PROVIDENCE — Rhode Island currently recycles plastic, aluminum, glass, cardboard, and may soon add textiles to that list.

Under a new law passed by the General Assembly last June, state environmental and waste officials are planning a public education campaign on how to recycle used clothing, fabric, and other textiles to divert them from the landfill.

The move is part of a larger series of actions taken up by state officials in recent years to reduce the amount of waste buried in Johnston’s Central Landfill, which is estimated to reach capacity by 2046.

And while recycling clothing sounds foreign to American minds trained by a single-use, disposable culture, recycling clothing and any other fabrics used to be a common practice, once upon a time.

“Fabric used to have many different lives within a household until it became completely exhausted,” said Reed McLaren, a sustainable clothing educator and owner of The Sustainable Garment. “After that it would be made into something useful like part of a quilt, or stuffed into a pillow, or even end up in the hands of a rag man, who would collect spare cloth and find a way to make a buck off of it.”

McLaren has worked as a sustainable clothing consultant since 2018, and teaches people how to mend or repair clothing instead of just throwing it away and buying replacements. Mending, and especially reusing, household fabrics, said McLaren, is something of a lost skill today, although it was a common practice through the 19th and much of the 20th century.

People are much harsher on their clothing today, said McLaren, washing them too often, which can damage fabric, and pursuing cheaper, fast-fashion products which wear down more quickly. Much of her work is educating people on how to conserve fabric and teaching them not to throw it away.

But, unknown to most Rhode Islanders, textile recycling has been done by at least one organization at scale for decades, and for a significant profit. Since 1997, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Rhode Island (BBSRI) has been collecting gently used clothing, shoes and other fabrics.

The collection program, run by the organization’s donation center, has largely been a success. Last year the nonprofit diverted 4 million pounds of textiles from the Central Landfill. The organization offers curbside pickup services and also collects fabric from more than 150 donation bins scattered across the state.

“We’re not selling it ourselves, we’re not a retail store,” said Jack Blatchford, chief financial officer of BBBSRI and the person in charge of running the donation center. “We have a partnership with Savers; everything we collect we sell to Savers. They pay us and we use it to pay the donation center’s expenses, and everything else funds our other services.”

Today the clothing donation collections run by BBSRI account for around 70% of the company’s operational revenue, and 95% of what the agency collects and sells to Savers is sold at Savers’ stores, or recycled into other uses, like stuffing or insulation.

“We service over 250 kids a year, and another 2,500 individuals through what we call an empowerment fund,” said Blatchford. “If any of our families are having trouble paying their rent, or utility bills or car bills, we provide funding for that as well.”

Textiles currently make up a small percentage of the total municipal solid waste generated by the state’s residents and businesses sent to the Central Landfill in Johnston. A 2015 study prepared for the Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation, the quasi-public agency that operates the landfill, estimated apparel and non-apparel fabrics accounted for 28,860 tons of all waste sent to the landfill. About 5.5% of all waste landfilled, essentially, is fabric, but in a landfill with a limited lifespan, every bit of waste diverted helps prolong that lifespan.

Both BBBSRI and McLaren supported the new textile education bill passed by lawmakers this year. The bill requires the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management to generate a public outreach and awareness campaign on how Rhode Islanders can recycle textiles.

BBBSRI, said Blatchford, will benefit from the new law, but so will municipalities. Every year the nonprofit gives every city and town a report that details how much clothing was diverted from the landfill. “It’s important to get people understanding how the recycling process works for fabrics,” Blatchford said. “On our end, if you recycle with us, we can help more children in Rhode Island.”

Recycling textiles has real implications for not only the environment, said McLaren, but also pocketbooks. Every municipality in Rhode Island pays Resource Recovery tipping fees based on how much trash it sends to the landfill to be disposed of. The less waste sent, the more municipalities can save tax money on the part of residents.

DEM has until next summer to build and launch the awareness campaign, and there’s two other deliverables possible under the new law. Starting in 2028, any private entities collecting clothing or fabric at scale will have to furnish annual reports of how much was collected that year. Starting in 2029, DEM will be allowed to set benchmark diversion rates on how much clothing and fabric has to be collected.

“There’s value in textiles not going into our landfill,” McLaren said. “It’s an opportunity to divert, and not only that, save money on paying tipping fees. If we send less, I pay less, you pay less, and less goes into the landfill and it has a real economic impact.”