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. 

This issue is public thanks to our Founding Members, whose support helps ensure greater access for those who can’t afford to pay.

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. 

One online report stated bras might lose their shape and supportiveness after six months, but the “experts” quoted turned out to be reps from an underwear brand. Another report claimed that in the long-term, underwear materials can harbour infection-causing bacteria. To be clear: this could certainly be the case with improper washing, but when we tried to find the data source for this claim – widely cited online and attributed to an old article by the Good Housekeeping Institute – we found, well… nothing. Meanwhile, other research suggests that with good laundering the risk is low, which is to say you’re very unlikely to get sick from wearing a pair of regularly washed pants just because they’ve passed the six month mark. 

Cora Harrington, lingerie expert and author of ‘In Intimate Detail: How to Choose, Wear, and Love Lingerie’, agrees. She tells me: “While you should change your underwear daily (or more often, such as after exercising), you do not need to throw out your underwear every six months. I have only seen that recommendation from places and people trying to sell you more underwear. […] Blanket advice like this is a recent suggestion driven by an overall attitude that clothing is disposable and should be tossed away at the first excuse, when it's been just the opposite forever. You should wear things until you can't wear them anymore. That's the most sustainable way.”

Eighty percent of all textiles end up being incinerated, landfilled or discarded in the environment, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, and when you apply that to how much underwear each of us goes through in a lifetime, the number of globally discarded pants could be mind-boggling. 

But it’s not for a lack of interest from shoppers: Jordan says, “When we first started our underwear recycling programme, we were told that nobody would send back old underwear. It turns out that’s far from true — in fact, there are lots of people all over the country who share our concerns about textile waste and want to do something about it, particularly for underwear where there aren't really any other viable solutions.” 

A handful of brands are offering repair schemes to keep underwear in use for longer. Copenhagen brand Underprotection encourages customers to get its items mended by local seamsters and send the brand a receipt for the work, which it’ll reward with a voucher. Underprotection also has a take-back scheme, which is still in its early stages and the impact and cost remain to be seen. 

With so few take-back schemes, it’s unsurprising that Jordan’s was overwhelmed: “From when we started the scheme in 2022 to last year [2025], the volume grew from a few parcels to over 50kg some months, which is a lot of underwear! At that point the partnerships we had with TerraCycle and Cotton Lives On were no longer viable: either too expensive for us as a small business or the fabric mix was too problematic for them to handle,” she tells me. 

The urgent need for industry-wide accountability is clear.

There are people working on creating new solutions, like the compostable underwear created by California-based KENT. The brand’s pants are made entirely from organic cotton that can break down completely. Pants returned from customers are sanitised, shredded, then composted by a partner business. Wearers can even compost their underwear at home by cutting it up and burying it, the process takes around 90 days. 

Creating a new life cycle for underwear is exactly the kind of thinking that might actually shift the industry’s problems, but it hasn’t been easy. Co-founder Stacy Grace tells me, “The hardest part has been infrastructure. There’s no blueprint for composting underwear — or really any clothing — and the fashion system isn’t built to take products back. There are no existing companies set up to accept compostable clothing at scale, so we’ve had to build that pipeline ourselves. That’s meant sourcing verified natural materials, finding composters willing to experiment with textiles, and educating customers on what ‘compostable’ actually means — which is very different from ‘biodegradable’.”

Designing to reduce waste, and in particular for disassembly, has potential, according to Professor King, who cites the “considered use of stretch fibres and synthetics only in areas where it’s absolutely necessary for fit and function, in order to minimise the harmful effects [of the fabrics on the environment] and make garments easier to disassemble for responsible disposal. Incorporating features like removable and replaceable elastics could also be a great way to enhance the repairability and functional lifespan of garments.”

I asked King how much these considerations factor into educating the next generation of underwear designers at FIT, and fabrics are a big focus, she says. “We discuss the challenges of working with stretch and synthetics, efficient fabric use, garment care, and the importance of quality in sustainability. I also introduce them to innovations in the market such as lyocell created from post-consumer recycled cotton and innovations in recycled and biodegradable stretch fibres.”

Ultimately, the large-scale challenges with underwear disposal, like many industry issues, require those with power and money to step up and create the initiatives to do it differently, rather than relying on existing circularity programmes that aren’t set up for underwear, or on small brands to chip away at the systemic problems created by much larger brands. 

Legislation might also help redirect some of the waste, says Jordan, who points to mandatory extended producer responsibility (EPR) schemes, like those being introduced in the EU, that hold producers accountable for the textiles they create and how their end-of-life is managed. 

But like recycling, this is simply addressing the existing problems created by overproduction and consumption, rather than envisioning something better. And while no one is taking stock of just how much underwear is being produced and discarded, and where it’s all going, how can we begin to educate brands and shoppers on the real impact of their purchasing decisions? 

Grace is cautiously optimistic, though. Shoppers meet KENT’s composting model with enthusiasm and curiosity, she says, and Nike’s Flyknit shoes, which are designed for disassembly, show what is possible even though it is a small section of the market. “I think the first step is reframing responsibility,” she tells me. “Too often, companies treat sustainability as a marketing add-on rather than a design principle. But if we start designing products for their afterlife — not just their lifespan — the entire system changes.” 

And what can those of us do without the power to reimagine life cycles and implement large scale schemes? Lingerie expert Harrington has advice: “Another part of practicing sustainability is wearing your clothing until it wears out. Instead of following underwear fads and trends, invest in what you like and can see yourself wearing daily. Buy the highest quality you can afford. If the elastic becomes a little stretched out on your underwear over time, why not make it a pair of panties for menstruation? This isn't an encouragement for people to wear underwear that makes them feel bad — people should feel good about the layer closest to their skin.”