When a pair of pants has been worn a few times and returned to a retailer, what happens? The answer is complicated and varied, but for a small but growing percentage of these products, a second life begins in a large, nondescript building in Denver.
Inside the Tersus Solutions headquarters in an industrial complex just south of Denver, something revolutionary is happening.
Any given day, thousands of used garments lie sorted into 4-foot-tall bins. Dozens of employees work at sewing machines, tidying up small imperfections and tears in used apparel. Nearby, pressurized chambers containing CO₂ and proprietary machines that look like giant laundry tumblers spin quietly.
The space is massive. Inside the warehouse with 30-foot-high ceilings, the size of a Walmart, a quiet energy of workers in focused motion hums. Voices softly carry as CEO Peter Whitcomb walks through the orderly yet gigantic rows. Tersus is rewriting the rules of textile care — and helping reshape how the outdoor industry thinks about waste.
The Vast Problem of Textile Waste
Textile waste — largely discarded apparel, but also including shoes, bedding, towels, and more — is a major problem. Of the 17 million tons of discarded textiles in the United States in 2018 (the last available EPA estimate), just 14.7% were recycled. About 9.3% was burned for energy creation. The remaining 76% — 11.3 million tons — ended up in landfills.
The problem is not unique to the outdoor industry. But with a strong environmental ethos, outdoor-focused brands are at the forefront of a process that, while not a solution, does take a dent out of the waste stream.
Enter Tersus. Now partnering with brands such as The North Face, Arc’teryx, Ariat, Cotopaxi, and dozens more, it gives second or third life to used apparel and footwear through its unique cleaning and deal fulfillment process.
In the first half of 2025 alone, Tersus processed over 1.3 million products, listing between 50,000 and 150,000 units per month across brand resale platforms. It aims to maintain a consistent cadence of new listings to encourage repeat visits to partner resale sites. Sell-through performance has been impressive — most brands are averaging 85%+ year-to-date sell-through rates.
And given the scale of waste apparel, the brand has barely tapped the potential.
“It’s totally fair to say it’s quite nascent,” Peter Whitcomb, Tersus’s CEO, told GearJunkie. “The brands that have adopted us are really early movers in a lot of ways. Go into footwear, luxury, contemporary fashion, and athletics, and the vast majority of brands aren’t doing anything yet in terms of circularity. But they know they have to do something.”
Carbon Dioxide: An Ideal Cleaning Agent
Founded in 2009 by Steve Madsen, a former environmental entrepreneur with a background in green dry cleaning, Tersus Solutions set out with a bold ambition: to clean garments without water, toxic solvents, or abrasion. At the heart of the company’s breakthrough is liquid carbon dioxide, a pressurized form of the naturally occurring gas that penetrates fabrics better than traditional methods, while using less energy and no detergents.
As a bonus, it captures microfibers during cleaning. These microscopic plastic threads shed from synthetic garments and typically end up in rivers and oceans. By integrating microfiber filtration into its system, Tersus offers one of the cleanest industrial textile processes in the world.
The process is so gentle that it can wash even paper tags without damage. “We’re at the tipping point of the awareness curve and now moving into the adoption curve,” Whitcomb said.
The process has resonated with some of the biggest names in outdoor gear. The North Face, REI, Arc’teryx, and others now rely on Tersus to power their resale and refurbishment programs, which aim to reduce textile waste and give customers access to high-quality, used gear at lower prices.
When a well-worn fleece or down jacket is returned to The North Face’s Renewed program, for example, there’s a good chance it passes through Tersus’s Colorado facility. There, Tersus washes it using the company’s LCO₂ process. It also inspects, repairs if necessary, and retags it.
Eventually, it drop-ships the used product straight to a new consumer; no shipment back to the brand is needed.
Circular Logistics
Tersus doesn’t just clean garments; it offers a comprehensive circular logistics model. In addition to CO₂-based laundering, the company provides sorting, repair, de-branding, inventory management, and even customer fulfillment for brand resale programs. It’s a full-service backend for what many apparel companies are now betting on: the circular economy.
The stats are compelling. Textile waste is one of the fastest-growing categories in global landfills, with the EPA estimating Americans throw away over 11 million tons of clothing each year. By increasing the number of times a garment is worn — even by just two or three cycles — brands can significantly reduce emissions, resource use, and landfill burden.
While the outdoor industry is the spear tip of a breakout circular economy, Whitcomb said that Tersus Solutions is in negotiations with mainstream footwear, luxury, sportswear, and athleisure brands. Many of these brands realize that environmental sustainability can also be good business, as the outdoor industry has begun to show.
Tersus Solutions is now in lease negotiations with a fourth warehouse in Denver that will add more than 30% capacity. It’s also actively working to expand its geographical reach, with partnerships in Europe, Korea, and China. It’s targeting Canada to be live by 2026.
“We’re not venture-backed, so we’re building to serve the market as it grows,” Whitcomb said. “We’re not pushing to get there, but getting pulled there. Brands that we work with in the U.S. say that it works, is scalable, and is profitable.”
Firefighting Turnout Gear
The company’s expertise also applies beyond consumer gear. Fire departments across the country have turned to Tersus to clean turnout gear, where its technology has proven more effective at removing carcinogens and toxins than water-based alternatives.
Still, scaling a niche sustainability service into a profitable business hasn’t been simple. Brands are eager to tout their environmental credentials, but many are still learning how to integrate resale and repair into their core operations. That’s where Tersus sees its long-term opportunity — not just as a cleaner, but also as the invisible engine behind a gear reseller working at a global scale.
Today, it has even begun working with the wedding industry to help launder and resell wedding dresses with the A&BÉ Bridal Shop.
Back in the warehouse, rows of down jackets, ski bibs, and synthetic base layers sit boxed and tagged in organized bins, ready for redistribution. To the untrained eye, they look brand-new.
But they’re not. In some ways, they’re even better. They’ve already lived through an adventure, and now they’re ready for another.
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