Reference page
U.S. textile waste statistics
Clothing has a longer life when it stays in closets, gets repaired, passes to another person, or is reworked into something worth wearing again. This page gathers the clearest public figures behind that idea, with the source and data year beside every number.
For readers, writers, students, and anyone researching how clothing moves through the U.S. waste stream, these figures are designed to be easy to check and cite.
tons of textiles entered the U.S. municipal waste stream in 2018.
That includes clothing, footwear, and household textiles once they reach the end of their usable life.
Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2018of all U.S. municipal solid waste generated in 2018 was textiles.
Textiles were measured alongside materials such as paper, food, plastics, and metals.
Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2018tons of textiles were recycled in the U.S. in 2018.
That equals a 14.7% recycling rate for all textiles in the federal dataset.
Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2018was the estimated recycling rate for clothing and footwear in 2018.
The EPA based this estimate partly on information from the American Textile Recycling Service.
Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2018tons of textiles were combusted with energy recovery in 2018.
That was 9.3% of all municipal waste combusted with energy recovery that year.
Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2018tons of textiles went to U.S. landfills in 2018.
Textiles accounted for 7.7% of all municipal solid waste sent to landfill that year.
Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2018more textiles entered the U.S. waste stream in 2018 than in 1960.
The EPA series rose from 1.76 million tons in 1960 to 17.03 million tons in 2018.
Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 1960-2018is the annual economic opportunity identified by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation for a transformed textiles economy.
The 2017 report frames the opportunity around designing out waste and keeping clothing and materials in use.
Source: Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2017of clothing material was estimated to be recycled into new clothing in the Ellen MacArthur Foundation's 2017 analysis.
The figure points to the gap between collecting used textiles and making them into new garments.
Source: Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2017What the figures show
Keeping a good piece in use is a real part of the picture.
Recycling matters, but the federal figures also show its limits. In 2018, 11.3 million tons of textiles still went to landfill in the U.S. Vintage, resale, repair, and reworking all help a garment stay useful before it becomes part of that total.
That is the value of a one-of-one piece with a past. It is not just another thing made to be replaced. It is a garment with enough character to be chosen again.
Explore reworked vintage clothing →Method and sources
How this page is put together
Each figure above comes from a named public report. U.S. waste figures use the Environmental Protection Agency's material-specific textile data, which tracks generation, recycling, combustion with energy recovery, and landfill. The broader circular-fashion figures come from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation's 2017 textiles-economy report.
Figures are shown as reported by their original source. This page does not combine figures from different reports into a new estimate. It will be refreshed when a key source releases a meaningful update.