What If Textile Waste Could Create Local Opportunity?
This article is tied to the 2026 National Zero Waste Conference Day 1 session titled Aligning Mission and Market to Build Local Economies and includes speakers Darlene Cossio, Sheila Kirschenbaum, Madeline LaScola, Shirley Pierson, and Claudia Rodriguez-Biezunski. Join us on October 21st to hear their presentations at the National Zero Waste Conference.
By Shirley Pierson, M.F.A.
What if the clothes nobody wants aren’t a disposal problem, but an education and workforce problem disguised as a disposal costume?
This is the question our “From the Unwanted to the Unbelievable” design challenge tried to answer. It began in the classroom: take unwanted garments at the end of their life and turn them into new products with unbelievable potential. Goodwill donated items pulled from its outlet bins, the aftermarket tier for unsold donations. Students weren’t asked to repair anything specific, only to find a new, efficient use for material already worthless by every normal measure. One student built a repair kit, then repaired several garments with it herself, and wrote an accompanying zine for the next person standing over a torn hem with no idea where to start.
As chair of the Clothing and Textile Arts and Technology (CLTX) department at San Diego College of Continuing Education for seven-plus years, I’ve built the department around a bet: this industry’s future is smaller, more local, and more skilled than the fast-fashion model most people picture when they hear “textiles.” We opened a fiber tech lab and are now working on phase two, a micro factory, built ground-up in a new West City campus addition. Neither exists because textile waste is sad. Both exist because there’s real, paid work on the other side, if somebody builds the training to match.
That’s the bet behind our Goodwill Industries of San Diego County partnership too. Goodwill moves enormous volumes of donated clothing and runs its own job training. CLTX teaches adults skills in construction, patternmaking, textiles, and increasingly repair, tuition-free. Put those together, and the question shifts from “how do we keep this out of the landfill” to “who gets paid to keep it out.”
The zine student stuck with me: she’d noticed what I keep circling back to, most people don’t lack the desire to mend, they lack knowledge. Fashion Revolution has written about the same gap, an age-old tradition lost partly because sewing and textile education left schools and homes. Watching her rediscover that, and build something to close it, told me repair deserved its own answer.
That’s pushing Goodwill and CLTX toward something more deliberate: a garment-repair feasibility pilot. How long does a repair take? What skill level does it need? What does it cost in materials? Does the garment sell for enough to justify it? Those aren’t rhetorical for us. Goodwill and CLTX don’t have firm answers yet. I doubt anyone does at scale. California’s Responsible Textile Recovery Act, SB 707, will soon force the issue statewide. “We’re not sure yet” won’t be acceptable much longer.
That’s not a hunch. A 2022 University College London study of 300 UK citizens found skill-building helps, but alone it doesn’t change repair behavior at scale.[1] Structural and policy change matters too.
A 2024 Lund University thesis on clothing repair gets more specific.[2] It breaks repair into three parts that must hold at once: materials, competences, and meaning. Skill without meaning fades. Equipment without skill sits in a drawer. Repair only sticks as a practice when all three connect.
That’s the accidental blueprint behind everything at CLTX, whether we had the vocabulary or not. The fiber tech lab and micro factory are the materials: real equipment, not a demonstration set. The curriculum, sharpened by the pilot, is the competences. The classroom itself is the meaning. Retirees sit at the same table as our Generation Z. Nobody’s there because a degree required it. They came to learn to sew, and the range of ages, backgrounds, and cultures turns out to be part of why people stay, not a footnote to it. Repair, sewing, keeping material out of a landfill: that’s what everyone at the table shares. We didn’t set out to build a three-part model. We built what felt necessary, and the research named it after the fact.
This isn’t only a California problem. Nordstrom, North America’s largest tailoring employer, funded a repair certificate at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in NYC last year, then expanded to Seattle Central College this fall. FIT’s first cohort had 15 seats and 200 applicants. A company with 1,500 alterations specialists funding training at two schools, not one, isn’t an environmental argument. That’s a market telling you something.
The pilot is straightforward, built to fail informatively. We run a batch of garments through it, measuring condition, labor, materials, and whether resale price earns any back. That data becomes the curriculum, not a guess: hours per repair category, skill level to teach toward, which equipment earns its cost. We’ll also track what we reject, and why: fabric deteriorated, construction not worth the labor, recycling the only honest option left. I’d rather publish that list, and teach to it, than pretend every garment deserves a second chance.
One thing isn’t up for negotiation: the people doing the repair work get paid. Students work under faculty supervision, at wages reflecting what the work requires. It would be easy to build this on free labor and call it experience, exactly the trap sustainability work falls into. If textile recovery is a real part of the local economy, the people recovering it have to be paid workers, not volunteers standing next to it.
None of this fits the collection bins and sorting facilities most people picture when they hear “textile infrastructure.” Somebody must look at a garment and know what’s wrong and what fixing it takes, a skill belonging in a classroom as much as a factory floor. It’s part of why we built the fiber tech lab, and why the micro factory and curriculum matter more than almost anything on my desk. It’s the point where “this could probably be repaired” turns into an actual, priced, staffed job.
I don’t have this solved. Goodwill doesn’t either. What I do know: every garment we can’t answer for yet, whether it can be fixed, whether it’s worth fixing, who gets paid to fix it, is a gap in the workforce we haven’t built. Not a flaw in the material in front of us.
[1]Zhang, L., & Hale, J. (2022). Extending the Lifetime of Clothing through Repair and Repurpose: An Investigation of Barriers and Enablers in UK Citizens. Sustainability, 14(17), 10821. https://doi.org/10.3390/su141710821
[2]Logotheti, D., & Wijerathne, H. (2024). Exploring the Threads of Clothing Repair Practice: A Social Practice Approach to Clothing Repairs [Master’s thesis, Lund University, Department of Service Studies]. https://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/search/publication/9170134