We’re diverting textile offcuts from landfill

Textiles help make A Life Outside comfortable and characterful. Although improvements are always being made to our processes, some waste is unavoidable during manufacture.

But with the help of After, we’ve diverted 550kg of textile waste — that’s the size of a 1-year-old elephant — from landfill.

A textile tale

With our Creative Director, Susan Tait, trained as a textile designer, textiles have become an important part of our offering. Our high performance textiles (some created in collaboration with Mokum) can stand the test of time in a range of demanding Australian outdoor environments. But whilst we’re improving our processes every day, our upholstered products and protective furniture covers do create offcuts, including textile waste, threads and zips.

That’s why we’ve started investing in a paid collection service by After, to ensure our textile offcuts continue to have value, rather than becoming waste.

As part of a series of improvements across the board, our Operations & Sustainability Coordinator, Amanda Harcourt found a way to give our textile offcuts a new life. She discovered that all our offcuts can be collected and transformed into recycled materials, via a circular business called After. This incredible service collects and redistributes textile waste to their partners, who either recycle or transform textiles into new materials, creating a circular economy.

Turning textile trash into treasure

‘The offcuts are collected in our upholstery work room,’ Amanda explains. ‘The textile waste is separated from the foam waste (which is also recycled through our foam supplier, Dunlop). Each month we book in a collection with After based on the weight of textile waste we have collected.’

Our textile waste at Tait is just a small drop in a big pond. Six thousand kilograms of textiles are thrown by Australian households every 10 minutes – 1 adult-sized elephant’s worth of clothing.

So far, we’ve diverted 550kg of textile offcuts from landfill – roughly the size of a 1-year-old elephant. But every bit counts, and we’re doing what we can to play our part responsibly.

‘Our first textile collection with After was in January 2023,’ Amanda recalls. ‘We were one of the first businesses to partner with them when they launched around that time.’

Joining forces in the sustainable journey

“We’re thrilled to be working with such a dynamic and sustainably aligned company, whose mission is ‘to empower Australia’s participation in the circular economy by reinventing ethical textile disposal’,” says Creative Director Susan Tait. “They’ve helped us on our journey, educating us on the extent of textile waste and providing metrics that help us understand the impact of our actions.”

If you’re interested, we urge you to consider booking a textile waste pick up with After. As well as working with business, they also do household pickups for clothing (no undergarments), bed linen, upholstery, and even shoes.

Happy diverting!

Download our Sustainability Statement

Published 17 September 2024

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