Reducing Fabric Waste
So much love, hard work, and skill go into creating our YALA sustainable bamboo fabric at every stage of production and distribution.
The Value of Bamboo Fabric
Each stitch of bamboo fabric represents the quantity of land, rainwater, and sunshine required to grow the bamboo.
It also represents the efforts of the foresters who sustainably harvest the bamboo stalks; the ingenuity of those who process the stalks into fiber in a closed-loop system; the care of those who dye it with AZO-free dyes; and of course the garment-workers who craft the fabric into the clothing and bedding you know and love.
Even the shippers who carry our YALA across continents and oceans, and deliver it safely to your doorstep, deserve our respect and gratitude.
To honor the natural resources and people who work in harmony to create YALA bamboo clothing and bedding, we do our best to utilize every possible scrap of the fabric we create!
Our Fabric Waste-Reduction Strategies
Here are some strategies we've developed at YALA to reduce our fabric waste as a company:
- We make reusable gift bags out of leftover, discontinued fabrics.
- We make reusable bedding bags out of sheet scraps.
- We make reusable sleep mask pouches out of sleep mask fabric scraps.
- We hold local warehouse sales to sell returns, samples, discontinued and excess products to our local community at crazy-reduced prices.
- We donate the remains of warehouse sales to local charities.
- We NEVER throw away returns (unfortunately, this is a common practice in fast fashion because the value of the clothing is less than what it costs to repack and resell it).
Reducing Our Footprint, One Step at a Time
Sometimes it takes extra effort to do the right thing. In the long run, we know keeping unused fabric out of landfills is worth it.It’s one more reason to support sustainably-minded companies like YALA, dedicated to changing business for good.
Facts on Fabric Waste
Americans throw away 14 million tons of clothing each year.
- In 2018, we sent 17 million tons of textile waste to landfills.
- Textiles can take up to 200 years to decompose, and they release greenhouse gases while they do.