It feels like a sin to throw away pieces of clothes that are perfectly fine but don’t fit you or have run out of style. So you search for used clothing donations and sleep peacefully at night thinking you have done a good deed for the underserved community in the country.
While you may be happy under the illusion that someone else is enjoying your high- quality sweatshirt right now, it just may be that the clothing you donated became a rag in a local store after being dumped in landfills along with other garbage.
Used Clothing Donations and Their Ultimate Fate
- The average US citizen throws away up to 85 pounds of clothing and textiles very year as per the stats published by Council for Textiles Recycling.
- 84% of clothing donations end up in landfills after being disposed of.
- There are different ways in which you can opt for used clothing donations. Let’s take a look at how some of these work.
Donation Bins
What happens with clothing bin donations? Well, nobody knows. Donation bins were first set up by legitimate charitable organizations as a way to increase the number of collection points for donors and reduce manpower requirements at goodwill stores.
Interested people were encouraged to leave their donations in the bins from where the companies collected them with a promise to utilize the items for a bigger cause.
However, most of the bins operating now are actually from for-profit textile recycling companies. Although they pose as charitable organizations, the items you give away are only sent off to other countries or recycled to make rags or fibers.
Sometimes they only share a small percentage of the donations, like 10% to stores for sales to legalize their activities.
Either way, donation bins from textiles recycling companies are tainting the impression of organizations that are working with noble intentions.
Local Charity
Donation collection centers set by companies such as Goodwill or the Salvation Army collect millions of textile articles. The intention is to donate or sell them in exchange for profit that can be used to launch helpful programs for the needy in the community.
However, the amount that is utilized this way is just 10% of what is collected. If your clothing is not picked up for donation within a couple of weeks, it will simply be thrown away only to be taken as rags or carpet padding.
Almost 90% of the clothing collected in this manner simply ends up with textile recyclers. This is especially true for garments that were stained or had a persistent smell. The material is then recycled unless it was stained by a solvent like gasoline.
Recycled material is reused for making rags for industrial waste. Alternatively, it is also sometimes turned into fiber to make paper, carpet padding, insulation, or yarn.
What happened to textiles that recyclers can not reuse? Well, these are packed into boxes, divided by labels like gender, size, or season and then sent off to third-world countries like Africa.
It is still a point of debate if the clothing is reasonably distributed and used there or only dumped off to further worsen the environmental conditions in these regions.
Nonetheless, the scenario of recycling the clothing even if it is eventually used as rags seems acceptable. At least this method can reduce greenhouse gas emissions caused by the decomposition of paper, textiles, and plastics every year.
Clothing Store’s Take-Back Programs
Some clothing retailers allow buyers to bring back used articles as part of their in-store take-back program. The idea is to recycle the clothing and donate them or turn them into insulation or rags.
A large number of buyers at H&M, Levi’s, Madewell, and Patagonia make use of the scheme to get rid of clothes that they don’t use anymore. As an incentive, the stores offer discount vouchers on some of the items submitted.
This is a decent approach to handling used clothing. However, some customers have shared their concerns that stores should be more transparent in what they intend to do with the textiles collected like this.
Promising that the old material will be recycled and used in making new wear is a bit misleading.
This is because the fibers are weakened after recycling and are not fit to manufacture a high-quality, new piece of clothing. H&M has confessed that they could only use 7% of the donated material for recycling and reuse.
Ultimately, less than 1% of clothing is used to make new ones and that is no surprise!
With Rest of Garbage
How many times have you thrown away an old shirt or a piece of a garment because it had holes in it or was stained beyond repair? For some, the number may be high while others will say “just a couple of times” but we have all faced this situation at least once.
So it is easy to determine that when you dispose of clothing in the trash where the rest of your household garbage goes, it will end up in waste landfills instead of proper recycling units.
Now before we tell you how horrible the outcome of this disposal is, let’s go through some common stats to get an idea of exactly how much textile is dumped in this manner every year.
- It is a rough estimation that 85% of the population dumps clothing in the trash.
- The amount of clothing disposed of is approximately 13 million tons every year.
- Moreover, 13 million tons of clothing is equivalent to 70 pounds per person.
- Also, each piece of garment can take up to 200 years to decompose when left in landfills.
Considering how long the practice of dumping clothing has been going on, we have already done damage for thousands of years to come.
What’s more scary are the chemical reactions that take place as poly-blend cloth decomposes in nature. As soon as decomposition begins, harmful gases like carbon dioxide and methane are released.
Clothing Donations Usability In The Future
- 95% of the textiles that are wasted every year can be recycled and reused.
- As a community, we should also consider buying fewer clothes and using the older ones for a longer period considering what hassle it is to get rid of the textiles from the environment.
- It is also advisable to buy clothes that last longer. Durable clothes can be donated directly to people who need them later on instead of being dumped in trash cans as you would do with worn-out clothing.