Engineering360: "New York nonprofit recycles textile waste"

" . . . calculations of their carbon footprint savings."

Where are my waders?

Hey, I'm all for recycling, reducing our landfills, and re-use wherever feasible, but to say they are reducing their carbon footprint is a bit of a stretch. The processing, handling and transportation of these materials takes energy. If they just landfilled all these synthetic materials think of the good they would be doing by sequestering all that carbon!!

Sure, there is additional carbon being emitted to recycle these garments. Though lets not assume this additional carbon is less than the carbon needed to extract virgin material. For example the Aluminum industry has a huge incentive to use recycled feed stock as it is so expensive (and by virtue carbon extensive) to mine and refine virgin ore.

Regardless the win is really the second life cycle of the finished goods, in the article they claim reuse rate of ~40%. Which means all those clothes are going to be worn again. This is a tremendous savings in carbon as only transportation is adding to the footprint, and I'd argue a fairly minimal addition as the clothes are likely being sold in local markets. Compare to extracting raw materials, converting to usable form, sewing / fabricating garment, shipping garment to US, displaying garment... yadda yadda.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle... these are in order for a reason : )