55RAGS
T
he two-story cutting room at Star Wipers fills with a
soft, mechanical hum. About 20 middle-aged women
and a handful of men stand at workstations encir-
cled by 6-foot-tall plastic bins full of used clothes and
sheets. In the middle, Amity Bounds, one of the last profes-
sional American rag cutters, grabs a pink hoodie with a sparkly
print across the front that reads justice love justice. Like her
co-workers, she stands 6 inches from a tea-saucer-size blade
that spins at chest level inside a metal guard with three small
gaps. With a butcher’s precision, Bounds slips the hoodie into
one of the gaps, cuts off the hood, then slices the garment twice
so it lies flat. Next she cuts off the zipper and tosses it into a
waste bin. Then she cuts off and tosses the sparkly print. (“It’s
abrasive and no good for wiping anything.”) The remaining
sweatshirt offers little resistance; she slices once, twice, three
times, transforming it from a garment to rags.
“It took me a year to learn all of the products and learn to
cut them,” Bounds says as she tosses the sweatshirt fillets into
a barrel filled with fresh-cut rags.
“How long have you worked here?” I ask.
“Ten years.”
Few consumers, anywhere, have heard of the wiping-rag
industry. But it bails out everyone. Approximately 30% of the
textiles recovered for recycling in the U.S. are converted to
wiping rags, according to Secondary Materials and Recycled
Textiles (Smart), a trade association. And that’s probably an
undercount. The 45% of recycled textiles that are reused as
apparel eventually wear out, too. When they do, they’re also
bound for the wiping-rag companies.
Nobody counts the number of wiping rags manufactured
intheU.S.andelsewhereeveryyear.Butanyonewhoknows
theindustryacknowledgesthatthenumbersareinthemany
billions—and growing. The oil and gas industry, with its net-
work of pipes and valves, requires hundreds of millions of rags
per year to wipe leaks, lubricants, and hands. Hotels, bars, and
restaurants need billions of rags to clean glasses, tabletops, and
railings. Painters need them for spills and drips. If these busi-
nesses can’t reuse clothes and sheets, they’ll opt for disposable
paper towels, synthetic wipes, and new cloth rags, complete
withalltheirenvironmentalandfinancialcosts.Decadesbefore
environmentalorganizationsandgovernmentsencouraged
reuse,recycling,andcirculareconomies,thewiping-rag indus-
try had mastered the art.
Todd Wilson, the wiry, 59-year-old vice president of Star
Wipers, stands beside me, watching Bounds with rapt atten-
tion. “Did you see how many multiple cuts she did?” he asks
with excitement. “Every time she runs it through the blade”—
he stops to compose himself—“our competition doesn’t do
that!” Wilson is one of the industry’s most passionate boost-
ers. And Star Wipers, located in Newark, Ohio, 40 miles east
of Columbus, is one of the last American companies that in his
estimation does rags “the right way.”
Like most people who don’t make money from cutting rags,
I long assumed that “the right way” was how it was done at
home. My mother would take old T-shirts and tear them into
rags for polishing furniture and wiping down sinks. What trans-
formed this act of household thrift into an industrial processPhotographs by Andrew Spear