The Scale of Textile Waste in Canada
Canadians discard an estimated 500 million kilograms of textiles each year. A significant portion goes directly to landfill — not because no alternatives exist, but because the pathways for diversion are not consistently understood or used. The situation is improving: provincial governments and national retailers have expanded collection infrastructure over the past decade, and awareness of textile waste as a distinct category (separate from general household waste) has grown.
The distinction between donation and recycling is important to understand before deciding where items go. Donation routes are for textiles that are clean, intact, and usable by another person. Recycling routes handle items that are worn beyond wearable condition — stained, torn, or structurally failed — but whose fibres can still be processed into industrial rags, insulation fill, or fibre for new products.
Donation: What Qualifies and Where to Bring It
Usable clothing, footwear, accessories, linens, and curtains can be donated through several channels in Canada. The main national organisations with physical drop-off locations are:
- Value Village / Savers — operates across most provinces, accepts bagged clothing and household textiles at store locations.
- Salvation Army Thrift Stores — widely distributed; accepts clothing, footwear, and linens. Many locations have external collection bins that are accessible outside store hours.
- Goodwill Industries — present primarily in Ontario, British Columbia, and Alberta. Items are sorted for resale or, when not suitable for retail, sold in bulk to textile processors.
- Diabetes Canada — operates clothing bins across Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia. Proceeds fund diabetes research and education.
Many municipalities also accept textiles through blue box or special collection events. Toronto, for example, includes textiles in its blue bin program for certain items. Vancouver's Recycling Depot accepts clothing and fabrics year-round.
Donation bins accept only clean, bagged items. Wet or contaminated textiles damage surrounding items during sorting and are a significant operational problem for collection organisations. When in doubt, wash before donating.
Recycling Worn Textiles: Beyond the Donation Bin
Items that are no longer usable — single socks, heavily stained shirts, worn-through denim, frayed towels — do not belong in the donation bin. They belong in textile recycling streams that process fibre rather than reuse garments.
H&M Canada has operated an in-store textile collection box since 2013. The program, run in partnership with I:CO (now Renewlane), accepts any brand of clothing and textiles in any condition at participating store locations. Items are sorted and directed to reuse, recycling, or energy recovery. According to H&M Group's sustainability disclosures, the program has collected over 140,000 tonnes of garments globally since launch.
Uniqlo Canada runs a similar program through its RE.UNIQLO initiative, accepting Uniqlo-branded items at store locations for fibre recycling and, where possible, fleece reprocessing. The program is narrower in scope than H&M's but operationally straightforward for Uniqlo customers.
Patagonia's Worn Wear and Common Threads programs accept Patagonia items for repair and recycling. Customers can bring items to select Canadian retailers that carry the brand. The company publishes a full list of drop-off points on its website.
Provincial Context: Variations Across Canada
Textile recycling infrastructure varies considerably by province. Ontario and British Columbia have the most developed networks of collection points and municipal programs. Quebec has a strong network of Friperies (second-hand clothing stores) that accept and resell a wide range of textile items. Prairie provinces have fewer dedicated textile collection points outside major urban centres, though Salvation Army and Value Village locations fill much of this gap.
In Atlantic Canada, the Ecology Action Centre in Nova Scotia publishes a textile reuse guide covering regional options. The guide is updated annually and includes both donation and recycling routes by municipality.
Northern and remote communities face different constraints. Distance from major collection networks limits diversion options. Shipping textiles to urban recycling centres is an option for high-value materials (cashmere, fine wool) but is not economically practical for most household textiles.
What Happens After Collection
Donated clothing that is saleable in second-hand retail is priced and put on the floor. Items that do not sell within a set period — typically two to four weeks — are sorted by a textile grade. Grade A goes to export markets in Eastern Europe, Africa, and South Asia, where demand for second-hand Western clothing remains substantial. Grade B (wearable but lower quality) follows similar export routes. Grade C (not wearable) goes to fibre processors.
Fibre processing for grade C textiles involves shredding fabric into raw fibre that is then used for industrial wiping cloths, insulation fill (particularly for housing construction), automotive sound dampening, and occasionally as feedstock for recycled yarn. Wool fibre retains value through this process; synthetic fibres are harder to recycle into quality materials and more often end in lower-value applications.
A small but growing number of Canadian companies process reclaimed natural fibre into new textile products. Looptworks and similar producers source post-consumer fabric for new garment production. The volume is currently small relative to total textile waste, but represents the direction that circular economy frameworks are pushing textile policy.
Home Repurposing as a First Step
Before an item leaves the household, repurposing is worth considering. Cotton t-shirts cut into squares become cleaning cloths that replace paper towel use. Worn linen sheets cut into smaller pieces make high-quality polishing cloths. Wool sweaters past mending can be cut into felt for craft use or insulation patches.
The relevant principle is extending use in any form before recycling. Repurposing a worn cotton shirt into twenty cleaning cloths, each used twenty times, represents roughly 400 additional use cycles from material that would otherwise have been processed — a far more efficient outcome than recycling alone.
Last updated: May 14, 2026. Image: Textile donation container for the Salvation Army in Winschoten, Donald Trung, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.