Where does all the world’s underwear actually go? Guess...

Hi there. Valentine’s Day is looming and fashion is in the grips of a lingerie renaissance, with the new Wuthering Heights movie (and Margot Robbie’s accompanying press tour outfits) driving a case of corset fever.

Elsewhere, Sydney Sweeney has been hawking “seductive” polyamide lingerie — the newly launched (and completely sold out) label, Syrn, is the latest in a long, tiresome line of celebrity-designed undies brands. It got us thinking: What do you do with your old underwear when you decide to buy new stuff? 

You see, recycling them is costly and sometimes impossible thanks to fibre blends, and reselling comes with the obvious hygiene concerns. So where are all our knickers going? How much of it ends up in landfill and textile waste dumps? 

The answer is that no one really knows because no one seems to be researching or recording it. So this week Amy brings us a special feature where she’s tried to get to, well, the bottom of this. She spoke to experts and looked at the few initiatives that exist to change the system. 

Thanks for reading,

Amy and JD

Sarah Jordan, founder of Y.O.U Underwear, is frustrated. Her home, shed and shop in Oxford, England, as well as her storage facilities are brimming with discarded underwear.

Since 2022, Jordan has been receiving reams of bras, pants and undergarments of all styles through a take-back scheme that she never imagined would be so popular.

“We’ve now got a backlog of over 600kg of underwear that we haven’t been able to recycle,” she tells me. “We get kilos of [post-consumer] underwear from the high street chains each month and if they had responsibility for their own products we wouldn’t be in this situation.”

Dealing with discarded underwear comes with challenges: “Underwear is one of the hardest categories to recycle given the mixed fibre blends, trims and integrated elastic and catches, as well as hygiene concerns,” Jordan explains.

For a garment to be recycled the trims must be removed, and with all the hooks, bows, underwires, strap adjusters, diamantés… you name it, on underwear, this can present big time, logistics, and cost barriers. And the hygiene issue limits a secondhand market for the category and prevents some take-back and recycling schemes from admitting it.

When I spoke to Larissa King, assistant professor of fashion design; intimate apparel at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), she shared similar insights: “The garment recycling program I helped develop while I was in industry was both challenging and extremely rewarding. The biggest challenges were finding partners willing and able to work with our garments, which had a high percentage of stretch fibres and the added ‘taboo’ of processing ‘used’ intimate apparel.” 

Finding recycling partners is challenging for other reasons, too, as Jordan explains: “There are options and suppliers out there, but when you dig down so many of them actually involve burning the items, dumping them, or shipping the textiles abroad to be ‘dealt with’, and none of those were acceptable solutions for us.”

Polyester, stretch fibres, and synthetic materials are another blocker to responsible underwear disposal because they just don’t break down. In other words, if you put your worn-out polyester pants in the trash 20 years ago, they are still lurking in a landfill somewhere today.

Underwear’s impact is generally underreported and researched compared to ready-to-wear or accessories, so it’s hard to quantify exactly how much is produced, or how much people get rid of every year, and where it all goes.

But given the size of the sector (in 2020, the value of European women’s underwear imports alone was estimated as €6.5 billion), and between the material challenges and the absence of large-scale underwear circularity initiatives, evidence suggests that the underwear industry is causing a really big, really unknown, textile waste problem. 

Big Fashion’s marketing has a lot to answer for when it comes to such waste, because how many times have you heard that underwear needs to be replaced every six months? We looked deeper at the logic behind this oft-quoted number and found that, ultimately, the industry is using meagre sources, and worse, fear-mongering health claims, to push consumption.