We have spent 5 years preparing to open for donations. Why? Because we want to be the most sustainable donation center we can be. We also wanted to prepare our space and team for an influx of clothing for sorting, cleaning, and reuse. And we are ready!
When donating to us, we do our best to keep 90% of textiles here and reused within our community by reselling, upcycling, mending, dying, and being used as scrap to be made into new garments and products or as textiles for our sewing and tailoring classes.
Over the past 20 years, donations have exploded as fast fashion made clothes cheaper and more disposable; the sheer amount of textile waste is double what it was two decades ago.
The surge in donations hasn't come with a matching rise in quality: fast-fashion garments are often too worn or too cheaply made to have real resale value, so a much larger share of what gets donated than in the past is functionally unsellable. Thrift chains and charities simply can't move that much inventory locally, so they bale up the excess and export it, often to countries in the Global South. Dumping huge volumes of synthetic textile waste on places like Ghana or Chile that lack the infrastructure to handle it, which critics call "waste colonialism." So even donations that feel like they're being "reused" often end up as landfill or waterway pollution a few steps removed from you, the donor.
We believe the future of textile recycling and reuse is upcycling. And that's why we offer Sewing classes and our Tailoring Academy to teach professional sewing skills to our community in hopes they choose the route of sustainability and upcycling garments to combat this problem.
And at the end of the day, we hope that what we do makes you stop and think about where your clothing will go when you are done with it, before you buy. And don't even get me started on the conditions your clothing is made under...
All the best,
Danielle Sturm, Co-Founder & CEO
Learn more about what we accept and don't accept at The Nest. Also, learn how to donate.
