In a recent post on Harmony1.com, the authors cited some alarming statistics:

Ben Grossman of Grossman Marketing Group in Boston is trying to help mitigate this textile disaster with SwagCycle, an initiative that educates people on what to do with unwanted clothing and other textiles while also providing a platform to help companies either facilitate charitable donations of their obsolete, branded merchandise, or work with his team to upcycle or recycle those items. He says, “It's all about landfill divergence, keeping obsolete items out of landfills. And we've seen in our business when companies rebrand or get acquired or change marketing messaging, it often creates a lot of obsolete merchandise resulting in logoed T-shirts, water bottles, bags and more sitting in a warehouse somewhere and often headed to the landfill. We built SwagCycle to become the solution.”

According to Grossman, SwagCycle is a platform designed to help companies post the extra items they have and SwagCycle will pair those items with the appropriate charitable partner around the country, or even around the globe. Grossman adds, “If they come to come to us and say, ‘Hey, we have these shirts, but due to brand guidelines or other compliance reasons, we don't want those shirts to live on in the marketplace, but we really don't want to throw them away,’ we work with a network of our recycling partners to have those shirts shredded or logos removed and turned into things like painter’s rags, carpet pad fill, insulation materials, mattress fill, or if they're polyester garments, they might get ground down and combined with other materials and get turned into products like recycled yarns. If there are not branding issues, we look for opportunities to extend their life in other ways. From a standing start a couple of years ago, at this point we've facilitated between $600,000 and $700,000 in charitable donations working with charities like Dress for Success, United Way, Boys and Girls Clubs, Catholic Charities and the YMCA. We've also kept between 300,000 and 400,000 items out of landfills, both by facilitating donations to charitable partners as well as recycling initiatives.”