Textile Recovery Summit Panelists Say Automation Is Key to Scaling Reuse and Recycling

The second annual Textile Recovery Summit brought industry experts, policymakers, and environmental advocates to San Diego for three days of hard conversation about what it actually takes to keep clothes out of landfills. Held Feb. 23–25 at a summit co-located with the Plastics Recycling Conference and the Resource Recycling Conference, the event signaled something the sector has long needed: a seat at the broader materials management table.

The Textile Sorting and Grading Workshop drew particular attention, with industry experts concluding that recycling and reusing clothing presents unique challenges, as well as opportunities. It was a frank framing for a category that, until recently, had largely been excluded from mainstream waste management discourse. As Planet Aid noted in its communications ahead of the event, textiles were not included in the greater waste management conversation in years past. The Summit's second iteration marks a deliberate correction to that gap.

Planet Aid, a nonprofit active in the secondhand clothing sector, sent staff to San Diego and placed Uli Stosch, its Chief Officer of Strategic Development, on the Textile Sorting and Grading Workshop panel. Stosch heads the organization's corporate sales and B2B relations, and her team works directly with shopping centers, corporations, and realtors to implement what Planet Aid describes as turn-key solutions for corporate social responsibility. Her presence at the panel was meant to bring that on-the-ground, transactional experience into a room otherwise populated by policy thinkers and sustainability advocates.

Planet Aid framed its participation as an opportunity to share extensive experience in textile reuse specifically, a distinction worth noting in an industry that often conflates reuse and recycling despite their very different economics and infrastructure requirements. Stosch joined a panel described as offering a spectrum of perspectives from the secondhand industry, all oriented toward inspiring actionable strategies for reducing textile waste and advancing a circular economy.

The Summit's co-location with the Plastics Recycling Conference and the Resource Recycling Conference was itself a statement. Positioning textile recovery alongside established materials recovery conversations places fabric on equal footing with plastic and paper in the waste hierarchy, an alignment the industry has pushed for but rarely achieved at this scale. Whether the policy conversations sparked in San Diego translate into the kind of infrastructure investment the sector needs will be the real measure of the Summit's second year.