Don’t Donate Torn, Stained Clothes and Sheets—Send Them to Trashie
It’s quite dark. However, through targeted advertising on social media, I found a textile recycling subscription service that was the answer I was looking for: Trashie. Buy a “go bag” for $20 and you can send clean, used clothes, sheets, shoes and even old Halloween costumes. Bags come in packs of one or three. There’s also the “Take Back Tech Box” for $25, where you can return old electronics that have been gathering dust in a drawer. In exchange, you earn points toward discounts or gift cards at major retailers like Cozy Earth and Nuuly. You can also shop and earn points on partner sites, like Parachute. So, if you’ve been looking for an excuse to ditch last season’s trends that even thrift stores wouldn’t want (goodbye puffy quilted tote bag; I don’t understand why that was a trend), this is it.
From trash to treasure
Andre West, director of Zeis Textile Extension (ZTE) at North Carolina State University’s Wilson College of Textiles, corroborated the UN and EPA data in his research. And he says the textile waste problem is only getting worse.
Fast fashion is largely to blame for all this, he says. “In the USA, there would be a higher amount [of waste] than in the past. I don’t see any slowdown at the moment. »
Additionally, it’s difficult to know where textile waste ends up, and so calculating exact numbers like this can be quite an undertaking. “It’s also difficult to determine the data, because the waste is spread in all different directions – it’s not grouped into one big piece. Some of it is thrown away, some of it is burned, some of it is cut into cubes and shipped to other countries,” he says.
West painted a picture for me of the scale of the problem and the potential impact of an undertaking like this. “Product sorting is still in its infancy as to how to do it properly,” he says. “Even if you sort them by color, they’re all made from different materials with buttons, zippers and linings.” He also told me that items can often be mislabeled. This affects recycling, as breaking down each of these fibers requires a different, often time-consuming, process, so asking a service like Trashie to handle this could be a game-changer.
What can we recycle?
Photography: Julia Forbes
In my takeout bag there was a duvet cover that my dog had punched holes in and some old sheets that were the material version of a Walking death zombie. You can also bring clothing that is not suitable for donation. I hate to tell you, but that stained sweater? No one goes crazy for this one at the thrift store, but it’s perfect for upcycling Trashie. Trashie accepts a fairly long list of recyclable items (assuming they are clean), which you can find here.
