USA

The New York City Department of Sanitation commissioned a municipal solid waste characterization study in 2022. In its fall-season sort (10/ 24 - 12/18, 2022) DSNY collected ~800 samples of refuse and recycling, totaling approximately 40,000 pounds, setting aside all textile samples for further study by the research team. The samples collected in DSNY’s primary sort include curbside residential refuse and recycling collections, school collections, and street bins throughout the five boroughs of New York City (Freda, 2022). The textile subsort operation was adapted from practices such as those documented by FFG in their Sorting for Circularity Europe project (Fashion for Good, 2022) with project-specific adjustments to the sampling method to account for the MSW context: the sampled materials considered in-scope for this study are the fraction characterized in the primary sort as “textile-clothing,” which were set aside by the primary sorting agency (DSNY) for the purpose of this study. This excludes mattresses, footwear, accessories, and home textiles. We consider all textiles assessed in this study non-rewearable by nature of having been disposed of as refuse and commingled with mixed municipal waste. Accessories and complex multilayer items were counted at an item level and weighed at the category level (indicated in grey in the above table) but not scanned for fiber composition. The original study reports raw data collected over 1 season, while this data has been extrapolated for 1 year.