We are very excited to announce that we have secured additional funding for our Shred Up project from GMCA’s Foundational Economy Fund. Shred Up is our community driven solution to textile waste. As we embark on the next stages of the project we wanted to give you an update with how the initial testing phase has gone so far.
Since Stitched Up’s inception in 2012, we’ve taken in as many unwanted textiles as we can and re-homed them to the public through our Yard Sales. Textiles brought to our door have included fabrics from home sewists and fashion students, school uniforms, tents, building supplies, banners, tents and more. The Shred Up project (funded by GMCA’s Foundational Economy Fund) gives us an opportunity to take this work further, investigating where textile waste arises locally and developing solutions for reuse through cross-sector collaboration.
We launched the project at our Textile Reuse Open Day in September 2025 in the beautiful loft space of Bridge 5 Mill, which included a Yard Sale, a stall for our dye garden and some scrap busting crafts. It was fantastic to see so much enthusiasm for the project at launch, and to hear your ideas. It was also really helpful to hear about struggles people currently had with recycling textiles (both as individuals, and small businesses) and how Shred Up could potentially be of use to them. We used a demo hand crank shredder (kindly borrowed from our friends at Plastic Shed) which, though far from the industrial shredders of our dreams, was great at getting the project kicked off.
We spoke with a number of local businesses of different sizes, who work with textiles in some capacity, including the hospitality industry, upholsterers, upcycling businesses, and venues. This gave us valuable insight into the different issues businesses were facing and the types of textiles they had to dispose of.
When meeting with local housekeepers they spoke of Manchester’s grand hotels once having permanent seamstresses, who would take long curtains with stains and shorten them for use elsewhere, a constant process of upcycling until a material couldn’t be used again. Was there a possibility that this thinking could return? What if a fabric could be reused in the same building? Or if it could travel just down the road to be transformed into something new or reused as it was?
Through our discussions we discovered there was a wide range of textiles looking for a new home – of course scraps and offcuts but also whole sheets, ends of rolls and other completely usable materials which just weren’t being used in their current context.
Everyone we spoke to had agreed to meet with us because they are passionate and care about the issue of textile waste in their industry. The avenues for responsible disposal were inaccessible, unavailable, unsatisfactory (for a variety of reasons), or unknown to them.
While the materials, scales and reasons for disposal differed across our interviewees, there were some commonalities when it came to what a dream textile recycling service would look like. There was a desire (which we share) for drop off and collection points to be local, for the textiles to be kept within the local economy and community, and for their journey through that community to be transparent. There was also a need for different price-points to reflect different business sizes, needs and regularity.
As part of our research phase we were kindly invited to visit FibreLab, an award-winning textile recycling start-up operating in London. It was great to meet with the team and find out more about their pioneering textile waste products – from paper, to notepads, home decor, and furniture. It was also interesting to see their machinery up close; a bespoke textile shredder and a fibre opening machine which breaks down already shredded textiles further. These machines work in combination to break down fibres to create a lightweight versatile material which has a wider range of potential uses.
Inspired by our visit, we experimented with different ways of manipulating shredded textiles from our HQ in Ancoats, mixing them with biodegradable glues and using traditional paper methods to make a wadding-like material.
We have also been involved in different research projects with Manchester Metropolitan University, Wrap.org, GMCA and Future Fashion Fair. We were approached due to our hands-on experience with textile recycling in Greater Manchester. These conversations have highlighted the need for system and legislation change to support circularity at the local and national scale. Addressing textile waste is vital and we really value these opportunities for interconnectedness and collaboration which can lead to structural change.
We wanted to finish the first stage of the project by putting this theoretical local supply chain into action through a real-world intervention. Artist Freya Wysocki was creating an art installation shown at Eccles Shopping Centre and was in need of shredded textiles. Linking up with Vision Linens, who contributed surplus pillow cases, we bundled it all up and dropped it off with Shred Station for processing into smaller fibres, which Freya then used to stuff fantastic worms for their installation. This is a small but exciting example of how we can act as instigators of circularity by getting unwanted textiles, in the right form, into the right hands. The map below shows that the entire process was very local. (more of Freya’s work can be found here).
We would like to say a massive thank you to everyone who has been and continues to be involved in our Shred Up project so far. Throughout the last 8 months we have been welcomed into many different spaces we wouldn’t normally have a chance to see and everyone’s enthusiasm for building a better alternative to textile waste has been really inspiring.
We would like to say a special thank you to FibreLab, ShredStation and to all of our interviewees and survey respondents.
Do you have something you want to add, or are a local business and want to get involved or recycle with us? We’d love to hear from you, you can get in touch with us at hello@stitchedup.coop
If you generate textile waste and have a couple of minutes we’d really appreciate you filling out our survey below:
