Parachute Teams With SuperCircle on Textile Take-Back Program
Los Angeles-based home textiles company Parachute has partnered with reverse-logistics platform SuperCircle to launch a new recycling program for the company’s bedding, towels and robes.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 85 percent of textiles end up in landfills each year, where it can take hundreds of years for them to break down. The EPA’s most recent data from 2018 showed that 11.3 million tons of textiles ended up in municipal solid waste landfills.
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“Home linens are less frequently resold or donated when consumers are done with them, making them a particularly problematic category environmentally,” Chloe Songer, co-founder and CEO of SuperCircle, said. “When linens end up in landfill, they can take 80 to 1,000 years to break down, releasing harmful toxins and greenhouse gases, polluting waterways and soil systems, and contributing to warming.”
Parachute founder Ariel Kaye said the company wanted to find a way to help divert that waste by offering recycling options to customers.
“We hope to encourage consumers to get in the habit of recycling their home textiles instead of throwing them away,” she explained. “We are making it easy by simplifying the recycling process for used sheets and towels in a way that really hasn’t been done before at scale.”
At its 26 stores across the United States, Parachute will accept customer donations of sheets, towels, pillows and robes in any condition. Working with SuperCircle, Parachute will sort and recycle donated items for new uses, including new textiles, furniture batting, insulation and padding.
“SuperCircle has diverted more than two million textiles from landfills, which equates to approximately 300,000 pounds of CO2e not released into our atmosphere,” Kaye said. “We began working with them about a year ago to leverage our limited return waste, and have already seen a positive impact—diverting 26,648 pounds of textile waste from landfills and saving 12,924 pounds of CO2e. With this consumer-forward program, we’ll be able to significantly increase the scale of our partnership and ensure nothing goes to landfills.”
Parachute will offer customers a discount on new products when they donate used items for recycling. Kaye said they hope to not only get consumers in the habit of recycling unwanted textiles, but also show other retailers how they can help reduce waste.
“We hope to truly change the behavior and continue to educate the consumer on the impact that recycling can truly make,” she added. “We also hope to raise the bar in the retail industry. We know that taking responsibility for the end-of-life of our products is the right thing to do, and we’d like to see consumer brands across the board do the same so that the collective action can generate the needed support for initiatives like this.”
Sustainability has always been a part of Parachute’s DNA, with the company using GOTS-certified and Oeko-Tex-certified materials, according to Kaye. And with consumers becoming more cognizant of the sustainability profiles of the products they buy, she believes this initiative will allow customers to be a part of the circularity movement in a way that’s easy and effective.
“We know that when those sheets and towels are simply no longer up to the task, there has to be something better than letting them go to waste,” Kaye said. “We also know our consumer is increasingly conscious of the environmental impact of their purchases and the things they bring into their home. We want to ensure that we’re offering them practical and easy-to-adopt solutions that don’t feel like an extra burden.”
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