Ben and Ali Larsen were cleaning out the basement of their house in Ogden, Utah, when an idea came to them.
There, they found several garbage bags full of old temple garments, a kind of sacred undergarment that all members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are required to wear under their clothes. These garments — always white and generally snug, covering the shoulders and torso as well as the lower half of the body down to the knees — are worn at all times, with exceptions for sports, bathing and a few other activities. “If you can do the activity while wearing the garment, it’s recommended that you do,” Ms. Larsen said. “Because it is a symbol of your love of the Savior and your faith in him.”
The garments can be thrown away or reused, but only after the four holy markings (a backward L-like shape on the right breast, a V-like wedge on the left breast and two dashes, one at the navel and one on the right knee) that are stitched or printed onto all such garments are cut out.
“A lot of people would cut it up and use it as, like, a dish rag or to dry their car,” Ms. Larsen said. But for the most part, “nobody likes having to dispose of them,” Mr. Larsen said. “It’s labor intensive, and we see them as extremely sacred. Members really struggle with, ‘Am I treating this with the dignity and respect that it deserves?’”
Many church members, he said, simply put the issue out of sight and mind. “We’ve heard stories about members who’ve saved their garments for years.”
With more than 500,000 coreligionists in the Salt Lake City area, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints makes for one of the strongest faith communities in the United States — and also for a market opportunity, if only the Larsens could find a way to offload (and monetize) the burden of having to deal with outworn temple garments.
In March, the couple started Celestial Recycling, a unique business that allows church members to send the Larsens their old temple garments, which are primarily made of cotton or polyester, as well as nylon. Celestial Recycling has the garments shredded and then sent to a cement plant, where they are burned at a temperature of 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. The resultant heat powers a kiln, just as coal would. (Customers don’t have to bother with cutting out the four sacred markings because the garments are being completely destroyed, making their former religious function unrecognizable; “It is very common for members to just burn the entire garment all at once,” Mr. Larsen explained.)
“I’m surprised someone hadn’t thought of this before,” said Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, the director of the Mormon studies program at the University of Virginia. Dr. Maffly-Kipp explained that members of the faith wore the undergarments as a reminder of their covenant with God. (Temple garments are not to be confused with temple robes, which are worn only inside Latter-day Saints temples.)
Celestial Recycling takes its cues from similar businesses in the secular marketplace, such as Trashie and Retold Recycling. Users of those services are sent a bag, into which they deposit their unwanted items. (Retold just takes textiles, while Trashie also takes electronics.) Customers drop off the sealed bag at a designated location, or have it picked up; the items are sorted and recycled.
In recent years, the fashion industry has confronted the reality that clothes do not simply disappear when the consumer throws them away; they end up in landfills or the ocean. And the problem has become worse with the rise of outlets like Shein and Temu. “We’ve gone from fast fashion to instant fashion,” said the Trashie founder Kristy Caylor, citing the fact that only 15 percent of textiles were recycled in the United States. Each year, Americans create up to 34 billion pounds of textile waste, according to 2018 figures from the Environmental Protection Agency.
Mr. Larsen said he and his wife had been inspired by “Our Earthly Stewardship,” a sermon delivered by Bishop Gérald Jean Caussé in 2022. “The care of the earth and of our natural environment is a sacred responsibility,” the bishop said in that sermon. Their business is not affiliated with the church itself, which did not comment on Celestial Recycling.
The Larsens also have other jobs: She runs a nail salon from the basement and does clothing alterations for a dance studio; he is a partner at a law firm in Ogden. Ms. Larsen said that when their three children were younger, she would take breaks from parenting — “I love you dearly, but mom needs some time,” she recalled — by making them small blankets out of her old temple garments.
With its longstanding ties to the American West, the Latter-day Saints church fused a frontier mentality with a reverence for the landscape — and an emphasis on self-reliance. “The Mormons have always been fairly practical people about sustainability,” Dr. Maffly-Kipp said.
Celestial Recycling’s white recycling bags cost $18, $20 or $28, depending on size. Customers can stuff them full of temple garments (temple robes can be recycled, too) then drop the bag off at one of three locations in the Salt Lake City area. Mailing the bag from elsewhere costs extra.
The Larsens’ three-car garage is also the central Celestial Recycling hub. “Right now, we’re having them all shipped to us directly,” Mr. Larsen said. The couple drives the bags to a shredding plant, where they are torn up before being transferred to a cement factory.
Mr. Larsen said he could not think of an equivalent service in the United States. Most faiths mandate that religious objects be disposed of with respect but do not necessarily dictate how to do so.
Catholicism advises that “anything that has been blessed should be burned (and then the ashes buried) or simply buried,” according to the Rev. Monsignor William P. Saunders, a pastor in the Washington, D.C., area.
In Judaism, “there definitely is a sense of treating the land like a gift, meaning that it’s not something to be destroyed,” said Atara Lindenbaum, an associate rabbi at the Hebrew Institute of White Plains. There is no single rule about how to dispose of religious items like yarmulkes, though one option is to store them in a genizah, a repository for worn-out religious objects.
Muslims adhere to a similar imperative. “For people who practice Islam seriously, they have a great concern about wastage,” said Hamza Yusuf, a scholar of Islam and the president of Zaytuna College in Berkeley, Calif.
Mr. Larsen said he would welcome customers of other faiths. But it is the faith he and his wife share that mainly guides them. “We have felt inspired every step of the way,” he said. “Every time we felt like, ‘How is this going to work?’ something miraculous happens that puts us in the right place.”
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