How to recycle textiles (or try to)

Over the past year, I've been making more of an effort to get rid of things that I'm just not happy about using any more. Many of these items were textiles of various sorts: a baggy sweatshirt that I never liked the way I looked in; some towels that were frayed, threadbare, or stained beyond my ability to clean; old pairs of underpants that had lost all the elasticity in their leg elastics. Rather than forcing myself to keep using these things because they were "still good," I gave myself permission to discard and replace them with things I'd actually be happy with.

However, being an ecofrugal person, I couldn't simply toss these unwanted items in the trash. Instead, I've been accumulating a pile of them on the floor of the closet, saving them up for a run to the nearest textile recycling site. Over the years, we've disposed of old clothing and textiles in a variety of ways. Clothing in good condition, of course, can be donated to our local thrift shop, but many of our items are far too worn out for anyone to use, so I've had to seek out sources of true textile recycling — places that would turn the old fabric into new products.

Back in 2013, I was able to just drop my unwanted textiles in the collection boxes of an organization called Repurpose NJ, but that organization no longer exists; we once took a bag of stuff to a local drop-off center, but it's shut down too. Our most recent batch went to a collection bin at the nearest H&M, but not only is that site a bit of a pain to get to — being located in a mall we never visit if we can avoid it — but we've also learned that much of what gets collected there is never actually recycled. In 2017, WGBH reported that only 5 to 10 percent of the material goes into new clothing, while the rest is "downcycled" into lower-value products like insulation. A CBC Marketplace story from 2018 reported that while "most" of the material collected by  I:Collect, the firm used by H&M and several other retailers, goes to secondhand clothing markets overseas, a lot of it doesn't get used even there; in Kenya, for example, one used-clothing dealer says he "just dumps" vast amounts of unwanted clothing into piles and bonfires.

So, this time around, I decided to do some research to see if I could find a place that I could be confident would actually put our old textiles to good use. And this turned out to be a much taller order than I expected.

The first place I looked was Middlesex County's official division of solid waste management. This site says that "Every resident and business in Middlesex County is required to recycle their textiles" — but the county doesn't actually provide any facilities to do so. Instead, the website lists six private companies you can turn to for help recycling your unwanted fabric. Of these six, four (Turnkey, ATRS, Catholic Charities, and USAgain) only accept clothing in good condition, and  one (Planet Aid) no longer operates any bins in New Jersey. And the sixth was apparently having problems with its website, so I couldn't get through.

So I broadened my search a little, Googling "how to recycle textiles." On a site called (amusingly) Trash is for Tossers, I found an article purporting to explain how to recycle all old clothes, "even ratty ass old underwear," but it didn't really deliver on its promises. It first suggested reselling (only practical for pricey clothes in pristine condition), donating (only good for clothes in usable condition), or "upcycling" your old clothes into rags (of which we already have plenty, and anyway, isn't that downcycling?), before getting to what I was really looking for, recycling. It claimed there were "tons of amazing sustainable resources and organizations" that would take textiles for recycling, and it listed a dozen of them, but most of them had one of the following problems: (1) they don't operate in our area, (2) they actually only accept clothing in good condition, (3) they only want specific items we don't have, (4) their websites don't work at all, or (5) they're too expensive. (This objection applied only to the first site on the list, Terracycle, from which you can "Purchase a box to fill with clothing and fabric to ship to Terracycle to be repurposed"... for $103. Asking consumers to spend that amount to get rid of clothes they could put in the landfill for free is not what I call a sustainable system.) The closest thing to a useful suggestion on the Trash is for Tossers list was H&M, which was what we were trying to avoid in the first place.

Other sites I found with my search were equally unhelpful. Most of them just repeated the usual advice — donate clothes in usable condition, and turn worn-out clothes into cleaning rags — which I already knew and have already done for years. I remembered hearing that animal shelters can often use worn-out towels, so I checked out our local shelter to see if they could use any, but their FAQ said they were fully stocked at the moment and suggested "donating them to another organization" without naming any that would actually take them.

Fortunately, this story does have a happy ending. Today, I was able to get through to the last website on the Middlesex County list, Helpsy, and found that it genuinely does reuse or recycle about 95 percent of what it collects, with 75 percent being resold to thrift stores in North America or abroad and the rest getting turned into rags (for people who actually need them, unlike us). And it had two outdoor donation bins within a 7-mile radius of our house, which would be both easier to get to and less hazardous to our health than the mall where H&M is. One of the items I wanted to discard (an old pillow that had frayed to the point I could no longer repair it) was not on their list of acceptable items, but the rest were, and we even added some extra clothes out of our rag bin and a pair of worn-out shoes. We took it all to the donation bin outside the Bottle King liquor store in Hillsborough, and Brian took advantage of the opportunity to pop in and pick up a bottle of an inexpensive tawny port. And we even stopped off at a Starbucks for me.

So, in the end, our recycling mission was a success — at least this time around. But I confess, given that all the other organizations we've used over the years to recycle textiles have simply disappeared, I have my concerns that this one will also be gone by the next time we have a batch to recycle. Which makes me wonder: Just why it so hard to find a textile recycler? If they really are useful as a material, why doesn't anyone want them?

I realize recycling them into new clothing isn't that easy. According to the CBC Marketplace article, most clothes now are made from blended fibers, which can't easily be separated out into new fibers for making new cloth. (Maybe those Levites weren't so crazy for making this kind of fabric illegal.) So pretty much all fabric that gets recycled is downcycled — turned into rags (as Helpsy does with non-usable garments) or into insulation or carpet padding (as I:Collect does).

What I don't understand, though, is why no one these days is upcycling rags into paper. Back in the old days, paper was typically made from rags rather than virgin wood pulp, and even today "rag bond," which contains a high percentage of cotton, is considered to be the best-quality paper you can buy. But it's generally made with cotton linters — virgin cotton fibers that cling to the seeds after the cotton goes through the gin — rather than rags, while rags rot in landfills for want of use. What kind of sense does that make? Is the problem that making paper from rags is much more labor-intensive than making it from virgin cotton? If so, why? Is it not cost-effective to develop machines that can make it from rags — even when the material itself is basically free?

Is this just one of those mysteries of capitalism that's beyond my ken, or is there a simple explanation that I'm overlooking?