LA Industry: Circular Textiles

Under Mayor Eric Garcetti, the City of LA created L.A.’s Green New Deal sustainability pLAn. The pLAn has ambitious goals of reaching zero waste by 2050. This can only be achieved by moving towards a circular economy through the implementation of different tools. As a municipality and sustainable business assistance team working directly with LA’s manufacturers and businesses, LA Industry is uniquely qualified to foster connections and build infrastructure to support this project. The design and implementation of a centralized hub and online access portal to manage exchanges and quality control of the inventory will be one of the pollution prevention and sustainability strategies used to help businesses and industries reduce costs and environmental footprints. Our clients voiced concerns about a lack of local opportunities to reuse, repurpose, or recycle material streams along with L.A.’s Green New Deal’s prestigious zero waste goals provided a perfect opportunity for this project.

The hub as proposed is focused on post-industrial material streams and will create new markets, green jobs, and economic opportunities for entrepreneurs to find innovative solutions to reuse, repurpose, and recycle. This hub will be a centralized location where businesses and organizations can browse clean material streams to use as feedstock in their manufacturing processes, reducing the number of virgin materials used and thus creating cost savings. A successful hub will be an important tool to aid the City of LA in reaching 100% landfill diversion by 2050 as well as being a proven model other cities moving towards sustainability can implement.

Pilot or new project, program, or initiative

The direct impact of this proposal is that LA County will see a reduction of waste going to landfills, the creation of new markets, green jobs, collaboration opportunities, and cost savings to local businesses, as well as uniting local organizations and NGOs passionate in sustainable fashion. The indirect impacts of this proposal will be cleaner local communities due to the reduction of waste going to landfills, a step closer for the City of LA and LA County in achieving zero waste, and fostering a social sense of responsibility amongst local businesses and consumers.

Due to the immense volume of the City of LAs’ textile and garment waste, our project will target the collection and repurposing of post-industrial textile scraps. Diverting this textile waste would support L.A.’s Green New Deal’s waste goals of 100% organic waste diversion by 2028, 100% landfill diversion by 2050, and 50% local material reuse by 2035. We hope to achieve a successful, circular, and streamlined business model for textiles that can be applied to other material streams. This includes mapping out the A’s (material stream producers), B’s (intermediate processors), C’s (end users), as well as monitoring transactions to establish a dashboard of tracking metrics (ie: frequency, tonnage, composition, active users, cost savings, value creation, etc.)

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