St. Vincent de Paul diverts clothing from Lane County landfills
At a West Eugene warehouse, St. Vincent de Paul keeps nearly 3 million pounds of clothing out of landfills, but only garments that can be reused or recycled make the cut.
The biggest clothing-sorting warehouse of its kind in Oregon sits on Seneca Road in West Eugene, where St. Vincent de Paul of Lane County is turning donated clothes into a second life instead of a landfill load. Nearly 3 million pounds of clothing materials were diverted from landfills last year, and the work now runs through a local pipeline that sorts, hangs, boxes, and redistributes garments across Lane County and beyond.
Inside the Seneca Road warehouse
The operation begins when donations arrive from around the state and move onto a warehouse floor built for triage. Wendy Chand hangs clothes that are still good enough to send back into the stores, while warehouse manager Brandi Carter oversees a process that separates wearable items from the rest of the stream. Garments that pass that test can return to St. Vinnie’s stores; others move into other reuse or recycling channels.
The warehouse is part of a wider network that reaches Eugene, Springfield, Cottage Grove, Florence, Oakridge, and other communities, and it ties directly into the thrift stores that make secondhand shopping available at prices many households can still manage.
Why the local model exists
Fast fashion is the pressure point behind the whole system. Cheaply made clothes are designed to be bought quickly and discarded after only a few wears, which pushes more fabric into the waste stream and makes reuse harder to sustain. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency put 2018 textile landfill waste at 11.3 million tons, with a recycling rate of 14.7 percent for all textiles and 13 percent for clothing and footwear.
A 2025 Government Accountability Office report found textile waste has increased over the past 20 years because of fast fashion, decentralized collection and sorting systems, and recycling technologies that are still at an early stage.
What gets reused, and what does not
At the warehouse, the most usable donations are the ones that can be moved straight back into the resale stream. Chand’s work hanging garments that are still store-ready shows the first and best outcome for a donation: if it is clean, intact, and saleable enough, it can be sold again rather than broken down. Those pieces keep their value longer because they remain in the local secondhand economy.
Other items do not make it back to the sales floor but can still stay in circulation through recycling or other reuse channels. The nonprofit says its broader model has diverted hundreds of millions of pounds of material from landfills over seven decades, and Lane County’s textile line is one piece of that larger system. St. Vincent de Paul also says it has diverted millions of mattresses from landfills over the last two and a half decades.
What cannot be reused or recycled is the part that still ends up as waste. The local system can stretch the life of a shirt, a pair of jeans, or a jacket, but it cannot erase the fact that most textile recycling is still limited by sorting capacity and technology.
How St. Vincent de Paul fits into Lane County life
The clothing warehouse sits inside a much larger social-service operation. St. Vincent de Paul of Lane County puts its annual service figure at 50,000 people, says it operates more than 1,600 units of affordable housing, and runs two-day-access shelters. A Springfield Chamber of Commerce listing gives the annual service figure as 35,000 people and the housing total as more than 1,500 units.
Nearly 600 St. Vinnie’s employees work across homeless services, mattress recycling, thrift stores, and textile sorting.
The Lane County organization dates to the 1950s, when it operated from a retail store on West Broadway near where the Parkade now stands. The broader Society of St. Vincent de Paul began in Paris in 1833 and came to the United States in St. Louis in 1846, and the Lane County branch has since grown from a human-service group into a retail, recycling, and philanthropy model built around zero waste.
The consumer habits behind the pileup
The local warehouse is dealing with a problem created far beyond Lane County. When shoppers buy more clothing, keep it for fewer wears, and replace it faster, the volume of donations rises and the quality of those donations becomes more uneven. That is why a secondhand system depends not just on where people donate, but on what they buy, how long they keep it, and whether the item still has enough life left to resell.
On March 23, 2026, the nonprofit posted about partnering with Eugene graffiti artist Suspish-Fish to “pump the brakes on fast fashion” and give “new life to old threads.”
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