What happens to…..
to 50,000 lbs of extra LA wildfire clothing donations?
Victoria Namkung
28 January 2025
The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/28/california-wildfires-clothing-donations-suay-sew-shop
Businesses like Suay Sew Shop are trying to salvage piles of damaged textiles – and warn of the dangers of climate impact and overconsumption
At Suay Sew Shop in Los Angeles’s arts district, mounds of clothes are piled high in a warehouse. The T-shirts, socks, jackets and denim are surplus donations from the LA wildfires that community groups across the city were unable to distribute because they had too much already, or because the items were dirty, damaged or poorly made.
Instead of letting the clothes go to a landfill, where they can cause a host of environmental problems, Suay has rescued 50,000lb of textiles so they can be cleaned, sorted and upcycled by professional designers and seamstresses/seamsters. Since LA currently has no permanent textile recycling or collection, it’s up to groups like Suay to save as many textiles as possible before they get dumped or exported.
“To see the overwhelming influx of textiles donations here in Los Angeles in response to the devastating wildfires just shows how the current systems in place have failed us all,” said Suay’s co-founder and CEO Lindsay Rose Medoff. “We have to draw the connections to our everyday consumption and disposal habits. Until we draw these connections, the same overproduction that is impacting our climate and resulting in these disasters will continue to strengthen.”
Experts say a surge in donations can actually impede relief efforts since volunteers have to handle sudden influxes of clothing when they are unwearable or unwanted. Without a climate-informed approach, well-intentioned donations are likely to end up in landfills or polluting deserts and beaches in other parts of the world. A leading industrial polluter, the fashion industry is responsible for about 10% of global carbon emissions, and the rise of “fast fashion”, cheap garments that are only worn a few times, is a major contributor to our environmental crisis.
Suay expects to take on additional donations in the coming weeks as other centers in the Los Angeles area continue shutting down, and say they will find a way to upcycle them into the fire aid relief support they were meant for. Suay was among the first to mobilize, creating a free store for LA fire victims that features stylish clothing and textiles that allow people to replace lost items with dignity. It’s open daily and located upstairs from their retail shop, which sells Suay’s upcycled fashion and home goods, from mini mesh tote bags made from old sports jerseys to oven mitts remade from flannel and denim, and one-of-a-kind dresses fashioned from vintage T-shirts.
They are asking people to support fire victims by sponsoring a $20 Suay It Forward bag of clothes to be sorted, donated and upcycled into free materials for fire victims and other members of the community in need.
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Since 2017, Suay has taken in enormous volumes of clothing and upcycled unused textiles into remade apparel and home goods, diverting more than 4m lbs of textiles from landfills in the process. Their “zero-landfill, zero-export system” means excess donations are handled responsibly.
“One of the biggest impacts stemming from excess donations is the reappearance of these textiles in developing countries,” said Jessica Kosak, who teaches courses on sustainable systems in fashion at ASU FIDM. “They don’t necessarily have the waste infrastructure we have here in the US, and they can’t effectively dispose of these materials, so the result is things end up in waterways, on beaches and in our oceans and that contributes to pollution overall.”