Whether you just did a closet clean-out or you’ve just noticed a few pieces are looking a bit too tired for repair, you might be wondering what do I do with these old clothes?
The Clothing Waste Problem
In the United States, the EPA reported that nearly 67% of discarded textiles are landfilled and 19% were incinerated with less than 15% being recycled. Those stats mean that 14,520,000 tons of textiles were landfilled or burned in the year 2018 alone (which was the last year that textile waste numbers were reported by the EPA).
Plus, there isn’t actually much if any textile-to-textile recycling infrastructure that exists at scale yet, so most textile recycling is technically downcycling. This is where textiles are shredded and turned into things like carpeting or insulation. While it’s better than the landfill, it’s not always the best scenario for textiles (especially when they’re still in decent condition).
Given the state of textile recycling, you might be thinking ok, let’s donate it!?
Unfortunately only a small percentage (estimates range from 10-20%) of the clothes you donate are sold in the charity shops themselves.
A significant amount of the donated clothes end up getting exported to countries in the Global South like Chile, Kenya, and Ghana where they do not have the demand to sell all of that clothing nor the infrastructure to process the volume of clothing.
And these countries certainly do not have the textile recycling infrastructure to handle the amount of old, worn-out low-quality clothing that the Global North is dumping.
What Do We Do With These Old Clothes Then?
While the typical suggestions for what to do with old clothes fall flat, that doesn’t mean we should give up — this guide exists to help you find sustainable ways to manage these unwanted garments and other pieces.
Step one: determine if it’s really a no or actually a “maybe”.
Sometimes when we’re in the midst of a closet declutter or just feeling overwhelmed by our wardrobe, it can be tempting to get rid of all of our “maybe” pieces. I’ve certainly done this from time to time.
While I love a streamlined wardrobe, I have regretted getting rid of particular pieces in the past. I felt like I gave up on some gems too soon! So now I like to implement a pause before decluttering my “maybe” pieces.
What’s a “maybe” piece? This is a personal decision, but for me this category involves:
- Pieces that I’ve worn in the past that I got tired of
- Pieces that I do love alone, but don’t know how to style yet
- Pieces that have just 1 or 2 things off about them
Essentially, “maybe” pieces are items that still have potential.
So to try to determine if it’s really time to say goodbye to that item, I first follow these practices:
If it’s an item I’m tired of wearing…
I’ll put it away for a season or two. It’s surprising how many items I’ve ended up loving again by just taking a break from seeing it in my closet every single day.
If it’s an item I don’t know how to style quite right…
I turn to Pinterest!
I like to search for that item on Pinterest + the term “outfit ideas”.
For example, if I have a sweater vest in my maybe pile that I want to wear more, I might search “sweater vest outfit ideas”.
I’ll save a few of the Pins that stand out to me and see how I might be able to emulate some of those looks.
You don’t have to own the exact pieces that are shown in the images but think about if you have something that could be similar and do a little try-on session.
If there is just one or two things off about a piece…
I consider if these things are fixable. Can I take my trousers to a tailor to get hemmed? If a v-neck is too low for my liking, can I add a snap closure?
Or I consider if I can wear those items in a different way. For example, does that fitted turtleneck work better as an under-layer? Will the button-down feel less stuffy if I cuff the sleeves and unbutton the top buttons?
I’m not suggesting you keep things that you genuinely dislike or that make you feel uncomfortable! But if a piece still has potential, I find that a bit of experimentation can go a long way.
If a piece is just not feeling totally “you”…
Try pairing it with a tried-and-true item in your closet. This is a suggestion that two podcast guests — personal stylist Sophie Strauss and Stylebook co-founder Jess Atkins — have shared and it has worked wonders for me.
Another approach is to bring in a piece that has the opposite feel. For example, if a dress is feeling too soft for your style, what would the outfit look like if you brought it a moto jacket? What if you wore it with a pair of leather boots or sneakers?
This is also where your style words can come in handy! My current style words are feminine, structured, and grounded. So if a blouse is feeling too frilly, I add in a structured blazer. Or if a structured outfit is feeling too stuffy, I’ll add in something like a raffia bag to ground it down or a feminine shoe to make it feel a bit lighter.
A piece can be totally transformed when paired with the right complementary — or juxtaposed — pieces.
Step two: separate out clothes in good condition
Now for the “no’s” or the “maybe’s” that just are not working, let’s talk about how to responsibly declutter these items!
The best approach is going to depend on the item (i.e. how desirable it is), the amount of time you have to rehome it, and if you want to get a financial return or not.
Here are your options from highest to lowest effort. Note that there are some links below that are affiliate links — as always, I only share organizations and brands I love that I think you’d love too.
Resell it yourself
- Effort: high — you’ll need to photograph and upload the item to a marketplace, handle customer communications, and ship it out
- Financial potential: high relative to the resale value of the piece
- Best for: items with resale value that’d be worth the shipping cost
- Where? Online marketplaces like Poshmark, Depop, Vinted, Mercari, Vestiaire Collective, or Ebay.
Consign it locally
- Effort: moderate
- Financial potential: moderate to low, depending on the percentage your local consigner keeps
- Best for: seasonal items with resale value; check which brands and styles your local consignment shop takes
- Where? Search for “consignment shops near me” or peruse the ratings to read the experiences sellers have had
Swap or share with a friend
- Effort: moderate
- Financial potential: none, but you might get a new-to-you piece
- Best for: items your friend would love (I’d suggest sending pictures beforehand to a friend or in a friend group to see if anyone would be interested OR next time you see them in person you can show the pieces to them)
- Where? In person with a friend
Go to a clothing swap
- Effort: moderate
- Financial potential: none, but you’ll get new-to-you pieces (and it can be fun!)
- Best for: it depends on the swap, but any item in good condition
- Where? Search for “clothing swaps near me” or search on event platforms like Eventbrite; I also suggest following any local sustainable fashion organizations to stay updated on events near you!
Direct donations
- Effort: moderate
- Financial potential: none, but you’ll feel confident your donations are actually getting used by those in most need of them
- Best for: specific items (e.g., gently used coat to a homeless shelter or workwear to a women’s center; this will be specified by the organization)
- Where? Search for local organizations that might be in need of clothing, like a women’s center, homeless shelter, or refugee agency. They should be listing out the items that the organization is currently in need of. If you’re uncertain, contact them first! Sending in unwanted items may lead to that piece getting tossed.
Consign it with an online consignment store
- Effort: low
- Financial potential: moderate to none (some stores give $0 for fast fashion items)
- Best for: items you don’t have time to resell individually
- Where? Online stores like ThredUp take all types of items; The RealReal consigns luxury and designer items
General donations
- Effort: low
- Financial potential: none (plus, these places often have more than enough clothing so the pieces may not actually be resold)
- Best for: desirable pieces that have a high chance to get resold (though again, sell-through rates do tend to be quite low at charity shops so I try to avoid this approach)
- Where? A charity shop that resells clothing in order to raise money for their cause, like a Goodwill, Salvation Army, or British Red Cross shop
Tips for donating and selling clothing:
No matter which approach you use, keep these tips in mind to maximize the life of your old clothing!
- The piece is going to have the best chance at a new life when you’re reselling it in-season. (Donating or selling a parka in summer doesn’t have great odds!) If an item I want to rehome is out of season, I’ll store it away in a bin for later.
- Wash the piece before selling, swapping or donating. This sounds basic, but it was clear at the clothing swap I just co-hosted that not everyone is doing this!!
- If the piece is damaged beyond repair, stained, or worn-out, take it to step 3 instead!
Step 3: recycle or upcycle old clothes in poor condition
Some garments are simply unwearable. This is the toughest category to handle, given the lack of real textile recycling options. But there are still ways to make the most of these textiles!
If you want to try a creative project, old garments can become upcycling supplies. For a variety of upcycling classes, check out Skillshare or Domestika.
If you don’t want to upcycle these pieces yourself, SUAY LA has “Suay it Forward” Textile Recycling Bags.
They don’t export these textiles, but actually upcycle them in-house, which allows for full transparency.
A bag is $20, but in exchange you get a $20 credit to put towards one of their upcycled pieces. (I have my eye on one of their throw pillows!)
Another option for recycling your old clothes is Trashie. Their take-back bag works similarly — you purchase a bag for $20, fill it up with old clothing in any condition and they’ll sort through the textiles to find the next best use for that piece.
Trashie doesn’t have as much transparency into their process as SUAY LA does because they work with 40 external partners (rather than handling everything in-house), but they’ve been posting more behind-the-scenes videos on their Instagram page.
The benefit of Trashie is that you unlock dozens of rewards when you purchase one of their Take-Back Bags, rather than just getting credit at one store.
I do hope that in the future, all textile recycling options with full transparency will be free or at least that textiles can be accepted with the rest of our household recycling! I understand that paying for textile recycling is not accessible to everyone, even if you get a store credit in exchange.
In that case, you could contact your local thrift store to see how they handle unwearable garments. Textile-to-textile recycling is extremely rare so ask if they downcycle them domestically (preferable) or if they export them, making them a problem for communities in the Global South to deal with (avoid).
Step 3b: what to do with old underwear
Even tougher than repurposed unwearable clothing? Rehoming worn underwear! Almost nowhere excepts these items, and for very understandable reasons!
That said, here are two options to check out:
The Bra Recyclers is a social enterprise that donates new bras and repurposes used bras.
Subset has an underwear recycling program. The underwear brand works with a partner that downcycles these textiles into things like insulation and carpet bedding. Similar to SUAY LA and Trashie, you pay upfront but get a store credit in exchange. I’ve used Subset’s underwear recycling program in the past when I made the switch from synthetic underwear to their organic cotton pieces for health reasons.
My Final Thoughts on Managing Old Clothes Responsibly
When the reality of what it really takes to responsibly manage my old clothes sank in for me, it really made me way more intentional about my purchases. (There is no real “away”, because away is a real place, inhabited by real humans.)
That said, of course there will always be times where our clothing just doesn’t work for us anymore. That’s part of life — lifestyles change, identities change, needs change, sizes change, and even the climate we live in changes — and keeping 100% of our clothes forever is simply not realistic.
So when the time does come to declutter a few pieces, I turn to the three steps above to maximize their use and ensure they are getting a second (or third!) life that I can feel good about.
The post What to Do With Old Clothes, Sustainably appeared first on .
Last winter, we kept our house at 60 degrees and our electric bill was STILL $280. I’ve been interested in solar for a long time, but on the long list of house projects (especially when you’re restoring a 200 year old house on the historic registry) some are more pressing than others.
But with a few of those major projects wrapping up, and a daunting bill before me, I figured now was the time for a quick google search on solar panels, and let me tell you….. It can be very overwhelming.
Figuring out the rules (cough, cough, historic society), incentives or rebates if applicable, how much it would cost, how much we could save, etc. felt a little like a part-time job. But, one website made it really easy to compare things, and I am happy to be partnering with Aurora Solar to share that site with you.
Because I think you should be able to easily run the numbers on your house without a lot of hassle!
This post is sponsored by Aurora Solar, but all thoughts and opinions are my own.
If you’ve ever gotten a solar quote, there’s a good chance that Aurora Solar was involved. Aurora was founded in 2013 after its co-founders spent seven months trying to design a solar energy system using a patchwork of different tools.
Afterall, designing a solar system shouldn’t be harder than actually installing one. So they built software specifically for solar professionals. Today, more than 7,000 solar organizations use Aurora, and more than 20 million solar projects have been designed using the platform. They are also the largest solar software provider in the world. Their software is used by roughly 80% of the top 75 residential solar companies in the U.S.
All of this tech has been primarily used by professional installers to map your roof and then create a proposal, but now Aurora is offering this tech to us to help compare quotes.
So instead of having to call a bunch of different installers, I could use the Aurora Solar Marketplace to understand my solar potential, compare estimates, understand my possible savings, look into battery storage and other home electrification incentives, and map out different financing options.
1. know how much electricity the system will actually produce
Before you even get into the price, make sure you understand what you’re actually being quoted.
Two solar systems can have very different prices because they may not be the same size or produce the same amount of electricity. A cheaper system might simply have fewer panels and offset less of your electric bill.
With Aurora, you can compare solar estimates and see the system size, energy production, and how much electricity the system should offset.
You can also upload your utility bill to get a solar estimate based more closely on your actual energy usage, to make the quote accurate for you instead of a ‘generic household’.
2. understand the solar payback period
Aurora calculates things like payback period and lifetime savings, which makes it much easier to understand the long-term finances.
The solar payback period is basically how long it takes for your estimated savings to make up for what you spent on the system, and this is the number that surprised me most!
One estimate had a payback period of around 7 years, and another was closer to 11 years! Over 25 years, two of the estimates I looked at had almost a $13,000 difference in projected savings.
Of course, these are still projections as electricity rates can change (HELLO 2026) but when you’re trying to compare two options for the same house, knowing that one is projected to pay for itself four years sooner is pretty useful information.
3. look beyond the monthly payment
Depending on the installer, you may be looking at a cash purchase, solar loan, lease, or power purchase agreement.
But thankfully with Aurora you can compare the different financing options side-by-side which makes it a lot easier to see the trade-offs. One option may have a lower upfront cost, another may have a lower monthly payment, and another may give you better long-term savings.
4. find out which solar incentives actually apply to you
The minute you start Googling solar, you can find federal incentives, state incentives, utility programs, rebates, net metering, and a whole bunch of information that may or may not even apply to where you live.
And some of the articles ranking at the top of Google are several years old! (RIP to the federal incentives canceled at the end of 2025.) But, Aurora can account for solar incentives when calculating the cost and savings of a system, including state, local, and utility-specific programs.
I would still double check any incentive or tax benefit you’re planning to use before signing a contract, especially because programs and eligibility can change, but having all the relevant information in the same place makes the research process much less overwhelming.
5. research the installer, equipment, and warranties
Aurora lets you compare solar installers based on things like reviews, reputation, pricing, and financing options, which I think is just as important as the actual quote.
I’d also look closely at what equipment is included. What panels are they using? What kind of inverter? How long are the equipment warranties? Is there also a workmanship warranty from the installer? Who handles repairs if something goes wrong five or ten years from now?
And, I know I’ve said it a million times, but it’s nice to see it side-by-side without having to fill out a bunch of forms and be hounded on the phone just to get an idea of what solar may look like.
The post How to Compare Solar Quotes: What to Look For Before You Choose appeared first on Going Zero Waste.
How to Compare Solar Quotes: What to Look For Before You Choose
Green Living
Sustainability In Your Ear: XPRIZE’s David Babson on Why Climate Grand Challenges Need Buyers, Too
Buyers contracted nearly 30 million tons of durable carbon removal in 2025, more than triple the 2024 total, according to CDR.fyi data reported by Heatmap. About 90% of those purchases came from a single company, Microsoft, and suppliers delivered only about 450,000 tons during the year. That is a sliver of the six to 10 billion tons of removal a year that climate scenarios suggest the world will need by 2050. The technology to pull carbon out of the air works, but the customers needed to scale it remain scarce.
Our guest today, David Babson, is executive vice president of the Energy, Climate, and Nature domain at the XPRIZE Foundation. He calls the slow progress a market failure, because the technology is progressing faster than it is being adopted. Babson previously led MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges initiative and was a program director at the U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA-E. His portfolio includes XPRIZE Carbon Removal, which drew 1,334 teams and whose participants have raised more than $3.3 billion. In April 2025, Mati Carbon won its $50 million grand prize for spreading crushed basalt on smallholder farms in India, where the rock locks away carbon dioxide. “If people could make money taking carbon out of the air and putting it underground, as opposed to only being able to make money taking it from underground and putting it in the air, we would be in a better place,” Babson says. Mati is weathering the slump in part because its rock dust also improves soil health and crop yields, giving farmers a reason to participate that doesn’t depend on carbon credit prices.
XPRIZE’s answer is to change what winners receive. Babson describes “mixed purses” that pair a cash award with a guaranteed buyer through an advance market commitment, a power purchase agreement, or an offtake contract. In one thought experiment, a carbon removal prize would come with a separate $1 billion fund raised from credit buyers, which qualified teams could draw on as they deliver verified tons. XPRIZE is applying the same thinking to a planned series of fusion energy prizes, pairing technical milestones with market mechanisms to build the supply chain that commercial fusion will require. The same gap between invention and adoption shows up in other XPRIZE competitions. On September 23, XPRIZE Wildfire awarded about $4.55 million from its $11 million purse, with defense contractor Anduril Industries taking first place in autonomous fire response along with a $1 million Lockheed Martin bonus. Babson expects costs to fall as fire agencies adopt the tools and as startups license individual components into cheaper platforms, though underfunded agencies will need a way to buy the first systems. He also notes that the competition left fuel management and ground-based autonomy for future prizes. Earlier this year, program director Andrea Santy told us that field testing had moved ahead of drone regulations. In biodiversity, Limelight Rainforest won $5 million for surveying 100 hectares of tropical forest in under 24 hours and identifying more than 250 species. Biodiversity still lacks a price, but Babson argues that once ecosystems can be measured, slow-walking policy becomes “a dereliction of what they should be doing.”
We also discuss the tension inside XPRIZE’s vision of “equitable abundance,” including a $101 million Healthspan prize that could add years of consumption to longer lives. Babson argues that abundant, cheap clean energy would let society move beyond efficiency as its organizing principle, powering uses such as indoor vertical farms that could return millions of acres of farmland to nature. You can follow XPRIZE’s new competitions and get involved in its prize ideation workshops at xprize.org.
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Interview Transcript
Mitch Ratcliffe 00:36
Hello. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today.
Let’s talk about the power and the uses of grand challenge programs to kickstart low-carbon industries and respond to the changing environment. Over the past several years, we’ve talked on the show with leaders of grand challenge programs designed to accelerate progress on humanity’s most difficult challenges, from pulling carbon out of the atmosphere to fighting rapidly growing wildfire threats in cities and rural communities. Many of these competitions have been launched by XPRIZE, whose leaders have shared on the show the stories of these competitions as they launched and unfolded.
Today is a chance to take stock, to look back and think about how climate markets, technology, and politics are changing fast, and how that makes this a good moment to ask the question: Are these programs designed to accelerate progress actually delivering that progress?
Our guest today designs XPRIZE’s climate bets. David Babson is executive vice president of the Energy, Climate, and Nature domain at the XPRIZE Foundation. Before XPRIZE, he was the executive director of MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges initiative and a program director at the U.S. Energy Department’s ARPA-E energy technology research agency.
His portfolio includes the largest incentive in prize history. In 2025, Mati Carbon received a $50 million grand prize for their enhanced rock weathering solution for capturing and drawing down carbon, and XPRIZE now reports that companies participating in its programs have raised $3.3 billion. That carbon removal win arrived just as the removal market hit serious turbulence, and as XPRIZE’s wildfire competition wrapped up with its top prize still unclaimed.
So we’re going to discuss what grand challenges can really accomplish, which winners continue to build and which stall, and what the reasons are, as well as the tensions inside a portfolio that funds both climate solutions and longer human lifespans. We’ll get to the conversation right after this brief commercial break. Stay tuned.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear, and welcome, David Babson, to Sustainability In Your Ear. How are you doing today?
David Babson 03:10
I’m doing well.
Mitch Ratcliffe 03:11
I’m glad to have you here. You’ve run research portfolios at ARPA-E and MIT. What can a prize purse accomplish that a well-funded grant program can’t, or are they complementary?
David Babson 03:22
They’re absolutely complementary. The way that I think about it is that the value of these different mechanisms for promoting innovation is at different parts of the innovation supply chain, if you will. A prize is not a substitute for the very necessary investments that places like governments make into basic, applied, and advanced research. In fact, those types of investments are really valuable for establishing the innovation ecosystems and the technical capacities to eventually win prizes.
Where the prize is very valuable is somewhat downstream: translating technologies, ideas, and innovations that are coming out of academia and labs to market for scale. It challenges the innovators to imagine those technical capacities as solutions to global challenges, and then the visibility that the prize brings to those translations of technologies de-risks funding to flow to those innovators so they can imagine their uses in practice.
So I actually see them as very complementary, particularly when it comes to solutions in the energy and climate space that require rapid adoption of technologies in markets to have impact. Just having an energy solution or a climate solution is not valuable unless it can be de-risked and connected to markets to scale for impact. And that’s what the prize is actually very good at doing.
Mitch Ratcliffe 05:22
That comes through in the impact report that you all published recently. About 1,300 different organizations were catalyzed. The groups came together, apparently, because of their desire to compete in the competition.
What I’ve found in my work with public-private partnerships, in particular, is that impact investors are looking for that initial traction, and to a degree, the prize and the distribution of money within the prize group is that catalyst that says there’s a real opportunity for an impact profit, something that both does good and is profitable. How does the organization consult with the financial communities that are going to back these companies once your prize has been awarded? Is there a backroom conversation about that, for lack of a better way of putting it?
David Babson 06:10
Not an explicit backroom conversation about it, but the prize itself brings attention to the innovations that are coming out to win the competition. Oftentimes, as you’re noting, these impact investing communities exist, and they are looking for technologies to invest in to have impact.
What the prize is effective at doing is casting a wider net and surfacing the best solutions across the board, where there may have been silos in the past, or there may not have been transparency to individual investors about where to put their money. The prize is capable of elevating all of them, creating better visibility, and therefore, just by its inherent operation, creates better opportunities for investment capital to flow to the right types of teams to have greater impact more quickly.
So we don’t have explicit discussions with those types of investor communities to have them directly connected to individual prizes. But we often consult with investors and experts in industry to inform the metrics that we would want to have demonstrated, so that we know that when teams are winning our competitions, the demonstrations that they do are de-risking capital to flow to those innovators so that they can be translated to market.
Mitch Ratcliffe 07:47
We’re talking about growing industries, which of course means diversifying into a lot of specializations. Once you’ve got this kind of anchor winning team or teams, how does XPRIZE think about propagating the information that’s necessary for the rest of the industry to grow and fill in around them, in order to provide the kind of comprehensive geographic coverage and range of functions that are necessary for the industry to thrive? Is that something that you think about cultivating, like you would in agriculture?
David Babson 08:22
It is something that we think a lot about. With a few of the more recent prize competitions that we’ve run, we have also paired those competitions with a subsequent impact phase, which is designed to further build the community that has been established through the operation of the prize and connect the technologies that came out of the competition to the right types of markets and investors so that they can scale.
So that is one of the things that we’re thinking about in future competitions as well: not just running an innovation competition to surface new innovations, but how do we augment the community building that the prize provides as a way to also promote the back-end business models and industries that can scale those solutions for impact?
Mitch Ratcliffe 09:19
How would you describe the patterns you’re looking for that indicate that an organization can become that durable enterprise? What separates them from the rest? Have you got thoughts about that?
David Babson 09:29
I do have thoughts about it. In a lot of ways, the rigorous metrics that we set up when we’re designing the competition are informed by what experts believe would be the necessary demonstrations to actually generate a solution that is market viable. So a lot of it is very quantitative in terms of how we architect the competition.
But what we’ve also seen is that there are elements of winning teams that can’t always be controlled by just the scientific metrics. A lot of times, it’s the composition of the team, how diverse they are, and the unique mentality that the leaders of the team have in terms of their vision and their ambition. Those are parts that you can’t control for, but the prize model is very effective at also attracting the type of entrepreneurial, big-thinking individuals that actually tend to be behind some of the most successful companies.
Mitch Ratcliffe 10:40
Those big-thinking individuals often struggle with the transition from inventor. And to your point about the academic community often being the source of many of the teams that are competing, that’s not something that academics are necessarily good at. As part of the prize process, do you also begin to coach them on how to staff for the operators who are going to be able to translate the invention into a market success?
David Babson 11:04
Absolutely. On the front end, the prize itself sets a target that is typically beyond what researchers in an academic setting are imagining for what they’re doing. It gives them a way to imagine their technical innovations as scalable solutions to big problems, so that gets them excited to be in the competition. But you’re right: they’re not necessarily all business-minded or have the types of experience that would allow even very, very good solutions to become very strong companies and business models.
So one of the things that we have tried out recently, and it’s a model that we could replicate in future competitions as well, is an accelerator cohort in the carbon removal prize. It was optional for teams to opt into the cohort to get additional guidance and consulting from experts in startups and technology translation. That would help them think about the unique elements of their proposed carb