How Difficult is it to Recycle Your Old Underwear?

 In 2022, as part of our work to improve the circularity of everything we produce, we launched our take back scheme - offering customers a place to bring their no longer usable underwear, tights, and socks from any brand to recycle them. 

When we first launched the scheme, we worked with TerraCycle who collected the mixed fibres to sort and shred them to be sold on as raw materials to manufacturers for inclusion in secondary items such as insulation and car seats. 

At the start, our collection focused on a single box in our Oxford shop, supplemented by the odd package of a few items of underwear sent directly from customers. We would send the boxes off to TerraCycle when they were full - a cost of c. £150 which whilst not cheap, was possible for us to cover at this small scale as part of our commitment to circularity and saving items from landfill.

In 2024, we also started working with Cotton Lives On, an organisation who collect unwanted cotton items and work with a mattress manufacturer to repurpose the fabric into inner padding for roll mats. These mats are distributed to the community via organisations working with people in need. We love the impact of this programme and we are continuing to send the high cotton percentage items (> 75%) to Cotton Lives On for processing. 

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Our scheme, however, has grown massively over the past few years and we now receive at least 30kg - 40kg of underwear every month, without really advertising the programme. We are really glad that so many of you share our concerns about textile waste and want to do something about it, particularly for underwear where there really aren't any other viable solutions. 

The scheme though has become a victim of its own success, and we are now struggling to keep up with the demand and be able to afford to continue to run it. Sadly whilst our underwear is easily recyclable with Cotton Lives On, most of the items we collect from other brands are synthetic, or mixed fibre blends, which they can't take, and sending it all to TerraCycle would cost us thousands of pounds. 

We are still committed to saving the items that have been sent to us from going to landfill, so at the moment we are storing everything we collect whilst we look for a more viable solution. This has filled our roof, shed, storage spaces and even Sarah's house - we are literally drowning in underwear and desperately in need of new solutions. 

The Issue with Underwear

While options are improving for garment and larger textile waste, underwear poses a specific set of problems which stand in the way of recycling potential.

Firstly, the current primary solutions for fashion circularity of resale / reuse are not an option, because no one wants to buy second hand pants. 

The recycling options for underwear are further limited as a lot of items, particularly socks and women's underwear, are made of mixed fibres which are much more difficult to work with than pure cotton or wool for example. Additionally, organisations often exclude underwear from recycling programmes due to hygiene concerns - and this challenge surrounding the blend of fabrics.

Y.O.U Recycling

So what does this mean for our underwear take-back recycling programme? To be honest, we're still working it out!

We have loved seeing some of the amazing things people are doing with textile waste and it’s so inspiring to see such a large range of upcycled products being developed. We are working on one or two potential collaborations in this area, which is very exciting, but ultimately will only use up a fraction of the waste we are holding. Most of the projects  involve investments of several thousand pounds, which sadly just isn't possible for us as a small business.  

With significant costs and the huge range of what we're currently collecting, unfortunately we can’t recycle viably with our current solutions, but we are continually looking at new alternatives. We are seeing some government and local council progress on textile waste, but we still feel wary of the ethics here. Kerbside collection is a great idea in principle but the truth is that the UK isn’t equipped with the technology on a large enough scale to handle the volumes. This means waste is often shipped off to the Global South where end of life facilities for clothing can vary greatly.

Having built up the scheme over recent years and becoming a trusted place for customers to deposit their recycling, we really wanted to avoid having to limit what we could accept but at the current rate we don’t have the solutions or budget to deal with underwear collected from all brands. 

Ironically, our own Y.O.U Underwear organic cotton products are one of the easiest items to recycle thanks to the 95% cotton content and our knowledge of the exact fibres and sourcing.

We are sharing this information with you in the hope that we can bring more light to the increasing obstacles to dealing with textile waste in this country. There is so much potential in this sector, but so little investment or public knowledge. 

If we can find partners who want to be involved in creating meaningful and impactful solutions then we feel that we could make a huge difference. We would also be happy to provide the raw materials for any organisation looking to make use of upcycled products for a larger scale project - fully recycled office interior anyone?

We are incredibly proud of the work we have done in setting up our take back scheme and the hundreds of kilos of textile waste which have been saved from landfill so far. No other underwear brand currently operates a scheme like this meaning we are effectively recycling for the entire industry! This project is so important but we desperately need support and investment to keep it up. If you or anyone you know can help in some way then please get in touch:

info@youunderwear.com

We hope we can bring you some more positive updates on this very soon!

In the meantime, keep reading with these previous articles:

Prevent Textile Waste by Learning Mending Techniques

Discover Fashion Revolution's Goals for Industry Transparency

And Uncover the UK's Hidden Textile Waste Problem

Images courtesy of Y.O.U Underwear & Canva