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News accounts of tech breakthroughs today often focus on AI, but another area of the tech revolution gets fewer headlines: recycling. The revolution in recycling—involving spectral analysis, robotic sorters, and chemical processes—ultimately depends on first collecting enough materials to sort and convert. And at the forefront of this Silicon Valley-type of tech breakthrough is Goodwill.
Goodwill? Really?
Most of us think of Goodwill as a kindly nonprofit organization that happily takes our old sweaters and couches, sets its staff to sprucing them up, then offers them for resale at extremely affordable prices.
At least that is where Goodwill started in 1902. It collected used clothing and household goods from wealthy Boston residents, hired unemployed people to repair them, and gave the repaired clothing and furniture to its workers or resold the items in its used goods stores. The motto was, “A hand up, not a hand out.” It worked so well the organization spread worldwide.
But now Goodwill of the Finger Lakes—whose region spans Greater Rochester plus stores and donation centers as far as Syracuse—is evolving its mission of recycling. The new motto might be, “Everything and everybody can reinvent their purpose.”
Jennifer Lake, president and CEO of Goodwill of the Finger Lakes, is working along with other Goodwill International executive members to take the century-old organization deeper into the new world of not only reuse but entirely metamorphosed new products using recently developed tech solutions.
A key element Goodwill brings to the table is an unbeatable collection network. Goodwill of the Finger Lakes covers 20 counties across New York and employs about 800 people. In 2023, its revenues topped $53 million. The organization has 12 stores and 12 donation centers in the Rochester area with plans to open three more stores this year, and a total of 29 over the next 10 years. To get a sense of scale, McDonalds has about 20 restaurants in the Rochester area. Nationally, Goodwill estimates 83 percent of the population is within 10 miles of one of its stores or collection centers.
The clothes we throw away
Few realize the sheer volume of clothing that Americans throw away. Last year’s school clothing is too small, this year’s summer outfits won’t work in the fall. The whole retail fashion business is focused on getting us to see style as a passing whim. The Environmental Protection Agency reports that Americans throw away some 17 million tons of clothing every year.
When I grew up in Rochester, I owned five button-down shirts, one for each school day and one pair of khaki pants. I also had a pair of jeans, rolled up at the bottom—as was the fashion (but you could not wear jeans to school). In the summer, boys wore “pullovers” (T-shirts) and shorts.
Clothing was expensive. Kids were dragged to Sibley’s or McCurdy’s or Edwards every fall to buy new, bigger sizes. This was the world long before Walmart, Target, Old Navy and Gap. With the spread of worldwide manufacturing, clothing has become cheap enough to throw away. Chains like H&M are noted for their rapid change of inventory. Wait a few weeks and that blouse you loved and wanted to buy may have disappeared.
What happens to all the unsold shorts after summer ends? Where do they go? Chain stores have contracts with waste haulers to take “overstock” to landfills. We follow a similar path by tossing old clothing in the garbage because the local hauling companies will not take them in the recycling bin.The alternative is giving it to Goodwill.
With its formidable ability to collect, repair, warehouse, resell and also offload great quantities of used clothing, Goodwill is a natural fit for new efforts to increase the subsequent use of textiles.
Where does it all go?
Donations pour in at Goodwill centers and workers “process” what is good enough to resell. All the sorting team members quickly judge each garment. A nice winter coat that is clean except for a spot that can be removed will make someone else warm. A man’s shirt with one button missing can be repaired. What about items beyond fixing? Anything that can’t be fixed, or does not sell in one of Goodwill’s stores, is returned to the warehouse next to the Clearance Center at 1555 Jefferson Road for one last shot. If it still doesn’t sell, it joins the pile of textiles to be baled and sold into the commodities market. Some are resold as clothing in foreign countries, some finds other uses like rags, mattress stuffing and insulation. The trade term is “downcycling.”
According to the state Department of Environmental Conservation about 20 percent of textiles like clothing, shoes (like sneakers), household goods (like curtains, towels ) are collected, retained, refurbished and reused. But the other 80 percent is the problem. Forty percent of that is natural fiber items that can be used again as clothing (mostly sold in bulk to overseas brokers); 20 percent is downcycled into fabrics for carpets, mattresses, or home insulation; and 20 percent is turned into wiping cloths or ends up in other industrial uses including fiber for paper. (I’ve often wondered if the little flecks of red and blue thread visible in a new dollar bill started life as someone’s Christmas sweater.) But these figures only explain uses for natural fibers. What about all the made-made fabrics like polyester?
You can usually tell you are wearing something made of polyester (most commonly a type of polymer called polyethylene terephthalate, often abbreviated as PET) because it does not breathe as well as cotton or wool and can feel itchy on the skin. Much of today’s clothing is a mixture of natural and man-made fibers—what Lake calls “franken fabrics” (like Frankenstein). These man-made fabrics are extremely difficult to downcycle to other uses. The vast majority of clothing containing polyester will be buried forever in landfills. Polyester takes 450 years to disintegrate. Our record on recycling all plastics is dismal enough—about 5 percent. But man-made textiles? A paltry 1 percent.
Landfills are filling up
Visiting a modern landfill like High Acres, the one Waste Management operates in Perinton, gives you a sense of the vast waste created daily. The 12,000-acre site, like similar sites across the country, is nearing capacity. Each day sees an endless line of dumptrucks, refuse collection trucks, and “walking trailers” (long semis that haul municipal waste). Everything is dumped on the landfill where weighted crushers run back and forth to compress the mass. As one section fills up, layers of soil and special impervious blanket covers are placed on top. The buried volume is so great that Waste Management can run its trucks on gases generated by decomposition.
What happens when the landfills are full? The New York State Thruway is not a major waste corridor near Rochester because it does not serve major population centers. Stand on a bridge over I-80 or I-76, in Pennsylvania, however, and you can see an endless line of walking trailers heading west from New York and New Jersey bound for landfills in western Pennsylvania and Ohio. Moving waste by truck or train is not a solution, only a way of stalling the inevitable time when these open landfills also close. What do we do then, move it to Mars?
Goodwill joins the circular economy
Goodwill has joined with the Walmart Foundation and Waste Management to find solutions. One answer is to convert waste textiles made of polyester into new thread that can be woven into new clothing. The essence of the “circular economy” (those three little arrows on all plastic containers and bottles) is that nothing should be wasted. A conference that set the direction was held in Rochester last year with representatives from 11 regional chapters of Goodwills (representing roughly one-third to the U.S. population). Goodwill of the Finger Lakes is leading the Northeast circularity hub. Several businesses worldwide are experimenting with the process of creating new textile materials from waste clothing. Lake recently visited the Reju company’s pilot plant in Frankfurt, Germany, named Regeneration Hub Zero, to see how the process works.
Google’s AI description of Reju includes many tongue-twisters: “Reju recycled polyester is created using a glycolysis-based technology, developed in collaboration with IBM, Under Armour, and Technip Energies, which allows them to break down polyester fibers from old clothing into their basic monomers (small molecules or atom that joins with other monomers to form larger structures called polymers, hence POLYester) essentially ‘regenerating” the material to produce new, high-quality polyester fibers for new clothing.’
By 2027, Reju plans to open a conversion plant in the U.S. Until then, efforts are focused on streamlining the collection process.
The joining of big names like Walmart Foundation, Waste Management, IBM, Under Armour and Technip couldn’t happen without the collection and distribution engine at the center called Goodwill. Perhaps Goodwill is better positioned to see the need for textile solutions because so much of its nonprofit business is about solutions. Goodwill’s original motto, “A hand up, not a hand out,” speaks to human betterment (another form of recycling). This has been updated to “Elevating people, community and planet for a good today and a better tomorrow.”
The organization runs robust programs for sight-impaired persons (blind), and programs providing high school education, employment training, manufacturing skills, catering, and crisis prevention. The revenue derived from donations and sales of used clothing and furniture helps sustain these operations, as will, eventually, the additional revenue from Goodwill’s entry into high-tech aspects of the circular economy. Everything comes back to the storefront donation center down the street that can make a difference in our lives as contributors or recipients (or both).
On my phone call with Jen Lake, I had one last question: “Is there anything unique about Goodwill donations in Rochester?” She answered without hesitation, “Yes, Kodak memorabilia. We get all kinds of things including cameras.” A good place to look if you are a camera collector or want to know more about the Rochester institution that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2012. What the Eastman House doesn’t have, Goodwill does.
Robert Lovenheim is a township supervisor in Pennsylvania and a former Rochesterian (who maintains a 585 cell phone number and claims he has never lost his Western New York accent).
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