If one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, then a warehouse in Queens was once a veritable El Dorado for New York’s budding fashion designers. Every week, handfuls of students used to trek from Manhattan to Jamaica to spend hours sorting through mountains of fabric scraps thrown out by labels like Marc Jacobs, Oscar de la Renta, Eileen Fisher, Mara Hoffman, Nautica, and Esprit. Call it thrifting on steroids.
On a Thursday afternoon in April, Jessica Schreiber, the 29-year-old founder of the fashion recycling nonprofit FabScrap, ducked behind an eight-foot-tall stack of black garbage bags. “Careful,” she warned, nearly knocking over a second pile. FabScrap works with 135 labels across the city, collecting and recycling their textile waste. This means everything from fabric swatches to actual items of clothing — the week before my visit, Schreiber found 200 socks. (Singles, not pairs.) Earlier this year, it was a bag full of neckties. “All of my husband’s neckties now come from that bag,” she said.
FabScrap's former space in a Queens warehouse.FabScrap
Schreiber used to run the fashion recycling program at NYC’s Department of Sanitation. The program put large donation bins inside the basements and laundry rooms of apartment buildings in the city. Soon, brands started to reach out to her asking how they could recycle their commercial textile waste. “At first, I was excited because it seemed like it would be a great partnership for the city — but then the city was like, well, we’re not really set up to take this on,” she said. “So I thought, ok, I’ll do it myself.”
She quit her job in early 2016 and pitched her idea on the reality television show Project Runway: Fashion Startup. (You can watch the whole season on Amazon.) “It’s the most millennial way to start a business,” Schreiber admitted. Three of the four investors on the show ended up giving her seed money. She launched the business from the backroom of the Queens warehouse, which belongs to the lingerie label Hanky Panky — a FabScrap client. (FabScrap has since relocated to a bigger space, inside the Brooklyn Army Terminal.)
On average, FabScrap collects a tone of fabric per day — about 40 bags, weighing 50 pounds each. The fabric is split into brown and black bags: black bags are proprietary fabrics, which means brands have specified that material cannot be reused or resold. Brown bags are general waste. Each bag is weighed and its contents documented. Schreiber then gives this data back to the brands. “We give them a nice social media-friendly comparison — like, you’ve recycled enough to plant this many trees, or whatever. They love that.”
The nonprofit relies heavily on volunteers to help sort what’s collected. Schreiber does a lot of public speaking and guest lecturing at fashion schools and colleges, which is probably why 60% of FabScrap’s volunteers are fashion students. On the day I visited, Gia Carranza, a 21-year-old Parsons student, was sorting through a bag of leopard print samples looking for felt and wool scraps. “Everyone knows about FabScrap at my school,” she said. Rachel Karioki, 35, also from Parsons, told me: “Unless you go to a fabric store for hours, I don’t know if you ever get the opportunity to get your hands on this many types of fabrics and materials all at once.” Carranza nodded. “It’s really important to go hands on.”
Volunteers are supposed to sort the scraps into material type (wool, linen, polyester, cotton, and so on) and dig out anything that’s either impossible to recycle (like spandex, which melts when you try and shred it) or too valuable (silk and leather). All the bags are labeled with the name of the designer or brand they came from, but Schreiber had devised a numerical code after volunteers started fighting over the good stuff. “They’d come in and see a bag labeled with the name of a famous designer and they’d all jump on it,” Schreiber said.
Small pieces get recycled and turned into things like building insulation, or those blankets used by movers. Anything over a yard long gets sent to the “Reuse Room,” where it’s resold at a discount. (Unlike a thrift store, you need to make an appointment to visit FabScrap, on account of the warehouse’s operational hours and security.)
For the first year of the business, Schreiber was doing the pickups myself in a rented U-Haul. “I’ve been up and down a lot of freight elevators,” she said. Last year, she hired Camille Tagle, also 29, and Annie Keating, 23, to help with operations. “The sheer physical nature of what we’re doing is lost on a lot of people when we tell them what we do,” Tagle said. “There have been a lot of unglamorous girl-power moments of just lugging really heavy bags and suitcases full of fabric through the streets of New York and on the subway.” Tagle flexed her arms. “I’m very buff now as a result.”
All three women describe themselves as “trash nerds.” “I actually have ‘trash nerd’ on a lot of my professional things,” Schreiber said. To demonstrate, Keating stood up and pointed to her shirt. “This is from FabScrap” — her bra — “and this” — and her shoes — “and these!”
The Reuse Room houses boxes of lace trims, buttons, belts, and beads, as well as whole rolls of wool and felt. There’s a whole shelf of leather animal skins, sorted by color. Earlier this year, a company that makes Bible covers donated whole rolls of embossed leather sheets. Tagle pulled out a roll of white tulle, hand-painted by a Brooklyn designer. “It’s gorgeous,” she said, running her hands along it. Next, a small roll of emerald green silk-printed chiffon, with a floral pattern.
FabScrap's Reuse Room.FabScrap
Tagle put her hand over the white label. “I’m dying to show you who this is from, but I can’t.” Then, whispering: “It’s a really famous designer.” (Some brands don’t want to advertise their involvement with the nonprofit, for reasons Schreiber said are sometimes to do with still-developing sustainability policies.)
Volunteers get first pick — five pounds of material for free, and then $3 per pound after that. For everyone else, it’s $5 per pound. For anyone who gets excited at the idea of several yards of hand printed silk, that’s quite a bargain. “You’d be hard-pressed to find fabric for $5 per yard in the garment district,” Schreiber said.
FabScrap’s clientele ranges from quilters and sewers to entrepreneurs and teachers who want to start sowing clubs at their schools. There are also a lot of young designers who can’t afford to get their fabric directly from vendors. “Lately we’ve started selling to two girls who make dog collars and leashes and want to use recycled materials,” Schreiber said.
To date, Schreiber has relied mostly on word of mouth and social media to draw clients — the nonprofit’s Instagram account is nearly at 5,000 followers. But a recent wave of media attention saw back-to-back appointments for the Reuse Room. “It was like Black Friday in here,” Tagle said. Sometimes, people will come in with one or two suitcases and just go to town. “This is a dangerous place for hoarders.”
Eventually, there’s hope to expand to the West Coast. “I get the feeling there are a lot more trash nerds out there,” Schreiber said.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lauraannaparker/2018/12/25/meet-the-millennials-in-charge-of-recycling-new-yorks-fashion-waste/
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