodwill locations around the country, the learnings from these pilots will help Goodwill develop a model to keep textiles at their highest use and a roadmap to scale best practices across their network.”
Goodwill has also worked with Amsterdam-headquartered innovation platform Fashion for Good on trialing curbside pickup for textiles, which is replete with challenges such as potential contamination from liquid or food waste, damage from adverse weather and the unpredictability of collection volumes because people tend to declutter in bursts. The nonprofit also glommed onto the fact that technology trials for sortation and other forms of preparation must be a priority because many of its employees are differently abled, meaning that adaptations will need to be made. The resources needed both within Goodwill and on a municipal, state and national level will be significant.
“We also see our role is figuring out how most effectively to partner with the best players: of developing technology, that are willing to invest in infrastructure, brands,” Preston said. “I think we can be a big solution for brands and retailers in this space. We’d love for them to give us things that can be resold because we think we do a good job of that. We could provide a multitude of capabilities.”
Lake said that the Northeast hub, which is still going strong, is under NDA with several different recyclers, as well as some emerging businesses “that have an interest in this space.” To hit scale, however, Goodwill will need to exploit the limits of what it can do—and draw in the capital it needs to build up staffing, equipment and facilities that could leverage things like AI to grease the pipeline.
“The stigma of buying from Goodwill just isn’t there anymore,” she said. “[But] I think a lot of people still don’t realize how much more than a store Goodwill really is.”
Preston agreed. Getting things right will be a multi-year journey, but there’s slow and steady and then there’s slow but stuck. For now, Goodwill is actively engaging with the likes of the Rochester Institute of Technology and sortation systems Tomra and Sortile.
“It takes time to do it, but we need to be on that pathway today if we’re going to be successful tomorrow,” he said. “We need to grab the mantle and realize that we have an opportunity for leadership in the area.“
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