Whether you’re or doing an annual you’re probably in need somewhere to offload your . While most of us wouldn’t dream of throwing them into the trash—after all, textiles take to degrade and can infuse toxic chemicals and microplastics into our water—it can sometimes be hard to know exactly where to send your unwanted clothes. Donation is often the best option, but not all clothing donation programs are created equal.
Sadly, many of the items that are donated in the US, Canada, and the UK, actually never even make it onto the racks of the local charity shop. “It’s important for people to know that it's the reuse of secondhand clothes that drives the clothing recycling world, yet that typically only makes up around 50% of the donation,” explains , founder and CEO of Wearable Collections, a clothing recycling company based in New York City. “What an organization does with the other 50% is increasingly important.
” According to , much of it ends up in landfills or is sent to the (already overwhelmed) second-hand markets of Africa, Asia, and South America, where if it isn’t sold, it is either incinerated, put into landfills, or left in waste piles. “The textile waste crisis has reached an alarming scale, with 92 million tons of textile waste hitting landfill each year—the equivalent of one full trash truck each second,” says Chloe Songer, CEO and Co-Founder of platform . “Once in landfill, textile waste takes 80 to 1000 years to break down, releasing h.
