Facts About Recycling Clothes

The Council for Textile Recycling calls secondhand clothing "post-consumer textile waste," and says it accounts for 48 percent of the total of that waste. Textile recycling companies earn profits of $700 million every year by reselling 2 1/2 billion pounds of this waste. The majority, 35 percent, is sold as used clothing, while 33 percent is broken down into fibers for remanufacturing, 25 percent is turned into rags and wiping cloths, and 7 percent goes into landfills.

Buying Used Clothing

The average American discards 68 pounds of clothes every year, but buys only 10 pounds of recycled clothing. According to Earth 911, people who bought used clothing by shopping at second-hand or consignment stores helped to save 2.5 billion pounds of clothes from the dumpster in 2006 alone.

Specialty Recyclers

A company specializing in recycling disposable clothing used in clean-rooms, Garment Recovery Systems in Hammond, Indiana, accepts polyethylene lab coats, coveralls, shoe and boot covers, pants, aprons and hoods. The Bra Recyclers of Gilbert, Arizona, accepts clean bras to distribute to disadvantaged women and girls. Nike's Reuse-A-Shoe program turns old athletic shoes into playgrounds, tennis courts and running tracks. The program has been in operation since 1990 and, as of May 2010 has recycled over 25 million pairs of shoes.

Repurposing Clothes

The Extension Service at Ohio State University advises that recutting clothing is a good way to recycle rather than discard your unwanted wardrobe items. The service lists six ways to recut a woman's dress, four ways to redo a skirt, a man's suit or a coat, and three ways to turn a man's shirt into different garments.

Clothing Drives

Wearable Collections, a company based in New York City, collects used textiles by placing bins in apartment buildings and conducting clothing drives on college campuses. The company sells the clothes to vendors in South America, Latin America and eastern Europe in what it terms a "not-for-profit" manner. The vendors then sell the wearable clothes to low-income people, the unwearable clothes as rags, and send the unusable items to factories that break it down into fibers for manufacturing upholstery, fiberboard and new fabric.

Thrift Stores

Goodwill Industries uses profits from selling used clothing to fund job-training programs. In 2009, the organization helped 155,000 people to find employment. The Salvation Army funds its Adult Rehabilitation Program with profits from its secondhand stores. The charity provides donation values for clothing items ranging from $1 for underwear to $400 for a fur coat.