How Trashie is Putting Textile & E-Waste Recycling in The Hands of Consumers
Kristy Caylor is the founder & CEO of Trashie, the recycling and rewards platform that gives people an easy, convenient, and fun way to recycle unwanted clothing, shoes, accessories, linens, and more, keeping waste out of landfills for as long as possible and helping to drive impact. The result of five years of research, iteration, and innovation from the team behind For Days, the zero-waste fashion brand Kristy founded in 2018, Trashie was built to transform mainstream consumerism at a time when consumption is doubling every ten years.
Trashie's Take Back Bag, which people fill with everything cluttering their closets and then send back to Trashie in exchange for rewards to use at places like Sephora, Uber Eats, and Trip Advisor, has become internet-famous amongst Gen Z and millennials. Trashie has sold over 865K Take Back Bags, which means they’ve diverted 11.4M items, totaling 5.8M lbs, from landfills.
Kristy has spent over 15 years championing sustainability in global commerce and is an expert on the circular economy. She previously co-founded Maiyet, one of the first ethically-driven luxury retailers, and spent her early career launching and growing businesses for Gap, Inc., including Banana Republic Petites and Banana Republic Japan. She was also instrumental in leading Gap’s Product (RED) division.
We spoke with Trashie’s founder and CEO, Kristy Caylor, about her mission to create a better planet through simple, community-driven actions.
Attia Taylor: What inspired the creation of Trashie? Can you tell us about the brains behind the organization and how the idea came to be?
Kristy Caylor: Trashie was born from a 20-year career in fashion and a deep passion for sustainability innovation. After building businesses for Gap for many years, I was troubled by the negative impact the industry had on people and the planet. Progress was slow, and new business models were struggling to meaningfully shift the market at scale. As a result, I chose to focus on sustainability—first working on global social impact through the luxury brand I co-founded, Maiyet, and then tackling circularity with For Days, the first zero-waste clothing brand.
While working on For Days, we uncovered a universal consumer pain point—the problem of “too much stuff.” Products pile up in our homes, and before Trashie, there wasn’t a way to responsibly recycle things like fashion, cell phones, or toys.
Americans discard 112 pounds of textiles and 47 pounds of electronic waste per person into landfills annually. As consumption rates continue to accelerate, innovative solutions are needed to address this environmental challenge.
Through our platform, customers can responsibly dispose of textiles (clothing, shoes, accessories, and linens) and electronics (laptops, tablets, mobile phones, and cords).
The process consists of customers ordering a Take Back Bag for textiles or a Tech Take Back Box for electronics from our website. They then fill it with items from any brand in almost any condition, and ship it back like a standard online return. Every recycling action earns customers TrashieCash, unlocking exclusive rewards across lifestyle, dining, entertainment, travel, sports, and wellness from our partner brands like Fanatics, Sony, AMC Cinemas, Factor Meals, SiriusXM, and Allbirds.
In 2024, we sold over 700K Take Back Bags and processed 9.2 million items, diverting over 4.5 million pounds from landfills. We are projected to collect 2 million pounds of e-waste in the coming year.
Textile and e-waste are major environmental challenges right now. Why tackle both? How do they differ and intersect?
Trashie grew out of our previous company For Days, which was a zero-waste fashion brand. We sold apparel basics made out of fully recyclable materials that people could purchase, use, and then send back to us for recycling once the items were worn out.
So, we already had a robust textile recycling infrastructure in place when we launched Trashie and the Take Back Bag to give people a solution for getting rid of all forms of clothing, accessories, shoes, and textiles from any brand in almost any condition.
We chose to tackle e-waste next because it’s one of the fastest-growing solid waste streams in the world, and only 12.5% of e-waste is recycled. 130 million cell phones end up in landfills every year in the U.S. There are also very few mail-in e-waste recycling programs and none that are easy, rewarding, and convenient. And our customers were asking for it. Just like the pile of clothes they had accumulating in their closets, they had drawers full of old cables, cords, phones, and tablets that they didn’t know how to responsibly get rid of. So we launched our Tech Take Back Box in December 2024.
Responsible electronics disposal is more challenging than textile recycling given the process is complex, involving data sanitization and hazardous materials handling. We spent seven months building our reverse supply chain to ensure the highest levels of integrity, security, traceability, and impact.
But on the customer end, it was important to us to make the process just as easy as with textiles.
The TrashieCash Rewards program incentivizes recycling. Why is this exciting for your customers and how do you decide which brands to work with?
The rewards are a critical component of getting our customers excited about engaging in recycling and circularity, and they encourage repeat participation. We work very hard to ensure our rewards marketplace features a diversity of brands and services, and we’re especially focused on including a lot of experiential brands and companies that offer daily essentials because we want people to be able to put their TrashieCash towards either products they really need, or activities they love like going to the movies, traveling or dining.
We are constantly adding new partner brands to the rewards ecosystem, with new rewards and deals launching every week. We pick partners based on customer feedback about brands and categories they find the most useful and fun. As our customer base is expanding, we’re also expanding the range of rewards we offer overall.
What happens to the products once they’re sent in? What technologies or innovations play a role in your upcycling and repurposing processes?
We partner exclusively with carefully vetted recycling facilities that meet rigorous standards for responsibility, transparency, security, and sustainability. Our priority is to maximize reuse and responsible recycling, and all products are sorted onshore according to a meticulous grading system that ensures the right products get to the right next use.
Our Texas textile facility—the most sophisticated in the US—sorts items into 253 distinct grades. Currently, approximately 70% of the textiles we receive are reusable in their original condition, while 20-25% are suitable for downcycling or fiber-to-fiver recycling. This means we keep 95% of everything we receive out of landfill. We use an advanced tracking system to ensure all items are traced to their final destination.
All e-waste is also processed in North America to ensure the highest levels of data security throughout the recycling and refurbishing process. By managing everything internally, from data destruction to material recovery, we maintain strict control over sensitive information, safeguarding against potential breaches. If technology cannot be reused, it is physically destroyed to ensure complete data elimination and responsibly recycled into valuable materials. Items are processed using an advanced shredding system which efficiently produces clean raw materials, including steel, aluminum, copper, plastics, and circuit boards.
The fashion and tech industries are infamous for their waste. What’s Trashie’s take on the responsibility of brands in addressing this issue?
Getting brands to make bigger commitments to circularity and sustainability is key. But most businesses find it very hard to monetize sustainability. Many solutions aren’t scalable and don’t drive revenue results.
Trashie makes it equally as easy for brands to stand up circularity programs as it is for individuals to recycle with us. We offer brands and retailers a “turn-key” sustainability program that drives revenue and customer engagement alongside meaningful impact. Partners can sell the ‘Take Back Bag’ to their customers and also plug into Trashie rewards, which drives customer acquisition and retention. We track the impact of these efforts in real time, providing metrics on landfill diversion, water savings, and CO2 emission reductions.
This is a major movement toward minimizing brand and consumer waste. And it must take some creative thinking. How has design and creativity played a role in moving this work forward?
While many sustainability solutions can be earnest and a bit dry, we believe you have to make the experience fun and joyful in order to create a lasting change in behavior. With the rebrand and redesign of the ‘Take Back Bag’, we shifted from a black and white design to bright, bold colors with more irreverent and lighthearted calls to action like “Recycling is my love language”. The bags have become instantly recognizable, even from a distance. Trashie has done ‘Take Back Bag’ tours on the East and West coasts, where anyone can bring unwanted clothes and fill bags for free. The resulting piles of ‘Take Back Bags’ attract more people to see what’s going on and learn more. Trashie’s micro influencer programming has also exploded. The hallmark of the program has been focused on ordinary people from all walks of life, demonstrating how the ‘Take Back Bag’ has enabled them to reduce clutter in their own living spaces. This authentic content, created and shared on a wide scale, is helping to turn clothing recycling into a new social norm.
With about 2M in social media reach, Trashie has built the largest consumer recycling community in the market.
What are some of the biggest misconceptions people have about recycling textile and electronic waste?
That it won’t actually do anything to move the needle. That individuals can’t have an impact, and it’s down to companies. That all recycling/donation programs are made equal. For example, donation centers, on average, only resell or reuse a small percentage of what they collect. Goodwill, on average, sells 27% of what they collect in their stores. This is because charity shops have a limited amount of resale demand, or they need very specific products. Yet, people use them as dumping grounds for everything they want to get rid of. Therefore two things happen: Charity shops limit collections to specific amounts or items. They offload the extra inventory to rag houses that have opaque supply chains. This means that products can often get blindly shipped offshore or end up in landfills.
Trashie takes everything, anytime, in unlimited quantities (things like holey shirts, single socks, frayed dishtowels, pillowcases, old underwear, kids’ worn Halloween costumes).
Looking ahead, where do you see Trashie going? Are there any upcoming projects or partnerships you’re excited about?
Trashie's vision is bold yet simple: transform circularity from an abstract concept into a strong foundation for global commerce. By making sustainable disposal both accessible and rewarding, we're turning an intimidating, complex system into an everyday reality for consumers and companies alike.
Our unique advantages position us for expansion:
Scalable business model
Advanced recycling infrastructure
Large, engaged customer base
Sophisticated impact tracking and reporting
These assets enable us to:
Expand into new household waste categories
Partner with brands seeking credible circularity solutions
Help companies achieve their sustainability goals
Brands partner with Trashie because we deliver both financial benefits and trust. Our industry-leading recycling infrastructure, combined with proprietary reporting, provides transparent validation of environmental impact—essential for companies serious about sustainability. We have an exciting partnership that you’ll hear more about in the coming months with the NBA.
How can real people and companies get involved in supporting your mission?
We encourage ANYONE seeking a responsible solution for unwanted textiles or electronics to go to our website – Trashie.io – and consider purchasing a ‘Take Back Bag’ or ‘Tech Take Back Box’. If you can make an online return, you can use our ‘Take Back’ solutions. And we guarantee that we will find the next best use for anything you send us and keep it out of landfill!
Retailers of all types looking to further their environmental mission – please reach out to us. We work with you to create custom recycling solutions that work for you and your customers and make it as easy as possible to engage in sustainability and circularity.
