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A Mountain of Used Clothes Appeared in Chile’s Desert. Then It Went Up in Flames
As Bloomberg reported in May, New York, California, Sweden, and the Netherlands are developing legislation similar to Chile’s extended producer responsibility law that went into effect this year, mandating that the fashion industry fund recycling programs via tariffs calibrated to the quantity of garments produced. In order to help New York City uphold its existing law limiting or forbidding textiles in the waste stream, FabScrap, a nonprofit founded in 2016 by a former New York Department of Sanitation worker, receives 7,000 pounds of preconsumer textile waste each week. Sorted by volunteers, the nonsynthetic scrap items are sent to a New Jersey facility that shreds the material, producing “shoddy,” a stuffing…