You see, these charities can typically only sell 20 percent or less of their donations in retail stores textile recyclers buy up the rest. Vincent de Pauls, and your Vietnam Veterans of Americas will end up back with a for-profit textile recycler. But you should know this too is not a simple act - there’s still a good chance that donations made to your Goodwills, your Salvation Armies, your St. (Not to suggest that these fine folks don’t have wonderful hearts - but hey, they’ve gotta eat.)įor you, donating that Shaun Alexander-era Seahawks jersey to a more traditional charity is probably the way to go. Those industrious teams separating your plastics from your papers down at the recycling plant aren’t just doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. And before we get too hung up on the for-profit part of this scheme, we should remember that all recycling works on a profit model. So any outfit that reclaims otherwise landfill-bound clothes and finds another use for them is doing the Earth a favor. And the problem is only getting worse - post-consumer textile waste jumped by 40 percent from 1999 to 2009 (that’s a lot of skinny jeans). Textiles make up a huge part of our waste stream: Americans toss 25 billion pounds of clothing every year, only 15 percent of which ends up donated or recycled. It does sound a bit shady, but I don’t think this is a terrible thing, Brian. Some such bins directly advertise that their proceeds go to charity while in some cases this is technically true, the recyclers usually donate only a slice of their profits and keep the rest. Instead, such recyclers sell donated wares to be worn overseas and/or to companies that tear them up and remake them as industrial rags, insulation, and carpet padding. Many people assume that the worn-out sweaters and shoes they drop in a donation bin are destined for less fortunate families in the community, but that’s not the case with these for-profit bins. But unless the company is falsely advertising itself as a charity (and some of them do), it’s more guilty of misleading well-meaning donors than outright deceiving them. It is a for-profit textile recycling collection bin. So I’m happy to tell you that the clothing donation bin you describe is probably not a George C.-level scam. To support our nonprofit environmental journalism, please consider disabling your ad-blocker to allow ads on Grist.
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