Project Details

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Sustainable Textile Market Development

Company: Goodwill Industries of North Central Pa, Inc.

Major(s):
Primary: IE
Secondary: MATSE

Non-Disclosure Agreement: NO

Intellectual Property: NO

Goodwill Industries of North Central Pennsylvania is a nonprofit organization headquartered in Falls Creek, PA, with a mission of meeting life challenges through opportunity, education, training, and work. The organization employs over 700 people across 15 Pennsylvania counties and is one of the state's largest recyclers, diverting more than five million pounds of donated goods from landfills each year. Goodwill receives over 40,000 pounds of donated clothing every week. Items that do not meet the quality standard for resale in its retail stores are compressed into 1,000-pound bales and sold to a single buyer who ships the material in bulk to low-income countries overseas. This arrangement is financially marginal (the per-pound return is low) and Goodwill is concerned that the market could shrink or disappear, much like what has happened in plastics recycling. The organization is already piloting a more promising alternative: a partnership with a company that recycles donated clothing into new fabric and pays significantly more per pound. That program, however, accepts only certain materials and colors, and excludes items with buttons, logos, or other embellishments, limiting how much volume it can absorb. The goal of this project is to identify, evaluate, and compare alternative end-use markets for Goodwill's non-resalable clothing stream, with particular interest in options that handle cotton and impose fewer material restrictions. Students will begin by characterizing the incoming clothing stream (analyzing it by material type, color, contamination rate, and embellishment presence) to establish volume and composition data. They will then research the landscape of textile recycling, upcycling, industrial reuse, and other sustainable outlets, and engage directly with potential partners and vendors to verify both the technical and commercial feasibility of each option. For each viable alternative, students will map the process changes Goodwill would need to make in sorting, baling, or logistics, and estimate the operational cost of those changes. Students are expected to surface opportunities Goodwill may not be aware of and build a data-supported case for the best path forward. Final deliverables include a material flow characterization of the incoming stream, a quantitative comparison table across finalist markets (covering volume capacity, revenue per pound, material restrictions, and logistics costs), a recommended strategy with supporting justification, and an implementation roadmap for Goodwill to act on the findings.