UNIQLO, Waste Management (WM) and US-based residential moving and storage company Piece of Cake Moving and Storage have expanded a clothing collection program to Los Angeles and Dallas, extending an initiative first launched in the New York area that collected more than 7,000 pounds of clothing in its first year.
The program, called UNtrash It, is tied to UNIQLO’s RE.UNIQLO take-back system and is aimed at capturing unwanted clothing during moves, when people are often sorting through closets and deciding what to keep. The companies said the service will be free during Earth Month in April.
Under the program, customers booking a move with Piece of Cake can set aside unwanted clothing for pickup alongside their other belongings. The garments then move through UNIQLO’s collection stream, where they are sorted for either donation or recycling. WM said it will use textile sorting technology to identify unwearable items for possible reuse or recycling.
The companies framed the effort as a response to a persistent problem in textile recovery: many consumers have clothes they no longer wear but lack a convenient way to move them into reuse or recycling channels. In announcing the expansion, the partners said textile waste totals 92 million tons a year globally.
“At UNIQLO, our philosophy is to create high-quality, perfected essentials that our customers will love to wear for years to come,” Jean Shein, global director of sustainability at UNIQLO, said. She added that the company wants to take responsibility for products through the end of their wearable life and said UNtrash It is meant to make clothing recycling easier during major transitions such as moving.
Piece of Cake cast the program as an extension of decisions many customers are already making before a move. “Before a customer starts packing, we encourage them to take a moment to edit their closet,” Najah Ayoub, chief marketing officer of Piece of Cake Moving and Storage, said.
WM pointed to its textile recycling infrastructure as part of a broader push to keep clothing out of disposal streams. “WM is a leader in textile recycling by building infrastructure that can reduce the amount of clothing sent to landfills,” Tara Hemmer, chief sustainability officer at WM, said. WM has separately said its textile facilities use robotic and near-infrared sorting systems to classify items by fabric type and color.
Consumers who are not moving can still use RE.UNIQLO bins at stores nationwide. UNIQLO says those collection points are used to sort garments into items suitable for reuse and items that can be recycled into other products or materials.
