Thrift Week 2026: How to Recycle All the Things (starting with textiles)

I've been writing this blog for over 16 years now (counting from January 2010, when I first decided to give my old blog an ecofrugal theme). In those 16 years, I've published over 1,600 posts. And the most popular of them all, by a huge margin, was a 2014 post on how to recycle whipped cream cans. In the 12 years since I posted it, it's received roughly 31,000 views—blowing away its nearest competitor, my post on building a raspberry trellis, with a mere 5,100 views. Over 160 people have viewed it just in the past week. Evidently, how to recycle hard-to-recycle objects is a topic that interests many, many people.

Hence, this year's Thrift Week is going to be all about that topic. I've already said pretty much all that needs to be said on the topic of whipped cream cans, but there are loads of other recycling challenges that I've explored over the years, and this will be my chance to share what I've learned. I've written about this subject before, most notably in my 2013 post "How to recycle everything (if you can)," but a lot of the info in that post is now outdated. This week's series will expand on that material and bring everything up to date. And I'm kicking it all off with one particular category of theoretically-recyclables that's given me considerable trouble over the years: textiles.

When you look for information on textile recycling, most of what you'll find is advice on clothing donation. And obviously, if you need to get rid of clothes in usable condition, this is the best thing to do with them. There are tons of places that will take old clothes, from local thrift shops to veterans' organizations. I personally just gave a big box of worn but still serviceable garments to the United War Vets Council, which emails me every so often to see if I have anything to donate. You can also give old clothes away on Freecycle (or its close cousins, the Buy Nothing Project and Trash Nothing) or offer them to your friends at a clothing swap. You might even be able to make a little money reselling them at a consignment shop (in store or online) or at a yard sale. In short, there's no shortage of ways to find a new home for wearable garments.

But if you're a frugal person like most readers of this blog, you tend to wear your clothes until you've worn them out. An old pair of jeans with thighs so threadbare you can't even patch them is clearly no longer wearable, yet it may still have plenty of good fabric left on it that could be put to use. Yet most of the sites listed under "textile recycling" won't actually take them. They're not really planning to recycle your garments; they're planning to resell or donate them, so they'll only accept clothes in good condition. And the few that do accept clothes for actual recycling may require you to cover the shipping costs, which can be considerable. Terracycle's prepaid Zero Waste Boxes, for instance, cost between $160 and $379. 

In my area, there are only two places I know of that genuinely recycle textiles. The one I rely on most is Helpsy. It accepts all types of fabric goods, donates the stuff that's still usable, and downcycles the rest into insulation, stuffing, or rags for industrial use. Only about 5 percent of it needs to be thrown out. Unfortunately, this organization operates only in the northeastern U.S., and even within that area, the number of its bins seems to be dwindling. The last time I tried to make a dropoff, both the bin I had been using in Princeton and the one closest to me in New Brunswick had mysteriously vanished. Fortunately, I was still able to find one, but it keeps getting more difficult. (Which is why I currently have a small collection of old socks, tights, and one battered potholder that's been sitting in the bedroom for several months, waiting until I can get it to a usable recycling bin.)

If Helpsy ever disappears completely, I can always fall back on the garment collection program at H&M. The store has bins where you can drop off clean, used garments from any brand, which get sent to its "partners" overseas to be sorted. The usable items are resold, the unusable ones get downcycled, and a small fraction of the material gets fully recycled into new textiles. This isn't an ideal solution for me because the nearest H&M store is in a mall we never otherwise visit (the traffic is awful), and because of the additional carbon costs of shipping the garments halfway around the world. But it's better than nothing.

If neither of these organizations works for you, you might be able to find a better one through Earth911. This handy site has a tool to help you find recycling facilities near you for just about anything, including clothing. Unfortunately, its suggestions aren't always helpful. Many of the textile recycling programs it lists near me either (a) only accept items in good condition, (b) only accept specific items, such as sneakers or bras, or (c) are only available to residents of a particular town. But it's at least worth a check.

Whenever possible, though, we prefer to take the recycling of our clothes into our own hands. Those old trousers too worn to hold a patch usually get tucked away in my scrap fabric bin so I can cut them up to make patches for other garments. If the bin is too full to hold the entire garment, I at least keep the pockets, which make handy ready-made patches for holes in the knees of Brian's jeans. Similarly, when his T-shirts and socks get too worn out to be darned, we rip them up and turn them into cleaning rags. And little scraps too small to get used for anything, if they're made of natural materials, can go into the compost bin, where they'll eventually break down into useful fertilizer for our garden. Now that's truly cradle-to-cradle recycling.