Donating is the most sustainable option for unwanted clothes

A wardrobe is a wonderful way for every person to express themself. There is such a wide variety of clothing and styles out there in the world: from grunge, to granola, to athletic and more, you can find clothes to fit your vibe anywhere.

At the end of the day, though, when you’ve worn something and it doesn’t fit right or you’ve finally stopped finding reasons to wear that one sweater you love, where does it all go?

Not to mention all those clothes that enter and leave a store without being bought, what happens to them?

Clothes, old and new, build up in landfills across the world. According to a 2020 article by Abigail Beall for BBC News, “Why Clothes Are So Hard to Recycle,” the U.S. alone ditches about 85% of the textiles made, either in landfills or through burning.

That added up to 13 million tons, or around 286 million pounds, of textile waste in 2017 alone.

Globally, people toss out about 92 million tons of textile waste every year, and that number is growing annually.

The article says that in 2020, only around 13.6% of clothes and shoes in the U.S. are recycled each year. The difficulty in recycling clothing is because of the materials they are made of.

The mixtures of fibers and threads such as cotton, polyester, natural threads, and synthetic fibers have to be separated to be properly recycled.

“Sorting textiles into different fibers and material types by hand is labour intensive, slow and requires a skilled workforce,” Beall said in the article. “Growing use of modern fabric blends in clothing also makes it hard to do this mechanically too…once sorted, the dyes that have been applied to the fabrics need to be removed in order for yarns to be reused.”

So not only are we getting rid of our clothes in large amounts and more quickly due to changing fashion styles, the ability to recycle our clothing is extremely difficult and almost not worth it.

So, what can we do? Is donating our clothing to thrift stores worth it? Yes. While donating clothes to thrift stores is better than immediately throwing away our clothes, many of these stores end up selling off the clothes that they can’t sell to other locations or rotating them around until they are sold.

While advances in technology are being made to recycle clothing, there are other options that we can pursue while the world makes better processes for recycling clothes.

While I can push for minimalism and buying less clothes, let’s be honest, that’s not a fun option.

I will be the first to admit that the idea of not staying up to date on cute things to wear, going through a small closet and the same outfits each day doesn’t seem as exciting.

While I am pushing myself to live a more minimalist lifestyle, I also recognize not everyone wants to do that.

Donating your clothes to thrift stores or handing them down to younger siblings and friends is a wonderful way to give back.

Personally, one of my favorite options is finding charities or foster families to donate to.

Foster kids are often pulled out of their homes and forced to move around with whatever they can carry in just a garbage bag.

Donating to charities, such as Foster the Love MN, allows children without stable homes (fosters, homeless, impoverished, etc.) to shop for clothing that they like and will fit them instead of just being tossed a bag of random assortments and dealing with it.

There are so many options out there of charities, families, friends and stores to donate to. Don’t just toss, give back to the world around you.