Textile Waste Guide.

Textile waste seems self-explanatory - it’s surely just waste from the textile industry, right? Well. Not quite. Depending on where you are sourcing your waste, what type of form the waste takes, and what composition the waste is made from will determine how you classify it.

Yodomo is a social business that is increasing awareness around how craft is a viable model for economic production - while addressing other issues at the heart of our current growth system, such as pricing, process and materials. They received funding to run a year-long Creative Reuse Centre in the heart of Hackney, East London, where collected discarded materials would be dispersed to makers (amateur and professional) for free. For that shop and project was a requirement to share with visitors exactly what textile waste is, and how best to use it so that you’re not simply taking waste and wasting it.

I came along then as a textiles sustainability specialist to shed light on what textile waste is, where it comes from, the terms that confuse the matter, and how to use materials in a home and commercial manner.

Image: Textiles at the Yodomo Creative Reuse Hub, photography by Paul Fuller

In order to appreciate the common streams for textile waste, it is helpful to recognise firstly what textiles are. 

According to Brittanica, the definition of “textile” is as folllows: 

“Any filament, fibre, or yarn that can be made into fabric or cloth, and the resulting material itself. The term is derived from the Latin textilis and the French texere, meaning “to weave,” and it originally referred only to woven fabrics. It has, however, come to include fabrics produced by other methods. Thus, threads, cords, ropes, braids, lace, embroidery, nets, and fabrics made by weaving, knitting, bonding, felting, or tufting are textiles. Some definitions of the term textile would also include those products obtained by the papermaking principle that have many of the properties associated with conventional fabrics.”

As you start to imagine all of the materials in your everyday life, you can appreciate how vast the world of textiles is, and consequently, how many types of textiles there are.

So, if we head back upstream to the starting point of clothing production, and pinpoint every textile element within a garment, we can swiftly make a list of all the materials - and energy and resources involved - at each step. This also means we can trace back and see the textile waste that accumulates through this production cycle.

With that in mind, we now come to the ever-important question of, “what is textile waste?”

Find the Textile Waste Guide here.

Images: 1. Yodomo Circular Hub shopfront at Hackney City Farm; 2. Sophie Rochester, founder of Yodomo; 3. Katherine Rose Smithy with an outfit made fully from collected textile “waste”; 4. Nicola J Reid, founder of No Rules Knit Club with a crocheted dress made from a woven carpet roll.

Not sure what a word means in the context of the textiles industry?

One of the biggest issues with textiles and fashion is greenwashing. This isn’t actually a term in this glossary, but perhaps it should be. Greenwashing is where a company makes an environmentally-friendly or socially-just claim that simply isn’t what they’re doing. For instance, claiming a textile is biodegradable, or circular, or it’s sustainable because it is made from deadstock.

Find the Textiles Waste Glossary of Terms here.


If there is anything in this guide or glossary that you’re still unsure about, want to know more about, feel needs to be padded out, needs to be further sense-checked, then please do reach out. You can send me an email via the contact form, or DM me on Instagram.

I also want to point out that I am now calling myself a “content creator”. Feels a little strange. But I was accepted on to the LinkedIn Creator Accelerator Programme where I am receiving training, support and skills in building a following surrounding my chosen topic: which is educating on the intersection of food, fibre and fashion. So if you would like to read more frequent content, at least for now while this program is on, please follow me there. Here is my LinkedIn profile.