February 5th, 2008

By John DeFore

Americans have been recycling their clothing — by donating it to the Salvation Army, Goodwill, and so on — since long before they could easily recycle their newspaper or plastic soda bottles. But cities haven’t jumped to incorporate textiles into their curbside recycling programs, for the obvious reason that they’re collecting raw materials for mass processing, not goods that could be sold for reuse to individuals.

Now a New York group has brought that kind of city-program convenience to clothes. Wearable Collections is putting bins in apartment complexes and inviting residents to fill them with unwanted apparel; they collect contents each week and ferry them to groups who purchase in bulk for transport to poor communities in South America; there, over half of it is used as secondhand clothing while the remainder becomes rags or stuffing for furniture.

The group isn’t itself a charity, but it offers its services to nonprofits, using its resale connections to help groups raise money through clothing recovery drives. It was born as an offshoot of fundraising efforts for NY’s chapter of the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis.

Operating currently only in New York, the group asserts that “386 million pounds of textiles enter the NYC waste stream annually, representing close to 6% of total waste” and cites a Council for Textile Recycling report that the “clothing recycling industry prevents 2.5 billion pounds of post consumer textile waste from entering the solid waste stream each year.” For its part, Wearable Collections’ web site claims to be responsible for diverting nearly 300 thousand pounds of textiles from landfills so far.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media