Recycle your textiles

Here’s one to ponder the next time to you feel like adding a little something new to your wardrobe to spiff things up. Canadians on average buy 70 new items of clothing a year.

And textiles are one of the fastest growing waste streams, thanks to rapidly changing fashion trends and lower than ever prices.  In fact, some stats tout that 12 million tons a year of textile waste is dumped into North American landfills. Yikes, right?

Gone are the days that clothing is something we wear to cover up and keep us warm when it’s cool, and cool when it’s hot. We seem caught up in this constant thirst for new, novelty, on trend, which can sometimes translate into unnecessary, over the top, and disposable.

We can all find ways individually to be part of the solution, instead of part of the problem.

Here are some tips to ensure you and your family are not part of that growing textile waste trend. Old clothing and textiles are most definitely re-usable, doing so simply involves a few extra steps to make it so.

Don’t throw them in your curbside recycling cart, they are not considered part of the Recycle BC program. If you throw them in there, they end up contaminating the acceptable recyclables that are being collected, will be deemed garbage (and likely sullied with other stuff by then) and sent off to the landfill.

That’s sad, when there are so many other valuable avenues in the community that can make good use of them.

So what can you do with your old clothing and household wares to make sure they find a new life and are reused appropriately?  It’s really quite easy to get them into the second-hand market.

Consider these options.

• Sell them online, and make some cash in the process.
• Donate them to friends or family.
• Donate them to thrift stores.
• Send those that are still current to second hand consignment shops, there are many thriving ones in our area to choose from.
• Hold a clothing swap party.
• Contact your local animal shelter to see what they may need for pet bedding and cleanup.
• Sometimes theatre groups or drama clubs are in need, depending on what you’ve got to donate.
• Check out the stores policies where you buy your stuff, some retailers have launched sustainability campaigns and set up in store bins for recycling old items.

The possibilities are endless.

You’ve likely also seen the clothing donation bins all over town that support charities in our communities. A lot of the thrift stores will even come to your door and pick the donations up.

For example with the red mailbox style community boxes supplied by the Canadian Diabetes Clothesline, whatever you put in, those charities sell that material to the for profits like Value Village, they’re paid per pound, no matter what is in the bin-nice fundraiser for the charities.

They say they want “useable” textiles (not your old rags), and not just clothing-cushions, belts, shoes, sheets, blankets, bedspreads. It all has a new purpose, somewhere along the chain of reuse and repurposing.

As you are cleaning out your closets and doing your sort, keep in mind, donations don’t have to be in 100 per cent perfect condition.

Let the professionals, the textile recyclers and thrift stores make that decision, to sell them, or sell them to second end markets. Just don’t throw them in the garbage.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.