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Textile Recycling – FabScrap Focuses on a Sustainable Future

Posted on February 19, 2023 by k8mante One comment

I emerged from the 59^th St. Subway station in Sunset Park, Brooklyn into a vibrant, energetic neighborhood. Blocks of 3-5 story, multi-tenant, walk-up brick apartment buildings lined the streets, many with small Asian or Hispanic shops, bakeries, and restaurants on the first level. A happy, multi-lingual chatter of families filled the air as parents escorted their children to morning drop-off at local elementary school PS 503/506.

Crossing 3^rd Avenue, the sky was blocked by the elevated Gowanus Expressway. I could hear the muffled rumbling of traffic overhead. Busy delivery trucks and taxis carefully made their way up 3^rd, dodging construction teams working on the underside of the Gowanus.

I was headed to volunteer with FabScrap – New York City’s largest fashion recycling organization – whose goal is to help end commercial textile waste by recycling waste generated during pre-production and production of consumer products.

Located in the Brooklyn Army Terminal, FabScrap works with teams of volunteers to help sort and recycle over 2,000 pounds of fabric a week – keeping it out of landfills.

^{Site photos are mine. Arial photo from Google Search}

The Brooklyn Army Terminal is tucked against the edge of the community, along the NY Bay. During WWII it was the United States’ largest military supply base, a sprawling complex of two enormous warehouses and a spattering of other buildings, spanning 6 blocks, 9 floors, and 55 acres. The warehouses themselves completely dwarf the buildings in the surrounding neighborhood. Today, the complex is used for commercial and light industrial/manufacturing use, artist studios, and maker-spaces.

FabScrap is in Building B, at the far end of a long internal atrium that once was a busy hub for weapons and supplies, but now seems weary and out of place and time. The metal frame of a once-glass-ceilinged dome sits rusting to the elements and open to the sky. An old, WWII-era train sits decomposing on moss-covered rusty rails leading up either side of the atrium. Dozens of cantilevered concrete ledges run up and along both sides. Each ledge buts up against metal garage door entrances, some long defunct. Large, chicken-wire frosted windows line each floor.

This morning was grey and drizzling and stepping into the atrium I took in a sharp, deep, breath. I felt as if I had entered an apocalyptic dystopian movie set. The air felt weary. A musty smell and the sound of the drizzle on sets of metal chairs and tables added to the chill.

Hidden beyond the atrium are over three million square feet of renovated space. The Terminal is a highly functioning industrial complex that houses over 100 businesses and 4,000+ good manufacturing jobs!

On the far side across the atrium, up on the 5^th floor, FabScrap takes in more fabric than it can process most weeks (up to 3,000 – 5,000 pounds). They work with well over 400 NYC clothing labels, designers, furniture companies, and costume studios to help recycle their manufacturing waste (642 brands between NY and their second location in Philly).

FabScrap provides these companies color-coded canvas bags into which excess fabrics are placed (brown for general waste and black for proprietary fabrics the brand indicates cannot be resold or reused). This can be fabric swatches they no longer need, or fabric scraps from making sample items. Sometimes clients send damaged or unfinished samples as well. Clients leave the paper/cardboard headers, tags, and stickers still attached so FabScrap can identify the type and composition of the fabric.

Some of the fabric I sorted (left) and one I found in the scrap room (right)

FabScrap charges a small, tax-deductible pickup fee and provides empty bags at every pickup. The bags are brought back to the warehouse for sorting and recycling by teams of volunteers. This morning the volunteers were a mix of artists, quilters, regular citizens, and students from FIT – whose programs mandate a certain number of hours volunteering so students are introduced to the often-unseen side of textile production.

Each volunteer had a table for sorting, surrounded by bins labeled for each type of material. Our job was to pull apart bundles of fabric then remove paper, pins, stickers, and staples, and sort the fabric into the bins.

It is a very manual, time-consuming, and tedious process and up to 11 volunteers help during any 3-hour session.

Behind us, across the length of the warehouse room, was a floor-to-ceiling hill of pristine textiles in trash bags, waiting to be sorted.

After sorting, the fabric has a variety of end uses. Proprietary material and small scraps are shredded to create a colorful pulp called shoddy, which will be used to create insulation, carpet padding, furniture lining and moving blankets. Non-proprietary material is used by students, artists, crafters, quilters, sewers, teachers, and even other clothing designers who focus on eco-wear.

How much commercial textile waste is generated each year in NYC alone? It’s hard to say as there is no current industry model for tracking and laws in most states are non-existent. NYC has passed a regulation that all businesses are required to recycle textiles if textiles are over 10% of the business’ waste.

According to Grow NYC, the average New Yorker tosses 46 pounds of clothing and other textiles in the trash each year. All told, that’s almost 200,000 tons of textiles every year.⁽¹⁾It is estimated that commercial textile waste could be as high as 40x consumer/residential waste.

Designers have difficulty recycling their textile waste. There is a lack of recycling options, recycling partners, and infrastructure, and commercial fabric scraps do not fit into the current resell-at-thrift or donation models. FabScrap steps into this space to help NYC designers and brands recycle their waste.

They also provide each company an “Impact Report,” which includes the end use of all sorted materials, the total weight diverted from the landfill, and the overall environmental impact. FabScrap has another warehouse location in Philadelphia which they launched in 2021.

According to Fabscrap’s annual report from 2021, they saved 305,977 pounds of fabric, 90% of which was recycled or reused and only 3% ended up in a landfill. They saved over 1,400 tons of CO2 emissions – the equivalent of planting over 20,000 trees.⁽²⁾

After each 3-hour shift, volunteers are able to choose and take home up to 5 pounds of material for free, either from their own sorting piles or from the large fabric recycle room. There were so many choices it took a solid hour for me to decide what I wanted!

In the end I took home materials to make two throw pillows for my couch – and a great experience and story to share with others! On my subway ride back to Manhattan, I thought about fast fashion and how often I’ve “cleaned my closet” by tossing clothes. While I tend to donate ones in good condition, I had been throwing away certain well-worn items. I think I’ll be trying to figure out how to reuse the fabric instead for potholders, to make fabric-rope baskets, maybe for quilting… What would you do with your unwanted clothing going forward? Send me some suggestions!

References:

The Bowery Mission:

Posted on February 10, 2023 by k8mante Leave a comment

Loving Actively through Hospitality and Compassion

Concrete beds in cardboard houses line the city sidewalks.
Tattered blankets, fast food remnants,
The smell of rusty, wet scaffolding.
Black plastic trash bags hold all the Universe.
Watching with heavy eyes through subway grate steam
until the suffocation of invisibility settles in.
They turn away from the lights of the street,
turn their backs on the world and endure a restless sleep.

^{Cardboard cabins built by the homeless on 37th. The residents will remove them each morning and rebuild them each night.}

Each night, thousands of unsheltered homeless sleep on the streets of NYC and over 65,000 sleep in city shelters.¹ Often, homelessness is accepted as a ubiquitous and expected background of daily life in the city, just like taxi cabs and neon signs. Encounters with panhandling and outbursts from mental illness make homelessness and poverty visible and uncomfortable – something evoking fear.

The Bowery Mission steps directly and unquestioningly into this, fiercely bringing their core value of “Love Actively” to life. Since 1872 this organization has exemplified love as action through compassionate care – offering free meals, clothing, showers, and a place to sleep for anyone in need of hospitality.

From humble beginnings in a small wooden building, to multiple sites in New York City helping those in need, The Bowery Mission served over 250,000 meals, provided over 55,000 nights of shelter, and over 20,000 articles of clothing in 2022². Sweat equity that builds relationships and restores communities.

In addition to these emergency services, they offer residential and transitional programs such as long-term residential support, psychological counseling, addiction recovery, educational and life classes, vocational mentoring, job training, certification programs and more.

I had volunteered at both their Bowery and Tribeca campuses, helping serve meals to those in need. This particular morning we were serving a hot breakfast with eggs, bacon, French toast, fruit, pastry, and coffee, to both the residents in the Bowery program and hundreds of homeless who came regularly to get a solid meal.

Clients in their programs come from all walks of life and are all ages. They all have a common denominator – life’s circumstances brought them to very hard times. Some lost jobs and were unable to find new ones so were evicted, some battle alcoholism and drug addiction, some left abusive family situations, some battle mental illness. There are many stories of trauma and pain. The Bowery Mission promotes the flourishing of New Yorkers by helping work through that trauma and pain and overcoming homelessness and marginalization. Their programs care for the whole person – body, mind and spirit.

While serving breakfast we were able to speak and connect with the people who had come for a hot meal. One client told me the Bowery team members and I were the first people to have a conversation with them in over 24 hours. On the streets, they said, “…no one looks us in the eye or speaks to us.” Another client told me they look forward to regular breakfast meals at The Bowery because… “It’s nice to know there’s someone who loves me.”

Building bridges through hospitality and compassion means the world becomes a little less brutal for the clients for that moment, and by getting to work with the homeless and build human relationships, I live with a little less fear because they are less invisible and unknown.

You can read more about the amazing history of The Bowery Mission, make a donation to support their programs, or find out how to volunteer here: Donate, Volunteer or Learn More to Help the Homeless & Hungry | The Bowery Mission

References:

Statistics for NYC Homeless comes from: How many total people are homeless in NYC? – Coalition For The Homeless
Statistics come from The Bowery Mission’s site: Homelessness & Poverty in New York City | The Bowery Mission

Homeless

Building a Clean Water Well in Guatemala

Posted on December 7, 2022 by k8mante Leave a comment

Organization: Living Water International: https://water.cc/

Location: Aldea Almolonga, Tiquisate district, Guatemala….

Those of us at the drill site that morning were working hard to keep the mud out of the way of the drill pipe as it bored deeper and deeper into the earth. The extreme humidity challenged our energy levels as the drill slowly ticked its way down through the rock.

The steel tip of the drill was made up of 3 circular sets of teeth that worked together to powerfully grind its way through the rock and shale, looking for a water table deep enough for it to run clean.

A diesel pump about the size of a large suitcase drew water up a rubber hose from the water pit we’d dug and filled from a huge tank the first day.

The pump powerfully pushed the water down and out the tip of the drill pipe, flushing the sludge and debris from drilling back up to the surface, where we needed to perpetually shovel it out of the way before our water pit, and the trough around the drill pipe, became peanut-butter-thick with sludge.

That would stop the drill and set us back while we cleaned up the area.

This was day 3 and we’d bore about 60 feet, stopping off and on for a myriad of reasons – to check the type of rock/mud (categorize the strata), dig the pipe free of sludge, and change the tip of the drill to a heavier one when the rock was too hard.

Muddy and exhausted, fending off the heat and 90% humidity with fresh juice from coconuts machete-chopped from a village tree by one of the elders, we kept each other going by sharing the heavy work and joking around.

Even though we all did not speak each others’ languages, it did not matter.

Hard work and community made us all feel close and we learned to communicate in our own way.

The equipment itself was both sturdy and old, so there always seemed to be a need to fix something – a jam in the chain gear that methodically and slowly moved the drill downward, a leak in the rubber hose that caused loss of pressure, a jam in the hose when some sort of debris got tangled up inside.

The rest of our crew were down the street, in the courtyard of one of the homes in the village, teaching hygiene lessons and working with the mommas and the children.

Although groups of homes throughout the village had hand-dug narrow, shallow wells they shared for water, and some homes used vats and plastic barrels to collect rainwater, the water was toxic, full of pesticide run-off from commercial sugar and plantain fields, livestock waste from the chickens, turkeys and pigs that ran free, and human waste run-off from outhouses.

Generations had been raised without running water and with no access to clean water, so members of the village were often sick with stomach and digestive issues from the toxic water and many had skin irritations because they hand-washed their clothing in the dirty water.

Children and the elderly were most affected, often getting sick and having life-threatening diarrhea. Children missed school often and both the youngest and oldest were at risk of death from illnesses brought on by the toxic water. The villagers knew the water was making them sick, but they had no options. There was no way to access clean water so they had to use what was available.

Many homes shared a simple hand-dug well like this one as their water source

Education was necessary to ensure they knew how to stop the spread of germs. Proper handwashing techniques, teeth brushing, keeping the well pump clean, learning how to mix a quick solution to combat dehydration from diarrhea… These are some of the lessons the group taught over the week. After lessons the team often played soccer and other games with the children. For many of the families, we were the first Americans they’d ever seen.

The amazing in-country Living Water team!

We were there as part of a small team of volunteers from the USA to work alongside the villagers and the in-country Guatemalan team from Living Water International, a non-profit dedicated to creating clean-water wells in villages across the globe with no access to clean water.

Long before our trip, the village had spent almost two years going through a process with Living Water to determine if their village was not only a viable site for a clean-water well (geological studies), but if the village met all the other criteria required as well – such as having a dedicated local team to help drill, build, and maintain the well, solid geo-political and religious agreements and alliances so that everyone in the village had equal access to the clean water, and the villagers had to raise some of the funds for the well drilling, the parts, and future maintenance.

The well is a partnership between every member of the village and Living Water. As in every other country Living Water operates, there is a waiting list of villages in Guatemala hoping to get a clean water well.

Each day on site, the mommas of the village worked together to cook us all (the village drillers, the US volunteers, and the team from Living Water) a spectacular luncheon of traditional foods made with local foods.

These lunches were typically traditional chicken or pork stew with vegetables, or some sort of meat cooked on the open grill and served with rice and vegetables. And there were always fresh-made tortillas – so delicious! Everything was made in their traditional kitchens.

Each home had a kitchen as a separate structure, often with low or partial walls and a tin roof. Open to the elements and air without doors and full walls, they cooked with wood on open fire pits built on cinderblock platforms slightly lower than counter height. Sometimes they had a gas stove as well, although our lunches were always made on the open fire.

The food was always delicious!

This particular day was Tuesday and through the afternoon and long into dusk we would be working, looking for water.

That evening, as the past two evenings, we would leave exhausted, sore from the hard work, and covered in mud, not yet having hit water, but getting ever closer!

We would get back to where we we staying, quickly shower, crash for some sleep, and eagerly be ready to get back to the village early the next day.

When we hit clean water we had to let it
run for many hours to ensure it was coming up clean

By the end of the next day (Wednesday) we would be blessed – hitting clean water – and with it would come a joyous celebration to be remembered for generations!

Hitting water meant life would change in the village!

Before we would leave the village the final day, we would help line the new well with PVC piping and build a hand-pump for the entire village to use.

The Living Water in-country team made sure the village representatives were taught how to maintain and fix the pump so the village would be self-sufficient.

The villagers could, if desired, save up to put in an electric pump in the future. But the manual hand pump is a great start because it will always work!

The in-country Living Water Team will follow up with the village to see how the well is doing. There are villages who still use their hand pump up to 15 years after it’s installed!

Thank you for journeying along with me.

To learn more about Living Water International, please visit: https://water.cc/