Recycling vs. Landfilling Clothes: Environmental Trade-Offs Explained

Most of us have been there—closet overflowing, out-of-style clothes piling up, and no idea what to do with them. Toss them? Donate? Recycle? While it might seem like no big deal, the choice between recycling and landfilling old clothes has serious environmental consequences. So let’s break it down: what really happens when we landfill clothes vs. when we recycle them? And what are the trade-offs of each?

What Happens When Clothes Go to Landfills?

Let’s start with the not-so-pretty option. In the U.S. alone, over 11 million tons of textiles are landfilled every year. That’s like filling up over 20 football fields a day with just clothes.

Here’s what happens in landfills:

• Clothes Sit for Decades: Natural fabrics like cotton or wool can take years to decompose. Synthetics like polyester or nylon? Hundreds of years.

• Greenhouse Gas Emissions: As natural fibers decompose without oxygen, they release methane—a greenhouse gas way more powerful than CO₂.

• Chemical Leaching: Clothes often contain dyes, bleach, or plastic-like materials that can leach into the soil and water, contaminating ecosystems.

• Wasted Resources: Throwing away clothes also means wasting all the water, energy, and raw materials used to make them in the first place.

  
  

So yeah, landfilling isn’t great.

What About Recycling?

Recycling sounds like the obvious solution, right? But it’s a bit more complicated.

There are two main types of textile recycling:

1. Mechanical Recycling

This is when clothes are shredded and reused to make things like insulation, padding, or industrial rags.

• Pros:

  • Keeps textiles out of landfills

  • Uses less energy than creating new fabrics from scratch

• Cons:

  • Fabrics lose quality and can't always be reused for clothing

  • Mixed-material clothes (like a cotton/polyester blend) are hard to recycle

    
    

2. Chemical Recycling

This process breaks fabrics down into raw materials that can be spun into new fibers.

• Pros:

  • Can restore fibers to almost-new condition

  • Works better with blended fabrics

• Cons:

  • Expensive and not widely available

  • Still in early stages of development

    
    

The Environmental Trade-Offs

So how do recycling and landfilling compare side-by-side?

Aspect	Landfilling	Recycling
Greenhouse Gases	High methane emissions from decomposition	Lower emissions (though some energy is used in recycling)
Soil & Water Impact	Chemical leaching possible	Minimal if done properly
Longevity of Impact	Clothes take decades or centuries to break down	Materials get repurposed quickly
Energy Use	None in disposal, but energy wasted from unused clothing life	Some energy used to process clothes
Scalability	Easy (but damaging)	Growing, but still limited by infrastructure and awareness

Why Isn’t Everyone Recycling Their Clothes Then?

Here are a few reasons:

• Lack of Access: Most cities don’t have easy textile recycling drop-offs.

• Low Awareness: Many people don’t even know you can recycle clothes.

• Fast Fashion: Cheap, low-quality clothes make recycling more difficult and less appealing to collectors.

  
  

So What’s the Best Option?

If recycling has some drawbacks, and landfilling is straight-up harmful, what should we do? Here’s the ideal order of action, known as the “waste hierarchy”:

1. Reduce – Buy fewer clothes and choose quality over quantity.

2. Reuse – Donate, swap, or repurpose clothes before tossing them.

3. Recycle – When clothes are too worn to wear, look for textile recycling programs.

4. Landfill – Only as a last resort.

   
   

Small Choices, Big Impact

Even if it feels like one old T-shirt doesn’t matter, it does—especially when millions of people are throwing out clothes every week.

If we all took a few extra steps to recycle or donate our stuff instead of trashing it, we’d be cutting back on pollution, saving resources, and protecting communities. So next time you clean your closet, pause before hitting the trash bin. Your clothes still have a chance to do some good—even if they’ve already been worn to death.