Question by : Recycling textiles for waste?
I have some old clothes, sheets and pillowcases that are not suitable for donating to charities. Is there a company that recycles textiles ? I live in Melbourne Australia and am having difficulty finding a company that can recycle old materials.
Best answer:
Answer by badhabyt
It is very hard to recycle old textiles and most localities have no programs. To separate the yarns, remove the colors, melt the polymers back down, and remake something is 10-100x more expensive than starting from scratch. Forget it, if there are buttons or zippers to remove. It is just hard to justify a 0 t-shirt. Textiles, because of their construction, are just hard to recycle compared to aluminum or plastic where the items are only made of one component. The most that can be done with such textile is chopping them up for toy stuffing and the market is flooded for that application.
Call you local recycling companies that do aluminum and plastic and the city government to see what is available if there is any program at all. There probably is no alternative.
Give your answer to this question below!
Why don’t you just throw them away? I always throw my old clothes away. It is so much easier then trying to recycle them.
What about upcyling/free-cycling the textiles?
Is there any way that someone (a group/organization or person you know) would be able to use the old material to fashion something new? (i.e.: cloths, blankets/quilts, bags, gloves etc etc?)
throw it all outside in the street. Recycling is a gesture in futility. By polluting; on the other hand, you are supporting all those people who have jobs which deal with trash and garbage. If no one liter what do you think would happen to liter patrol? To the sanitation workers? they would be out of a job. For every one pop can you recycle some company just dumped ten million pop cans into the ocean….see the futility?
Many auto repair shops can use worn out clothes for shop rags, so can painters and wood finishers. You ought to have some of those in OZ. It is a form of re use.
Here in the US a charity called The Rescue Mission takes textiles to recycle the fibers. I have also given items to animal shelters to use as bedding, especially sheets, towels, and blankets, also fleece and other “cuddly” items.