We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sam Ebenezer a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Sam thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start big picture – what are some of biggest trends you are seeing in your industry?

“It is only in our darkest hours that we may discover the true strength of the brilliant light within ourselves that can never, ever, be dimmed.” -Doe Zantamata

The year 2020 brought the entire world to a standstill, and difficult times made Green City Recycler have to think of ways to survive in adversity. Just as diamonds go through harsh treatment to get their shine, the textile recycling industry had to evolve and adapt. Gone were the days when folks took their bags to a local donation bin/store or hand-me-down shop. In the age of Uber Eats, Amazon Prime and Instacart where we have products arriving at our doorstep, textile recycling’s next step is curbside service. Wouldn’t more folks recycle their textiles if they could be picked up from their front door? In the summer of 2020, we introduced our free contactless home pick-up service of used textiles in Houston, Dallas and Austin. We were amazed with the response we had. Customers were participating in textile recycling, and for once we had the faces and names of our customers. In the past we had only seen their bags in our recycling pods, but now we had a way to engage with them and keep them using our services. We recycled over 2.7 million pounds of clothing in 2020, one of our best years. In 2021 we introduced our program to other cities around Houston and we were awarded our first city-wide textile recycling service for the city of Sugar Land. Residents can call us and have their textiles picked up from their homes, and we are confident several cities in the Houston area will follow Sugar Land’s lead. Curbside textile recycling has arrived and may change the way used clothing is diverted away from landfills. Green City Recycler has become an industry leader—our program has gotten attention from counties in the Northeast, Midwest and Pacific Northwest. We have serviced over 27,000 homes since 2020.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

While I was working towards my master’s degree in Washington D.C., I came across an international nonprofit that collected donated clothing, resold it, and supported various social development programs in sub-Saharan Africa. I took up an internship with their logistics department, during which I got to learn about the used clothing industry and traveled to Malawi, where I studied how valuable a Texans football jersey could be to a person who bought used clothing from the local market in Blantyre, Malawi. I had seen textile waste and wanted to change the way we diverted it away from landfills. On my return I took up an operational role in their North Carolina unit. I was able to grow the program and work with several counties’ solid waste departments to introduce clothing donation bins at county recycling centers. In 2014 I was given the opportunity to start and lead Green City Recycler in Houston. Knowing how much more waste there was to be diverted and seeing the opportunity to go beyond clothing donation, I made Houston my home. We are now more than just a clothing donation/textile recycling company. We work with corporations on ethical uniform destruction, and we help apparel companies to ethically recycle and/or repurpose their defective products. We use social media as a powerful tool. The textile recycling industry has never used social media to its fullest potential, and we took advantage of the social connection. This has led our brand to be respected and has attracted cities and corporations to trust us to recycle their textiles.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

As I mentioned earlier, social media is a powerful tool. There are over 70 textile recyclers in Houston but only a handful of them pop up on search engines and are active on social media. In 2017 we decided we wanted to be in everyone’s faces on their phones, in their newsfeeds, and in YouTube advertisements. We concentrated our efforts on creating engaging content. In order for our audience to participate we needed to educate first, so we spent a lot of our resources teaching folks about textile recycling via Instagram posts, using infographics and showing ways clothing could be repurposed or recycled. It used to be that when we received bags of clothing via our textile recycling pods, we never knew who these people were—we didn’t have a name, phone number or an email. We conducted lead generation campaigns on Facebook to get folks to use our home pickups, and this helped us capture data on these donors and turn them into humans we can interact with. The human interaction element was missing prior and we changed that via social media. Now we have a strong social media following. In 2016 we used to call school PTOs and organizations asking them to host our textile recycling pods, but now we are receiving calls to request a pod. Most of them notice a school posting on their feed about our pods and want to follow suit. We changed the way our sales work. A post on social media has a significant sales impact and we can quantify that. Since 2021 we have taken over contracts from four large area chain thrift stores as their official textile recycling partners, and all four stores heard about us via social media.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

While we were transforming our online image and our community work, we needed to differentiate ourselves from the crowd. We were not the largest textile recycling company in 2016 but we were honest and working hard to make ourselves better. I decided that we needed to win an award of excellence. Through Keep Houston Beautiful we won their Houston Mayor’s Proud Partner Award in 2018 and 2019. The work we did in Houston began to get noticed, and I was able to turn Green City Recycler into a company that makes corporations, municipalities, and large shopping malls sit up and listen to us. We continue to support several nonprofit organizations and school PTOs, helping them to fundraise for various programs by recycling their textiles. If you have a local nonprofit and are looking to fundraise, our program is a hassle-free way to do it.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.greencityrecycler.com
• Instagram: GreenCityRecycler
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GreenCityRecycler
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-satish-5650842/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn1RzCeBvvCjRl2RYRQ3uRQ

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