The RIVED Tracker is a public record of garments redesigned, textiles recovered, water saved, waste & emissions prevented, through creative reuse of existing materials by fashion upcyclers world-wide.
Keep a personal record of everything you’ve saved. Use it on your website or social media to track your upcycling inputs and calculate your impact.
Start Your Personal TrackerMeasure the impact behind every redesigned piece. Track the accumulated impact of all the garments you have recovered, the materials you have reused in your collections, and make your customers part of it.
Add Impact Tracking to Your Brand ChannelsCapture the impact of your workshops beyond the classroom. Measure how many garments participants upcycle during and after workshops - capture the long-term effect of teaching redesign and upcycling skills.
Add Impact Tracking to Your TeachingTurn community creativity and engagement into measurable recovery. Aggregate projects shared by your members and visualize the collective impact your platform generates over time.
Create a Community TrackerA shareable record of your cumulative upcycling impact.
Embed a live impact counter on your website or brand channels.
Bring contributions together and show collective progress over time.
Our first challenge is adoption: bring the first 100 upcyclers into one shared public record of recovery.
Next goal
First 1,000 source materials recovered
Challenge 01 / Adoption
22 of 100 upcyclers onboarded
Everything you need to know about logging, calculating, and sharing your upcycling impact.
A tool for logging and aggregating the impact of upcycling — turning redesigned garments and recovered materials into measurable, shareable numbers. Every piece you log adds to your own record and to a global one.
Anyone actively recovering materials through upcycling: brands, educators and workshop leaders, communities and platforms, and independent creators. If you redesign, reuse, or teach reuse, this is built for you.
We use two figures from independent academic research: 25 kg of CO2e avoided per kilogram of clothing reused, and a water-savings estimate based on the fiber composition typically found in donated and reused clothing.
A 2022 study by INTEXTER (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya) physically broke down hundreds of kilograms of real donated garments to measure their actual fiber content, rather than assuming a standard fabric. They found cotton and polyester together make up roughly 80–88% of reused and recyclable clothing, and used that real composition data to calculate the carbon savings of reuse: 25 kg of CO2e per kilogram. We use their figure because it's grounded in measured material composition, not assumed averages.
Water savings are estimated using published water-intensity factors for the dominant fibers found in that same composition data — cotton is the largest driver, since cotton cultivation and processing is far more water-intensive than synthetic fiber production.
Water intensity varies strongly by fiber, so we model water savings using a material-based factor rather than one universal number. For cotton — the dominant fiber in reused and recycled clothing — we use a global average water footprint of roughly 10,000 liters per kilogram, based on the water footprint research of Hoekstra and Chapagain, the foundational academic source for cotton water-use figures used across the industry.
That average hides real variation: depending on where cotton is grown and how it's irrigated, the actual figure can range from around 2,000 to over 20,000 liters per kilogram. We use the global average as a starting estimate, not a precise figure for any individual piece.
We calculate from the weight of what you log — not a guess at material type for every single piece. This keeps logging fast and lets you upload in bulk. The trade-off: your number is a strong estimate, not an item-by-item calculation. As we develop the model further, more detailed input (what you made, what it's made from) will let us calculate more precisely.
We use an avoided-impact approach: benefit comes from displacing the production of new material, not from a full lifecycle footprint of the recovered piece.
Our estimate covers production, not the full life of a garment — cradle-to-gate, up to the point a material is ready to use. It doesn't include transport, your own labor, or what happens after.
Measuring the impact of reuse and circularity is a developing area of research, and our model reflects where that research currently stands.
Baseline formula: Estimated CO2 avoided (kg CO2e) = recovered textile (kg) × CO2 savings factor (kg CO2e/kg)
Baseline formula: Estimated water saved (L) = recovered textile (kg) × virgin material water factor (L/kg) × replacement rate
Carrera, E. et al. (2022). Fiber composition and CO2 savings analysis of donated textiles, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (INTEXTER).
Chapagain, A.K., Hoekstra, A.Y., Savenije, H.H.G., & Gautam, R. (2006). The water footprint of cotton consumption. Ecological Economics / UNESCO-IHE Value of Water Research Report Series No. 18.
You decide what's visible — your total impact, your profile, and your group affiliations can all be shared, but the line-by-line log behind them stays private unless you choose otherwise.
Yes. You can credit a contribution to multiple relevant groups. It remains part of your personal record and is counted once in your individual impact. Group totals may overlap, so they should not be added together as a global total.
Through a public profile, embedded widget, or collective group tracker.
You can edit or delete entries from your profile at any time. Public totals update automatically.
The RIVED Tracker is free to use.
Join the movement of upcyclers turning the tide on textile waste through visible recovery
