Wearable Collections

The Story of Wearable Collections At the beginning of the 2000s, Americans were creating more textile waste than ever before. Between 1960 and 2000, the volume of discarded textiles (mainly used clothing and shoes) in the municipal solid waste stream increased by over 80% (EPA, “Facts and Figures about Materials, Waste and Recycling”).

2004: Wearable Collections is founded when a group of friends in NYC came up with an idea to save clothing from the landfill. The idea was sparked when neighbor’s bag of clothes sat in the hall all week, waiting to be picked up for collection.

But the motivation for the idea began elsewhere. Earlier that year, one of our founders, Ethan Ruby was struck by a car while crossing Delancey St. in lower Manhattan, leaving him paralyzed from his chest down. This event drastically affected all of our lives.

Ethan was a conduit of positive energy and did not let us wallow in pity. He took a leadership role by becoming the president of the NYC chapter of the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis, one of the leading spinal cord injury research facilities in America.

We found ourselves constantly brainstorming ideas for fundraising. In that bag of clothes, and the waste all around us as New Yorkers, we saw the huge potential of converting the city’s waste into something of value.

Within this year, we dropped our first bin in a building—a basic laundry cart.

2006: We upgraded our bins, complete with Wearable Collections canvas covers.

2009: We established a partnership with GrowNYC, the city’s largest and most established environmental organization. Today, that partnership allows us to collect textiles and clothing at 31 Greenmarkets throughout the city.In the same year, we collected discarded clothing from NYC Marathon Runners and hit our first million pounds collected.

2010: We established partnerships with Columbia University and Stony Brook University on Long Island, collecting waste regularly from their campuses, especially during move-out periods.

2010: We hosted our largest drive ever, collecting 13,452 pounds in Hopewell Valley, NJ.

2013: Eight years after we put bins in buildings to collect textile waste, DSNY founded the Brown Bin Program for organics collection.

2014: We upgraded our bins once again, rolling out our first batch of steel bins.

2015: We began our partnership with the NYC Department of Education’s Department of Sustainability, working with them to place bins and host drives in public schools throughout the city.

2015: We hit 10 million pounds collected! 

Between 2000-2015, global clothing production approximately doubled, while the rate of utilization—the average number of times a garment is worn before reaching the landfill—declined around the world (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, “A new textiles economy: Redesigning fashion’s future,” 2017).

2017: We introduced our first plastic covered bins.

2019: We began offering solutions for corporate partners in the apparel and fashion industry who need help recycling and reusing goods from the production side.We reached 6 million pounds in our Greenmarket collections alone.We also provided a second round of steel collection bins for buildings.

2020: We will surpass 20,000,000 collected!