Forgot about that container of yogurt in the back of the fridge? A bag of granola lost in the pantry? A glance at the expiration date might tell you that it’s time to toss it, but in fact, “expired” food might still be perfectly safe and enjoyable to eat. 

Heeding expiration dates often causes us to throw away food that’s still completely edible, contributing to our massive food waste problem in the U.S. With grocery prices soaring — rising nearly 8% between April 2022 and April 2023 — these wasted products are just money down the drain. Stamps of “sell by,” “enjoy by,” “best by,” “best if used by,” “use by,” and “best before” don’t all necessarily mean the same thing, and don’t communicate anything about the actual safety of the food after the printed date. In the absence of a national standard for food dating, these phrases have long confused and misguided our sense of when a product is edible. 

How Did Expiration Dates Come to Be? 

Sell-by dates on food products were first introduced by the store Marks & Spencer’s in the 1950s, but they didn’t really gain much public attention until the 1970s. By then, most Americans were shopping at grocery stores for the majority of their food — rather than growing it themselves or purchasing it directly from farms — as well as consuming more processed and packaged products, ultimately leading to greater concern about the freshness of ingredients. 

At that time, sell-by information was printed on products as a code that retailers could then decipher using a key, but it wasn’t made readily available to consumers. When customers began demanding more transparency about their purchases (some activists even began decoding the labels and passing out booklets explaining how to read the codes), manufacturers responded by dating their products more clearly with sell-by dates. While the vast majority of surveyed shoppers reported their approval of such dating, the then-Congressional Office of Technology Assessment stated that there was “little or no benefit derived from open dating in terms of improved microbiological safety.” Yet, a very similar system of dating food products is still widespread in the United States today. 

What Does an Expiration Date Actually Mean?

There is no universal, federal standard for what these dates mean, leaving it up to states to make their own rules and regulations based on a hodge-podge of information, recommendations, and industry discretion. Some states don’t require labeling at all, and standards vary widely. In Montana, for example, milk can be sold for only 12 days after it’s pasteurized, but cross the border into Idaho, and it can be sold for more than 20 days. While companies aren’t required to put dates on products (except for baby formula), they cannot print false or misleading information — but they also don’t need FDA approval for any dates they do print. 

Ultimately, expiration dates have much more to do with quality than safety. However, a 2019 study found that 84% Americans throw out food at least occasionally because it’s nearing/past the date on the package. Andy Harig of FMI (a food industry association) told CNN in an interview that the printed date is mostly about protecting the brand, an estimate of when the food will taste best so that customers will enjoy it and continue to purchase it. The date is not an exact science, but a prediction of when an item will be of highest quality in terms of taste, appearance, and texture. While it might provide consumers comfort as a point of reference, it isn’t really telling us what we need to know. Not only could the food still be safe, but if not stored properly it might be bad far before the date. “Use by” dates will often be a conservative estimate, too, since producers anticipate that consumers likely won’t store the product perfectly. 

The Problem of Food Waste 

According to the USDA, 30-40% of the United States’ food supply is wasted every year, and the average household spends a whopping $1,866 a year on food that ends up being thrown away. Food waste is not only an issue of wasted money, but of growing greenhouse gas emissions, landfill space, and widespread food insecurity. 

Of all food that’s wasted in the home, The FDA estimates that about 20% stems from uncertainty about the meanings of labels on packaged foods. In other words,one-fifth of a household’s food is usually thrown out due to expiration dates, even when some of that food might still be perfectly safe to eat. 

Luckily, there has been some legislative momentum to create better standards for these expiration dates. The Food Date Labeling Act of 2021 aims to require food manufacturers to label products with “use by” and “best by” alongside dates to specifically communicate safety and quality, respectively. But even if this act is signed into law, the government would also need to make a more concerted effort to communicate what these labels mean to consumers.

How Can You Tell Whether Something That’s Past Its Expiration Date Is Safe to Eat?

On the FoodKeeper app developed by the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, users can look up how long certain foods last by different storage methods. Our bodies are also pretty good at detecting decay. If you’re not sure whether a food item is safe to eat, rely on your senses. Most products will have a clear change in smell, appearance, and taste if they’ve turned. Pay special attention to any changes in color, texture, or consistency. 

There are a few general rules of thumb for how long certain items last, regardless of what the package says: 

• Some things basically never go bad, including sugary products like corn syrup, molasses, honey, and plain sugar; vanilla and other extracts; salt; and vinegar. 

• Grains vary in terms of their shelf life. Generally, white grains last longer than unrefined brown ones, which have a higher fat content. White flour lasts basically forever, but whole grain will go bad after a few months. White and brown rice act similarly.
• Dried beans last for several years, but will become harder and thus more difficult to soften through cooking over time (although they’re still perfectly safe to eat).  
• Oils last a long time too if they are kept in sealed containers, but do a sniff test first. If it’s turned, it’ll smell metallic or fishy, and will feel more glue-like. Similarly, dressings made of vinegar or oil (unless they include dairy or other additives) last for up to a year when refrigerated.
• Canned and jarred foods last for years — even decades, in some cases. Plastic, however, is often gas-permeable and won’t last as long. When opened up, there should be no rotten smell, cloudiness, or mold. On jars, the little button on the top should be rigid when pressed. If it’s popped, bacteria has likely grown inside the jar. 
• Milk is one of the most wasted foods in the world, but because so many germs are killed during the pasteurization process, it’s often completely safe to drink after the expiration date — just do a quick inspection of its odor and appearance before tasting. 
• Eggs typically last three to five weeks or longer. A typical egg test (other than smelling something rotten when you crack it open) can be performed by carefully placing it in a bowl of water. If the egg floats to the surface rather than falling to the bottom, it’s likely gone bad. 

Infant formula products are the exception to this haphazard expiration-dating, and are regulated by the FDA. To determine the “use-by” date, manufacturers determine when the product will no longer have the minimum amount of each indicated nutrient. Labels on products that are considered “foods that pregnant women should avoid” should also be heeded. These include things like raw fish, deli meats, unpasteurized dairy products, and sprouted vegetables because of their ability to carry listeria, an invisible and dangerous bacteria. These products are often served cold, so they don’t go through the heating process (the “kill step”) that kills bacteria before being consumed. 

It’s important to remember that food will already have been contaminated with germs like E. coli or salmonella before it’s brought home, but proper storage can inhibit the growth of these pathogens and generally keep food fresher for longer. Keeping the refrigerator at 40 degrees Fahrenheit or cooler can inhibit the growth of E. coli, or heating the food to 140 degrees Fahrenheit or hotter.

The post Is It Really Expired? The Truth About Food ‘Expiration’ Dates appeared first on EcoWatch.

Scientists first spotted the Blob in late 2013. The sprawling patch of unusually tepid water in the Gulf of Alaska grew, and grew some more, until it covered an area about the size of the continental United States. Over the course of two years, 1 million seabirds died, kelp forests withered, and sea lion pups got stranded.

But you could have easily missed it. A heat wave in the ocean is not like one on land. What happens on the 70 percent of the planet covered by saltwater is mostly out of sight. There’s no melting asphalt, no straining electrical grids, no sweating through shirts. Just a deep-red splotch on a scientist’s map telling everyone it’s hot out there, and perhaps a photo of birds washed up on a faraway beach to prove it. 

Yet marine heat waves can “inject a lot of chaos,” said Chris Free, a fisheries scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. It’s not just gulls and sea snails that suffer. Some 100 million Pacific cod, commonly used in fish and chips, vanished in the Gulf of Alaska during the Blob. In British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest, salmon runs – and the fishing industry that depends on them – floundered. The acute warming also triggered a toxic algal bloom that disrupted the West Coast’s lucrative Dungeness crab business. 

“It occurred in this place where we have some of the best-managed fisheries in the world, and it still created all these impacts,” Free said.

The Blob was the largest and longest-lasting marine heat wave on record. It might also have been an early glimpse of what’s to come. Fish farms in Chile, scallop operations in Australia, and snow crab pots in Alaska have already fallen victim to oceanic overheating. The economic toll from a single occurrence on fisheries and coastal economies can be as hefty as $3.1 billion. The northeastern Pacific Ocean has experienced several hot spells over the past decade — including the Blob 2.0 — and it’s still experiencing one. As a result, six of the last seven Dungeness crab seasons in California have been delayed. Scientists predict more fisheries will collapse in coming years as climate change — and the ongoing El Niño weather pattern warming the Pacific — spurs more marine heat waves 

“I’m really worried,” said William Cheung, director of the Institute of Oceans and Fisheries at the University of British Columbia. “This year we already know the temperature is crazy high.” 

As the planet warms, marine heat waves have grown more frequent and more severe. The world’s oceans have absorbed 90 percent of the heat trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gasses, and are as hot as humans have ever measured them. During a hotspot in late July, water off the southern tip of Florida reached 101 degrees Fahrenheit — toasty enough to fill a hot tub. 

“That’s the highest water temperature I’ve ever heard of in the ocean,” said Steve Murawski, a fisheries biologist at the University of South Florida who has studied oceans for 50 years. “Fish species in particular are great canaries in our collective coal mine.”

Marine heat waves can form in a number of ways, but in general they’re caused by changes in how the air and ocean currents move. When the wind weakens, the sea temperature tends to rise because warm surface water doesn’t evaporate as easily, and colder water doesn’t get churned up from the deep. 

Shifts beneath the surface can trigger heat waves, too. One appeared off the west coast of Australia in 2011 when a streak of warm water, some 100 miles wide and 3,000 miles long, surged south. It brought so much warmth from the tropics that ocean temperatures in the region rose almost 11 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. The extreme conditions stuck around for about three months, killing shellfish and forcing scallop and crab fisheries to close. To this day, the kelp forests, which provide crucial habitat for marine creatures like lobsters, haven’t recovered, said Alex Sen Gupta, an ocean and climate scientist at the University of New South Wales.

Read Next

The snow crab vanishes

Julia O’Malley

As the sea grows warmer, marine heat waves are more likely to tip temperatures past the threshold at which coral, kelp, and other marine life can survive. In western Australia, heat waves as intense as the one in 2011 occur roughly once every 80 years. They could arrive as often as once a year by 2100 if countries continue pumping carbon dioxide and methane into the air at high levels. Researchers pegged the chances of the Blob having re-emerged as strongly as it did in the Pacific Ocean in 2019 at less than 1 percent if it weren’t for human-caused warming. 

How global warming alters the wind and ocean patterns that spawn marine heat waves remains an “open question,” said Mike Alexander, a climate scientist at the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. Yet he and Sen Gupta don’t doubt that planetary warming and rising ocean temperatures are making marine heat waves worse. 

Fish that prefer cold water, like cod and salmon, are particularly vulnerable to heat waves. Warm water forces them to work harder, which means they need more food to sustain themselves. At the same time, it can make prey less accessible — say, by keeping the zooplankton salmon feast upon from rising to the surface for an easy supper. 

The heat also can restrict Pacific cod spawning habitat. Amid extreme heat in the Gulf of Alaska, their numbers tanked between 2013 and 2017. The population struggled to recover, so in 2020 the federal government closed the commercial season for the first time. The fish hauled out of the Gulf of Alaska have accounted for as much as 18 percent of the Pacific cod caught around the world. “It’s kind of devastating,” longtime cod fisherman Frank Miles, based in Kodiak, Alaska, told NPR at the time. 

The cod harvest has since reopened, but other fisheries haven’t been as resilient. In 2021, Canada closed 60 percent of its commercial Pacific salmon harvests, which support an industry that employs more than 6,000 people in British Columbia. 

As many as 30 million sockeye salmon migrated up British Columbia’s Fraser River in 2010. A decade later, only 291,000 salmon returned. The fish are declining for a number of reasons, but scientists say extreme ocean heat is a major culprit. 

“We’re really seeing substantial declines in salmon productivity,” said Catherine Michielsens, chief of fisheries management science at the Pacific Salmon Commission. She said there’s a “real concern” that British Columbia is witnessing the end of its commercial salmon fisheries.

It’s easy to focus on the heat during a heat wave, but high temperatures aren’t the only threat to fisheries. These weather patterns can cause a cascade of ecosystem changes, from algal blooms to shifting whale feeding grounds, that can wreak havoc on the fishing industry. That’s what happened in late 2015, at the tail end of the Blob. California, Oregon, and Washington delayed their Dungeness crab seasons — one of the West Coast’s most valuable seafood harvests — because the warm water spurred the growth of toxic algae, which catapulted a neurotoxin called domoic acid up the food chain. The crabs were more or less fine, but anyone who ate one might have wound up in the emergency room vomiting, lost some short-term memories, or even died. 

When California finally opened its crab season after a four-month closure, West Coast fisherfolk had lost an estimated $97.5 million compared to the previous year. But the Blob added more trouble to the mix. The warm water pushed krill, humpback whales’ main grub, toward the coast and into crabbers’ territory. “There was this intense overlap between the Dungeness crab fishery and humpback whales that led to an enormous spike in humpback whale entanglements in crab-fishing gear,” Free said. 

California’s Dungeness harvest rebounded with a strong catch in late 2016 and 2017, but it continues to face closures and delays due to concerns about toxic algae and trapped whales — a stark contrast from the pre-Blob era, when there were very few closures, Free said. “It’s putting the fishery on sort of a precipice right now.”

The northeastern Pacific is not the only place where fisheries are feeling the heat. One place of particular concern is the Gulf of Maine — in the northwest Atlantic Ocean — which has experienced a marine heat wave every year since 2012, according to Kathy Mills, a fisheries ecologist at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. 

The Gulf of Maine is like a sink with two faucets: one has cold water moving south from the Labrador Sea, the other has warm water from the tropics moving north along the Gulf Stream. But in recent years the Gulf Stream, a strong current that travels from the Caribbean up the East Coast and across the North Atlantic to Europe, has shifted northward, and the Labrador Current has gotten warmer, Mills said. “Instead of turning them on in the balance they used to be on, now we’re turning on the hot water more, and the cold water is not as cold as it used to be.” 

The result is that Maine lobsters, a bounty worth $725 million last year, have been growing faster and shedding their shells earlier. In the short term, the heat has been a boon for those who pluck them from the water, as it spurs growth and boosts lobster numbers. Business has been “booming,” Mills said. But if the trend continues, the critters might be forced to expend so much energy that they won’t be able consume enough food to reproduce or survive. 

“Now we’re getting to a point where the temperatures have been so warm for so long, and they are continuing to increase,” Mills said. “We might already be seeing signs that the population is turning off its growth trajectory because of temperature.” One of those signs is that lobster babies are becoming less prevalent. The heat appears to be a reason, among others, that lobster fisheries have already collapsed farther south, where the ocean is warmer, in southern New England.

There’s a silver lining, though: Lobsters that forage on cooler seabeds farther north, off the coast of Canada, might benefit from the heat; in fact, those populations have already been turning up in larger numbers. At the same time, “a whole suite” of species from warmer waters in the mid-Atlantic, such as longfin squid and black sea bass, both of which support multi-million-dollar commercial fisheries, have appeared a lot more frequently in the Gulf of Maine, where they used to be quite rare, said Mills. 

On the West Coast, a similar range shift is happening with California market squid — footlong, white-and-purple mollusks. (You may have tasted the mild meat of a market squid if you enjoy calamari.) Ever since the Blob, the squid have been seen as far north as Alaska, well beyond their usual habitat in the seas off Mexico and California. The heat wave has ended, but the squid are still hanging out up north. There is talk of opening a new fishery. 

“There are always going to be winners and losers,” Murawski said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The ocean is shattering heat records. Here’s what that means for fisheries. on Aug 11, 2023.

Pittsburgh, in its founding, was blessed and cursed with two abundant natural resources: free-flowing rivers and a nearby coal seam. Their presence made the city’s 20th-century status as a coal-fired, steel-making powerhouse possible. It also threw so much toxic smoke in the air that the town was once described as “hell with the lid off.”

Though air quality laws strengthened over the decades, pollution in Pittsburgh and surrounding Allegheny County has remained high, ranking among the 25 worst metro areas in the United States for fine, easy-to-inhale particles known as PM2.5. Carbon pollution can often feel so big — borne on the air, causing ice caps to go black and melt. But it also causes problems much closer to home. Allegheny County’s inhabitants are among the top 1 percent in the nation for cancer risk, and the area is notorious for its high rates of asthma and heart issues, both of which, like the biggest emitters, are concentrated in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. These kinds of health problems can often seem both mysterious in origin and inescapable for the people who live with them. However, the January 2016 closure of the Shenango Coke Works coal-processing plant provided an astonishing example of how quickly those same communities can recover from the most dire impacts of pollution.

Shenango was a coke oven — a facility that heats coal to around 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit to produce coke, which is in turn used to make steel. Such operations are famously nasty particle polluters, emitting not only carbon dioxide but also contaminants like benzene, arsenic, lead, and mercury. 

The research, led by the New York University-Langone School of Medicine, used medical records from area hospitals to determine emergency room visits and hospitalizations for heart ailments in the three years preceding and following the closure of the plant. They found an astonishing 42 percent drop in  weekly emergency cardiovascular admissions after 2016. That immediate drop was followed by a downward trend that continued for three years. The study also found corresponding steep drops in sulfur dioxide — as high as 90 percent near the facility and 50 percent at a monitoring station six miles away. Arsenic levels plummeted by two-thirds.

Study co-author George Thurston compared the sudden improvement to the benefits of quitting smoking. “Over time the body recovers,” he said. “Instead of at an individual level, you’re really looking at a community healing after the removal of that exposure.”

To Thurston, and study lead author Wuyue Yu, this research shows that cutting carbon emissions offers more than an abstract, long-term, far-ranging result. It can actually save lives, almost immediately.

The study was prompted by years of local agitation about the plant. Shenango closed under intense community scrutiny and had paid the county millions of dollars in fines for multiple air quality violations. 

For years, an organization called Allegheny County Clean Air Now, or ACCAN, fought to rein in ongoing emissions at the plant, bringing in the Environmental Protection Agency, the Allegheny County health department, and Carnegie Mellon University to monitor the plant’s pattern of violations and the health consequences for its neighbors. ACCAN members served as community scientists, collecting data and taking the results to local officials, company shareholder meetings, and U.S. Steel. Even steelworkers from the plant occasionally attended meetings, expressing concern about the situation. Now, says ACCAN member Thaddeus Popovich (who was told that there’s a 40 to 50 percent likelihood that his own triple-bypass heart surgery was prompted by living half a mile from Shenango), he and his peers feel “vindicated.”

After plant’s closure, members of ACCAN gathered and set to paper their memories of life before Shenango shut down. In the resulting collection, called Living Downwind, people describe living with fiery and sulfurous smells and mysterious ailments. Angelo Taranto, an active ACCAN member, lost his wife to a host of respiratory problems he’s sure were caused by Shenango’s billowing smoke. “These personal situations really energize people to want to do something,” he said. 

After the closure, Taranto said, ACCAN encouraged the Allegheny County health department to pull together some retrospective health studies. In 2018, Dr. Deborah Gentile documented a 41.6 percent drop in uncontrolled pediatric asthma two years following Shenango’s shuttering.

“What we were hearing from county officials was that they didn’t think the closure would be a boon to county health,” Taranto said. “We heard similar things from the company itself and we knew that wasn’t true, and we knew that we couldn’t let those types of statements remain unchallenged.”

There’s still a long way to go for the greater Pittsburgh area, though. Matt Mehalik, the director of the Breathe Project — which used its resources to support ACCAN and connect them to researchers —  points to similar facilities, such as the Clairton coke oven and the Mon Valley steel works, as contributors to major public health problems. Clairton, 10 times as large as Shenango ever was, sits near a low-income, majority-Black neighborhood, and community organizations have worked for years to hold the facility accountable to the harm it has caused. Environmental advocates are currently urging the EPA to revoke Clairton’s permit. The EPA has also proposed a stricter standard for toxic coke oven emissions, which could increase pressure on plants like Clairton.

Mehalik is excited about a potential transition to less coal-reliant forms of steelmaking as a long-term solution for Allegheny County. “We know that an investment in the right type of green steelmaking is needed if there is a future of steelmaking in the Mon Valley,” he said. “Perpetuation of a polluting facility that comes at the expense of our county is highly problematic.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline After a Pittsburgh coal processing plant closed, ER visits plummeted on Aug 11, 2023.

Over thousands of years, the Mississippi River wended its way through the lush and dense wetlands of the Barataria Basin in what’s now south-central Louisiana. As it flowed south on its way to the sea, the river continually poured sediment into the basin, gifting it with fresh, nutrient-rich river mud that replenished the land and prevented coastal erosion. But 20th-century innovations like dams and levees stopped the river’s natural systems. This, in combination with recent sea-level rise and the constant battering of supercharged hurricane seasons, means the sea now gnaws steadily at the bottom of the state, causing gradual but catastrophic land loss. Since 1932, the Barataria has lost 17 percent of its land. It’s predicted to lose another 200-plus square miles in the next 20 years. 

To combat this, Louisiana officials broke ground Thursday on an ambitious, $2.92 billion project to divert sediment from the Mississippi River into the basin, mimicking the natural processes of the river’s flow in an attempt to save the state’s disappearing coast. The initiative is the first step in Louisiana’s $50 billion Coastal Master Plan, funded in part by a lawsuit settlement from the devastating Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010. Though many laud the project, some worry it will harm existing wildlife in the basin, while taking a very long time to do its work.

The main event for the mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion Project will be “punching a hole in the levee” that prevents the Mississippi River from regularly overflowing its banks and changing course, said Bren Haase, the chair of the state’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority. The project involves installing a complex gate structure through the Mississippi River’s levee, allowing some water to flow into a channel, which will then empty out over the basin and wash into the sea, carrying mud, silt, and clay with it to create new land. It’ll take five years to build. Over 50 years, the diversion project should add 21 square miles of land to the basin, according to Haase. 

Supporters note the project will help restore a degraded ecosystem to some of its former glory. “There are large areas of open water where the marsh has just eroded and sunk away,” said Natalie Snider, associate vice president for the Environmental Defense Fund’s Climate Resilient Coasts and Watersheds program.

Read Next

‘There’s no alternative’: Louisiana’s ambitious plan to stay above water

Zoya Teirstein

Engineers factored sea-level rise projections of up to two and a half feet into the project’s design. But some scientists warn that sea-level rise is ultimately a wild card. There’s no knowing exactly how much, how or quickly, oceans will go up in the coming decades — and at some point, funding will likely run out for updates. For all the acres gained, they said, many will still be lost over time to the ravages of climate change. 

“It’s mitigation, not restoration,” said Rex Caffey, an associate professor of wetlands and coastal resources at Louisiana State University. “Slowing down the bleed.” 

The project has also been met with outcry from some of the people who make their living from the region’s fisheries. Louisiana has the most biorich fisheries  of any state, and some say the influx of freshwater from the project will decimate saltwater-loving stock in the basin, like oysters and shrimp.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Louisiana breaks ground on experimental project to rebuild lost wetlands on Aug 10, 2023.

Have you ever found yourself with a bunch of fabric — maybe old clothes, rags, socks, or tablecloths — that you just can’t find a use for, and don’t quite know what to do with? Well, don’t throw it in the trash, since 95% of all clothing, shoes, and other fabrics can be recycled in a textile recycling operation.

Why Is Textile Recycling Important? 

Globally, 92 million tonnes of textile waste is produced each year. Imagine: that’s a garbage truck’s-worth of textiles being thrown away every second. Americans alone throw away about 70 pounds of textiles each year, amounting to 17 million tons of annual waste, only 2.5 tons of which is recycled.

Textile waste isn’t just a matter of landfill space, but of social and environmental justice. With the rise of fast fashion in recent decades, clothing goes in and out of style faster than ever. Garments are made cheaply and quickly — often by exploited laborers —  and their poor quality means they won’t last long, either. In all, consumers buy about 60% more clothes than they did 15 years ago, and they’re only kept for half as long. Even when clothes are returned to retailers, they end up in landfills most of the time, since it’s less expensive than putting them back into circulation. Fast fashion alone is responsible for about 10% of all global carbon emissions, which is more than the emissions of all international flights and shipping combined. Furthermore, dying fabrics accounts for 20% of all water pollution. With so much fabric being produced, textile recycling can help give a piece of fabric — clothing or not — another life, and limit new fabrics from being produced.

What About Donating? 

Donating is certainly a viable option for suitable clothing that is still usable in its current form. However, clothing donation isn’t a silver bullet for our textile waste problem. According to the Council for Textile Recycling, charities that receive clothing donations will often ship a high percentage of it overseas. About 700,000 tons of used clothing gets shipped to other countries each year, and while these resources can be useful, there is also evidence that it harms local economies. For example, an imported secondhand clothing item can cost as much as 95% less than a clothing item produced in Kenya, which makes it hard for local businesses to compete. Goodwill, for one, is only able to sell about 30% of clothing donated in their thrift stores and through e-commerce. The remainder is sent to outlets, then sold in bulk, where a percentage is exported. Clothing that is unsuitable for wearing is also unsellable, but it might be recyclable.

How Does Textile Recycling Work?

When brought to a fabric recycler, individual textile items will be evaluated for their usefulness. Sometimes, they will be sold as clothing, or sold to be manufactured into other products. According to Secondary Materials and Recycled Textiles (SMART) Association, recycled fabrics are often used to make rags/wiping cloths that are needed in many industries, like construction, manufacturing, and custodial work. Or, the fabric is sold to recycling facilities to be dismantled. 

Different mechanical processes are used to recycle different kinds of fabric — especially natural vs. synthetic fabrics — so textiles are sorted by type (clothing, towels, etc.), type of fabric, and color. After being sorted, the fabrics are ready to be disassembled in one of two ways: mechanically or chemically. Since chemical processing is still an emerging and expensive method, mechanical processing is the primary mode of recycling. 

During mechanical processing, fabric is either shredded or pulled apart into its individual fibers — this works especially well for cotton and yarn. The machines tear at the fabric to break it down into its component fibers, which are then aligned in a process called “carding” to get them ready for reweaving. The fibers are respun into yarn that can be knitted or woven into new items. When a piece of fabric cannot be respun, it usually becomes filling, or “shoddy,” a product made from low-quality fabrics that’s used as insulation. This process doesn’t require any chemicals, which makes it advantageous, but shredding does impact the quality of the yarn as the fibers get shorter, which makes it harder to make high-quality garments. When respinning, virgin material is usually added to create a more high-quality fabric than if only the recycled fibers were used. 

Check the tags of your clothing, and you’ll probably see some that indicate that the garment was made with recycled polyester. Believe it or not, that likely means it was made from plastic water bottles. Synthetic fabrics that use polyester usually use blends of various materials, which makes them more difficult to recycle — so 95% of recycled polyester actually comes from recycled PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles. These bottles are sorted, shredded into flakes, cleaned, then melted to make new polyester fibers. 

How Do You Recycle Your Own Fabric? 

Now, what about that pile of old fabric you need to get rid of? 

First, check the condition of the items. In order to be recycled, they need to be completely clean and dry. Bacteria and moisture can contaminate an entire batch of recycling, leading to the entire bale being thrown away. 

There are a few options for recycling your unwanted fabric: 

1. Drop-off bins. Research recycling drop-offs in your area. Use Earth911’s free recycling finder to find nearby places to bring your items. These locations will usually be drop-off bins run by fabric recycling organizations, although sometimes they’ll feature local charities.
2. Local charities. Some charities will accept textile recycling, which they’ll then sell to generate revenue for their organization. Goodwill, Salvation Army, or other secondhand retailers will take suitable clothing to sell in their retail stores, but not usually other textiles. 
3. Private companies. Just like compost-collection services, private companies will come collect your textile waste for a fee, like CheckSammy and Retold. Always be sure to research a company before using their services to determine whether their recycling methods are legitimate. Some clothing companies will also offer to take your old clothing for free to be recycled, like Patagonia, Pact, and Girlfriend Collective, among many others.
4. Special events. Sustainability fairs, farmers markets, and city-run events might sponsor occasional free textile recycling drop-offs. Green Tree Textiles Recycling, for example, has booths at all of the New York City Down to Earth Farmers Markets to collect textile recycling. 

What Are the Difficulties With Textile Recycling?

Textile recycling isn’t perfect. Recycling technologies require consistent materials to work, and clothing products are variable. Dyes, finishes, and other chemicals require more steps and specialized processes, and impurities like buttons, zippers, and sequins need to be removed. Some garments also contain multiple different fabrics that need to be processed differently. The quality of fabric does suffer when disassembled, so virgin material usually needs to be incorporated into recycled products in order to make a high-quality garment. However, sometimes lower quality fabrics are “downcycled” and employed for other uses, like mattress stuffing. 

Emerging Technologies in Textile Recycling

Emerging technological solutions could make textile recycling more efficient and comprehensive. Re-polymerization — a type of chemical recycling — can break polyethylene terephthalate (PET) down to the molecular level, which is then “polymerized” to make new fibers. BlockTexx is also developing new technology to recycle blended fabrics made with a mixture of natural and synthetic fiber, which is notoriously difficult to recycle. 

The post What Is Textile Recycling? appeared first on EcoWatch.