How to Dispose of Old Work Uniforms

Did you know that approximately 90% of corporate workwear currently ends up in landfill or incineration? That’s why knowing how to dispose of old work uniforms responsibly is crucial for both protecting the environment and your business.

When Murray Uniforms partners with a business to create the perfect bespoke workwear designs for their staff needs, the process doesn’t stop at making a product that looks and performs great. We design with the end in mind in a complete cycle has accountability from creation right up until the end of the garment’s life.

After all, the time and cost involved in investing in proper uniform disposal is nothing compared to the cost of not doing so for both your brand and the planet.

We’re here with a comprehensive guide on the ins and outs of this important topic.

Why Proper Uniform Disposal Matters

Corporate uniforms serve as powerful brand ambassadors, instantly identifying your staff and building trust with customers. However, this same brand power means uniforms need careful disposal when they reach end-of-life, to prevent risks like:

• Brand impersonation if the workwear falls into the wrong hands
• Negative impact on the environment from textile waste in landfills
• Lost opportunities for material recycling and reuse
• Potential data protection issues from visible company branding

Accountability is a modern watchword for a reason. Today’s consumers increasingly expect businesses to operate responsibly. How a business handles uniform disposal speaks volumes about its approach to security and sustainability. Leading companies see this as an opportunity to demonstrate their commitment to sustainability while mitigating the reputational risks from the alternative.

With the UK alone producing over 33 million pieces of branded uniform every year, It’s increasingly important for companies to do their part to reduce textile landfill waste.

What Kind Of Waste Do Uniforms Fall Under?

Work uniforms are fundamentally classified as textile waste.

The majority of uniforms consist of natural fibres like cotton, synthetic materials such as polyester and nylon, or blended fabrics combining both. However, many uniforms also include additional components that need different disposal considerations, such as metal buttons and zippers, plastic reflective strips, and specialised protective elements.

For example: high-visibility workwear contains reflective materials that should be separated from standard textile processing.

What Do Businesses Usually Do With Textile Waste?

Using uniform care methods, you can extend the usable life span of workwear. However, all garments will eventually perish. When this happens, there are several key methods for how to dispose of old work uniforms. Let’s explore what each textile waste management approach entails.

Landfill Disposal

The most common approach is placing old uniforms directly into general waste. This virtually guarantees that these textiles end up in landfills or being incinerated. This is what happens to approximately 90% of corporate workwear.

When textiles decompose in landfills, they release methane and CO2, powerful greenhouse gases that significantly contribute to climate change. Incineration produces air pollutants and toxic ash residue.

Textile Banks

Some businesses attempt to use textile recycling facilities or clothing banks. While these options are better environmentally compared to sending garments to landfills, these services often discourage or ban donations of garments featuring corporate branding.

Crucially, they offer no documented chain of custody or secure destruction of branded elements, risking putting your brand into the hands of strangers and ultimately meaning the garments are more likely to end up in landfill.

Shredding and Fibre Recovery

Specialist textile recycling involves the garments being mechanically shredded and separated into fibres that can be bailed up and reused in new products. This process can destroy any branding while recovering materials and giving them new uses such as car insulation, furniture padding and industrial cloths.

The environmental benefits of this approach are huge. Each tonne of recycled textile waste saves up to 8 tonnes of CO2 compared to producing new fibres from scratch.

This is the approach that Murray Uniforms takes – we’ll explain our process in detail later.

Why Can’t Businesses Donate Their Old Uniforms To Charity?

Giving your uniform a second life to increase its usefulness might sound like an ideal solution. However, there are a few key reasons why most brands can’t take this action:

1. Brand Protection: Branded uniforms could be misused if they enter the public domain. People dressed as employees may be able to defraud customers.
2. Permanent Branding: While debranding garments might sound like an easy fix to this, high-quality custom uniforms often feature embroidered logos and branding that cannot be removed.
3. Quality Considerations: Many items are too worn or job-specific for reuse. After all, if they’re at the end of their usable life span for staff, they probably are for the public too.
4. Charity Limitations: Most UK charity shops, Cancer Research for one, cannot accept branded corporate clothing in any case due to issues it can pose.

This is why recycling uniforms often has to take the form of shredding and fibre recovery in order to give them a useful second life.

Why Invest In Proper Uniform Disposal?

As we’ve delved into so far, learning how to dispose of old work uniforms sustainably can be a more complex process than expected. However, for organisations with a substantial uniformed workforce, proper disposal is not merely an environmental consideration or something that’s “nice to have” but a vital part of protecting hard-earned brand trust.

Here’s why:

It Protects Brands From Misuse

If branded workwear isn’t destroyed and finds its way into the wrong hands, there’s a very real risk of strangers impersonating staff members. This is especially worrisome for retail uniforms where a uniformed member of staff might inspire trust to be let into a customer’s home – think telecoms or utility professionals.

Properly documented destruction stops you from being exposed to these particular brand misuse risks.

It Reduces the Environmental Impact

Textile waste is one of the world’s biggest causes of harm to the environment. Not only do garments require water, energy, dyes, and raw materials to produce. They also produce methane as they decompose in landfill sites, giving off harmful greenhouse gas emissions of methane and CO2.

Proper recycling processes give new life to these materials, turning them into something new. That way there’s no need for virgin resources to create new products and the textiles from the old workwear won’t be wasted, a win-win. Leading organisations now often track these savings as part of their sustainability metrics.

It’s Important to Customers & Clients

Research shows that 78% of consumers consider a company’s sustainability an important factor when making purchasing decisions. Responsibly disposing of old uniforms demonstrates a tangible commitment to environmental responsibility that’s becoming more and more important to consumers. This growing expectation creates an opportunity to differentiate your business from competitors who haven’t addressed this issue yet.

It Satisfies Compliance Requirements

Environmental reporting is no longer optional for major organisations. Shareholders, investors and regulators increasingly require detailed evidence of sustainable waste management practices. Uniform disposal is just one part of meeting these requirements, particularly for companies with large uniformed workforces. Documented textile recycling processes provide clear evidence that they are meeting ESG commitments.

Progressive organisations now recognise uniform disposal as an integral part of supply chain management rather than an afterthought.

Murray Uniforms’ Zero to Landfill Commitment

Since 2022, Murray has maintained a Zero to Landfill pledge for end-of-life uniforms. That means none of the garments we create go to landfill. We use the largest fabric recycling company in the UK to dispose of them in an eco-friendly way. Here’s what happens during the textile recycling process:

1. Secure Collection

A vetted collection service ensures uniforms are securely transported from your premises to the processing facility. Each collection is fully documented, maintaining a clear chain of custody throughout the process.

2. Industrial Shredding

Using specialist equipment, machines reduce garments to precise 15mm particles. This carefully calibrated size ensures complete destruction of branding while preserving fibres for effective recycling.

The industrial processes completely destroy all logos, embroidery and identifying features, protecting your corporate identity from potential misuse.

3. Material Bailing & Recovery

The shredded materials are processed to recover fibres for reuse in new products with a certificate of destruction confirming this has taken place. These materials can then be repurposed, reducing demand for virgin materials and supporting circular economy principles.

4. Reuse

The material from the old workwear is now back in use as new items like wipes, rags, fillers and sound insulation.

This process ensures none of the garments returned to use end up in landfill reducing our clients’ impact on the environment and removing security risks with end of life workwear.

5. A future closed-loop system

While our current process already gives materials a second life, we’re actively working towards a truly circular economy model where fabrics from old workwear are recycled directly into new workwear, meaning no need for virgin materials.

Our clients trust us with their uniform disposal because we understand that every garment represents their brand identity – even at the end of its life.

Uniform disposal is part of our bespoke approach

When partnering with Murray Uniforms, we create bespoke uniform programmes from listening to your colleagues, designing and delivery, right through to end of life to create a return on investment from your uniform programme.

We’re your partners through every aspect of your uniform needs, including final disposal. Our Science of Uniform® approach considers the entire life cycle of the garments we design, including end-of-life handling. That’s a key aspect of how we create workwear that has reduced environmental impact when it reaches disposal.

Nationwide and global brands require truly circular garment life cycles to meet best practices. We help brands achieve this not only through our 100% waste fabric disposal process but also in other ways. For example, when you place an order you can rest assured that it will reach you using carbon-neutral shipping. That way, you can have confidence that your business’s sustainability objectives are being met in every way possible.

We’re always working on new ways to make our processes more sustainable, including scoping out ways to upcycle clothing so it can be donated to charity. We’re also looking into innovative ways of dying clothing using bacteria! Currently, these methods aren’t ready for widespread use in work environments, but we’re excited about adopting more sustainable methods of colouring clothing like this when they’re ready and scalable.

“There is so much more we can all do individually to support this cause, but as businesses we could, and should, do even more.”

• Mark Bass, Managing Director, Murray Uniforms

Speak to one of our knowledgeable advisors today to discuss the end-to-end design to disposal process we can offer your business.

Book a consultation