Billie Eilish is well aware of the toll that the music industry has on the environment.
For years, the Grammy Award-winning musician and her mother, Maggie Baird, have found innovative ways to reduce the carbon footprint that inevitably comes with world tours and best-selling albums, from creating vinyls out of recycled plastics to performing on solar-powered stages.
In July, Eilish and Baird turned their attention to another facet of waste in the music industry: unsold concert merch.
Together with Universal Music Group’s merchandise arm, Bravado, they spearheaded an initiative to take a decade’s worth of “deadstock” — roughly 400,000 T-shirts — and transform them into something new.
In an interview with Fast Company, Bravado president Matt Young said that, until recently, the merch had gone “forgotten,” gathering dust in a Nashville facility that he likened to the warehouse at the end of Indiana Jones’ “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
But thanks to Eilish and Baird’s endeavor, the shirts were shipped off to Hallotex, a Spanish manufacturer in Morocco. There, they are being turned back into cotton yarn and spun into an estimated 280,000 new, 100% recycled cotton shirts. Any shirts that cannot be recycled will become housing insulation.
“We are drowning in clothes on this planet, much of which is in landfills, much of which is shipped to other countries to pollute their waters and their land,” Baird said. “I think we have to be extremely thoughtful about what merch gets put out in the world — why does it exist, how is it made, and what happens to it in its second life?”
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How To Get The Longest Lifespan out of Your Clothes
- Good: Shop thoughtfully. Resist fast fashion items, which are made from synthetic materials like polyester, nylon, and acrylic. Not only are they prone to damage, but they are often not biodegradable.
- Better: Read “Visible Mending” by Arounna Khounnoraj to learn how to mend glaring holes, tame unraveling threads, and affix missing buttons. Simple stitches can lengthen the life of your clothes considerably.
- Best: Learn how to repurpose your wardrobe. When damage goes beyond repair, give the garment a second life by turning old t-shirts and toeless socks into cleaning rags, quilts, stuffing, and more. allfreesewing.com
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A version of this article originally appeared in 2025 Fashion Edition of the Goodnewspaper.
Header image via Raph_PH / Flickr (CC BY 4.0)
