Fashion’s waste crisis is well-documented. We’ve all seen the images of post-consumer textile waste clogging the beaches in Ghana and the mountains of textile waste in Chile, which are now visible from outer space.
What we don’t see very often is the secondary textile waste crisis hiding in plain sight: the post-industrial, pre-consumer waste that spans fabric samples, swatches and development prototypes, amounting to some 12% of fashion’s total fabric consumption. This is the waste stream New York-based non-profit Fabscrap has dedicated the last decade to tackling.
Fabscrap was founded in 2016 by New York City Department of Sanitation employee Jessica Schreiber. Fielding more and more questions from brands about how to dispose of excess fabric, and facing a shortage of viable answers, Schreiber took her idea for a waste removal and fabric redistribution business on the short-lived television series Project Runway: Fashion Startup, unlocking the funding to road-test Fabscrap with real brands.
Co-founder and executive director Camille Tagle came on board a year later, bringing the perspective of a former luxury eveningwear designer, frustrated by what she deemed a “criminal” culture of waste and keen to do something about it.
In the time since, Fabscrap has been through its fair share of “revamps, corrections and additional streamlining”, says Tagle, who stepped into the executive director role after Schreiber’s departure in 2025 to focus on her family. Today, it focuses on collecting pre-consumer waste from local brands, and recirculating as much as possible, with small amounts going to downcycling or landfill.
It operates on a ‘pay as you throw’ model, scaled according to donation size. For smaller donations, brands pay per bag before collection.
For larger donations, which usually arrive on pallets, brands pay per pound, after Fabscrap has collected and weighed the donations. Tagle introduced this distinction in 2025 following a donation audit, which revealed that 24% of brands donated 84% of incoming materials during the year.
She also optimized the warehouse processes, improving sorting rates by 58% in the past 18 months and reducing the backlog of donations by 159,407 lbs.
Over the last decade, Fabscrap has collected pre-consumer waste from more than 900 brands across the US, mainly concentrated around New York, but also including Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Massachusetts. It currently has around 400 regular customers, spanning luxury to mass market.
J.Crew, PVH, Steve Madden and Urban Outfitters parent company Urbn has worked with Fabscrap since its foundation, and several of those brands (plus others like Carolina Herrera) have also supported the non-profit with grants and group volunteering.
But Tagle says Fabscrap’s potential to scale is limited by a lack of industry collaboration. Getting to the next level, and keeping more waste in circulation, will rely on brand and manufacturing partners upstream designing with circularity in mind. There’s a long way to go.
First measure, then reduce
To prove that you’re reducing waste, you need to know where you’re starting from. That’s why brand donations are weighed and catalogued before they’re sorted.
It’s important that this data is broken down by brand, says Tagle, because you can’t reduce what you don’t measure. “We track each brand’s data individually, so they can understand their environmental impact,” she explains, noting that each brand receives an annual impact report showing the weight collected, the number of collections, and how those donations broke down into reuse, downcycling and landfill.
After the collection has been weighed, it gets processed, ready for volunteers to sort through (there have been 10,000 volunteers and counting over the past decade). Larger pieces of fabric and prototype samples without too many imperfections are sorted for reuse, as well as smaller pieces of leather. These are recirculated through Fabscrap’s online store and in-person thrift store, which together make up the non-profit’s second largest revenue stream after brand fees.
The materials that can’t be reused — because they are torn, stained, or simply too small — are set aside for downcycling, usually shredded for insulation by Fabscrap’s partner in North Carolina. Preparing materials for downcycling is a “tricky” process, says Tagle, which requires volunteers to meticulously remove any stickers, safety pins, buttons or zippers. Everything that can be reused is, including these fixtures and fastenings, but a small percentage still goes to landfill.
Right now, one of the biggest buckets going to landfill is the waste brands marked as “proprietary” before collection, says Tagle. The category exists to protect brands from identifiable logos or design features making their way back into the market, but many brands are overly liberal applying this to donations, reducing the potential for perfectly usable fabrics to be recirculated.
It’s an ongoing battle educating brands to be less strict about this. “There’s really no reason why a leather hide with no branding should be marked as proprietary,” she notes.
Tackling misconceptions, mobilizing the public
Over the last decade, investors and industry alike have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into textile-to-textile recycling, chasing the — so far elusive — promise of turning mountains of post-consumer textile waste into new products. These efforts have largely concentrated around cotton and polyester, with some solutions catering to blended fabrics, but the majority are still weeding out huge swathes of waste, while struggling with time and cost-intensive disassembly processes.
The problem is that potential feedstocks are so easily contaminated, especially in fashion — an industry obsessed with novelty and differentiation, where polyester might be embellished with sequins, or cotton might be blended with elastane.
“There’s a misconception that it’s really easy to recycle fabric, but it’s actually very, very difficult,” says Tagle. Fabscrap tracked cotton and polyester waste separately for the first eight years, hoping to accrue enough to make a meaningful feedstock donation to textile-to-textile recyclers, but the amount of qualifying material never surpassed 4% of total donations, she adds.
“Our volunteers often walk away with a new understanding of what it takes, and how many grey areas there are.”
That has been an unexpected bonus to its volunteer program, continues Tagle. “At the beginning, Fabscrap was about making the biggest environmental impact possible,” she explains.
“That’s still core to what we do, but a really beautiful development has been engaging the public. So many textile recycling initiatives skip the general public entirely, but Fabscrap has volunteer opportunities baked in, and our volunteers can go home with some fabric for their creative pursuits as a thank you.
We’ve had well over 10,000 volunteers at this point. They geek out over fabric, they care about sustainability, and they’re excited to trade stories or sewing techniques, too.
It’s become a genuinely strong community.”
No automation without standardization
During New York Climate Week in September, I had the opportunity to visit Fabscrap’s Brooklyn warehouse and see the process up close. It quickly became apparent how time and labor-intensive sorting and disassembly can be.
Much of the waste Fabscrap deals with comes directly from design rooms. It’s a complex mess of fabric samples, prototypes and headers (the swatches fabric mills and producers send to brands to showcase their seasonal range).
No two are the same. Developmental samples are experimental by nature, often mixing different materials and fibers, playing around with sequins or embellishments, maybe integrating zippers or buttons.
Even the headers lack standardization — some have metal or paper hangers, so they can be displayed on a rail; some are stapled or glued to a sheet of paper or cardboard bearing its composition, while others are sent in binders; some are small squares, where others are larger rectangles. “Every swatch is completely random,” says Tagle.
“When you don’t have standardization, you can’t automate anything.”
Development samples have limited potential for standardization, but headers are primed for it, says Tagle. Late last year, Fabscrap released a white paper charting its explorations of pre-consumer waste materials and making recommendations for the industry to embed circularity upstream.
Among the suggestions was a framework for “smarter swatches” designed for disassembly and recycling or reuse. In an ideal world, according to Fabscrap, headers would be smaller than two yards, with no backing material, and a small sticker detailing material content and other descriptive elements, such as weight and country of origin, as required.
This would help volunteers at Fabscrap make sense of swatches, so they know which materials qualify for recycling versus reuse or downcycling. But it would also reduce costs and environmental impacts for fabric mills, removing the need for paper, plastic or metal components.
To help textile mills assess the impact of their headers, Fabscrap also developed a Smart Swatch Scorecard, which assigns header designs a grade, based on the number of components and the relative ease of disassembling them.
Moving forward, Tagle says her focus is on this kind of industry education and collaboration, helping stakeholders at every step of the design process understand how their choices can enable and accelerate circularity downstream. “Finding ways to deal with the waste that nobody else wants to deal with is a huge puzzle,” says Tagle. “It will probably take us the next 10 years to solve.”