Tackling textile mountains through youth-driven initiative

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/lauriewinkless/2025/01/24/wealthy-cities-are-generating-and-exporting-mountains-of-textile-waste/

Globally, large-scale abandonment and piling up of clothings—or textile mountains—is becoming an increasingly visible environmental issue. Driven by the rise of fast fashion and inadequate recycling infrastructure, million tonnes of textile waste pile up year after year in landfills. While clothing donations are often seen as the primary solution to textile waste, many conventional systems remain inefficient. Particularly, large volumes of donated clothes are discarded, resold without transparency, or mismatched with the actual needs of recipients.

It is within this gap that Mountain Climbers, a youth-led initiative based in Seoul, established.Founded to address the growing problem of textile mountains, Mountain Climbers reimagines how clothing donations move from donors to recipients. The initiative is dedicated to reducing textile waste and improving equitable clothing access, centered around transparency, local partnerships, and community-driven redistribution. 

Traditional donation systems often lack visibility. Once clothes are dropped into a bin, donors rarely know where their items end up. This disconnected system contributes to unnecessary waste while failing to meet the needs of vulnerable populations.

Through a structural digital redistribution website, Mountain Climbers creates a clearer link between donors and recipient organizations. Donated clothing is redistributed intentionally to youth shelters or orphanages in Seoul, based on real needs identified by partner nonprofits. 

The Mountain Climbers initiative draws inspiration from Clothes To Good, a South Africa- based organization that directly redistributes clothing to marginalized communities through a sustainable, employment-centered model. The Mountain Climbers aims to build a similarly transparent and impact-focused framework within Seoul.The team is currently in the process of coordinating further collaboration with Clothes To Good, stepping forward to a long-term commitment to learning from established sustainable business models. 

Since launching its platform, Mountain Climbers has partnered with local nonprofits to ensure clothing reaches those who need it most. One of its earliest collaborations was with the Happy Tree Plus Scholarship Foundation (행복나무플러스), through which the initiative facilitated the redistribution of 240 clothing donations to youth shelters and orphanages. 

The initiative’s impact and innovative approach to sustainability and equity has also gained recognition at the UN DESA 8th Youth Forum “Ideas for Change” Contest, in which Mountain Climbers was awarded 1st place. Following this achievement, the founder of Mountain Climbers, Seungwoo Oh, was invited to speak as the sole high school youth speaker at the UN Regional Symposium attended by over 200 professionals.These milestones underscore the growing recognition of youth-led initiatives as credible contributors to solving global sustainability issues. 

As textile waste continues to grow worldwide, youth-initiated project Mountain Climbers offers a practical, community-based response to systemic inefficiencies in clothing donation systems—and a reminder that meaningful change does not always begin with massive infrastructure.