Composting textiles with Everybody.World
If we want to stop throwing our clothes into landfills, we need to rethink how they're made from the ground up ...literally.
A few weeks ago, I buried a couple of undyed cotton t-shirts in one of my compost piles.
That sentence shouldn’t feel strange. Cotton is a plant fiber. It grows in the soil, utilizing both sun and water. In a sane textile system, something that comes from the earth should be able to go back to it when its useful life is complete. But the fact that it probably sounds odd to you that I put t-shirts in my compost tells you almost everything you need to know about how distorted modern clothing production has become.
Today, the vast majority of garments sold in the United States are made from synthetic fibers: polyester, nylon, acrylic, elastane. These are not “fabrics” in any historical sense. They are plastics, spun to look like thread. They come from fossil fuels, are manufactured through chemically intensive processes, and are designed primarily with cost in mind. Specifically, they make things cheaper.
But that cheapness comes at a different kind of price, of course. Garments made from plastic, shed plastic. A lot of it. Each time we wear and wash our synthetic-filled clothing, microplastics shed onto our skin and into our lungs, drift into our air and are absorbed into our soil and water. When we then send this synthetic-filled clothing to the landfill, those microplastics continue to migrate into the environment as the material degrades. In fact, the global textile system is one of the largest contributors to pollution, carbon emissions, and landfill waste on the planet.
“Dressing to kill could kill the planet,” stressed Secretary-General António Guterres at this year’s International Day of Zero Waste. “The fashion industry is one of the world’s most polluting sectors, responsible for up to eight per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.”
Honestly, that’s insane.
In order to build a world where what we wear doesn’t also destroy the planet, we need to reconsider inputs and outputs at every step: how fiber is grown, how we turn that fiber into textiles, how garments are designed and what dyes we use with them, whether we repair and reuse, and finally, how we dispose of them.
That last point is where I come in.
Over the summer, Los Angeles-based clothing brand Everybody.World reached out to me to see if I would compost one of their Trash Tees. These shirts are made from post-waste, plastic-free cotton and treated with low impact dyes—meaning that they should be biodegradable, able to be returned to the earth from which they came without leaving behind a legacy of contamination. Everybody World wanted to confirm, with a real compost pile, what exactly happens if you actually biodegrade them.
So I put a few of them into my compost to see what would happen.
In the compost pile, the shirt began to do what all biological matter does once it expires. It begins the process of breakdown, becoming food for other beings. In this case, microscopic ones. Cotton fabric is composed almost entirely of cellulose—a complex carbohydrate made of long, strongly-bonded chains of sugar molecules. When the cotton fabric is a t-shirt, those “strong bonds” make for a strong and durable fabric. But once it’s in the compost, microorganisms like bacteria and fungi are able to produce special enzymes that break the bonds and turn the long chains into simpler sugars, which they can then consume.
This happens quickly, too.
After one week in the compost, the Trash Tees and developed tie-dye like patterns of swirling, white fungal matter, although they remained largely intact. After two weeks, their material was so thin that slight pressure split the fibers, holes were opening up across the sleeves and seams. By the third week, the shirts were nearly unrecognizable. This was the moment to take a closer work.
In collaboration with Maggie Smart-McCabe, local soil-head and —full disclosure, one of my besties— we took some samples from both the finished compost and the remaining parts of the t-shirt, set up a microscope on my kitchen table, and took a look. Under magnification, the sample revealed a dense, teeming ecosystem: protozoa, testate amoebas, mature fungal threads, fungal spores, ciliates and aerobic bacteria …all wiggling, wandering (and occasionally zinging) past the microscope.
Below, we have just one snapshot of one tiny part of one tiny droplet of sample. But so much life! We see a testate amoeba (the grape-shaped guy at the center) a mature fungal strand (that’s the thread running parallel to the amoeba) and a speedy little ciliate (that’s the dot intersecting the fungal thread). Maggie expressed astonishment that she managed to capture the ciliate on camera as it careened across the screen.
Below, on the left, the brown-ish strand is a mature fungal thread. Fungal threads, or hyphae, appear segmented under a microscope because of internal cross-walls called septa. These septa divide the fungal thread into individual cell-like compartments. Fungi love a carbon-rich meal like pure cotton fiber might provide, and their presence is—generally— heavily-coveted in the compost pile.
Lastly, we have a close up of some remaining strands of cotton fiber.
As a general rule, the more abundant and diverse the microbial activity, the healthier the overall system. And what we saw was definitely abundance.
To compost your clothing:
Having a hot compost helps. I recommend shredding, wetting, and adding your cotton fabric to the compost pile, treating as you would any other “brown” (aka: a high-carbon input). That’s it, it’s that simple.
Or, at least, it should be.
All photography in this edition by the lovely Cheyenne Peerson.
This is awesome :)
Cool article. I really enjoyed the close-up photos of the microorganisms!