Recycle your old clothes?

When doing your spring cleaning or even just updating your wardrobe you'll likely go through your clothes deciding what to keep and what needs to go away.  As you do this you might go through what can be consigned or what can be donated and then there's the pile of clothes that are a little too old to fit in either category.

Those clothes often get thrown away.  In fact the average U.S. citizen throws away 70 lbs a year.  That's a lot of clothing!  Luckily almost 90% of textiles can be recycled saving that much space in our landfills.  Also reusing these textiles saves energy and resources that would be needed to produce new textiles.

So how can you help close this loop? It's easy and it won't cost you anything, in fact in some places you can drop off these textiles while you find your new clothing.  H&M, Nike, and Patagonia are a few such places located in many malls so you can do just this.  These retail locations don't require any purchase from them to recycle there and will take most all textiles in any condition.

This service is free and doesn't really take any extra time if you shop at the mall anyway, but there are several other options for donations.  If you go to Earth911.com and enter your zipcode you can find a list of recycling centers near you that will happily take your textiles!

Sources:
http://earth911.com/recycling-guide/how-to-recycle-clothing-accessories/