Recycle Clothes and Fabric from Household Waste
Recycling Old Clothes Can Save Money and the Environment
Jan 29, 2009
Recycling clothes and fabric in the home is a great way to save money and reduce your environmental footprint as well. Here are a few household recycling ideas to get you going,
Recycle Old Clothes: Donate Outgrown Children’s Clothes
The best thing to do with clothes that children have grown out of, but are still in good condition, is to donate them to a local charity. There are many services that are happy to place collection boxes in the neighborhood, or even pick them up from home.The nice thing about doing this is that old favorites will actually find new owners who are likely to enjoy those special outfits as much as the original owner did!
Recycle Old Clothes: Get Creative
It’s amazing what some imagination can do to all those clothes in the wardrobe that are in perfectly good condition, but have just become plain boring. Don’t junk them yet; explore these options first.
- Check out if a little tuck at the waist or a shorter sleeve or even a bolder neckline might perk up a slightly out-of date dress. Play around with ideas. Experiment.
- Good with a paintbrush? Try painting a motif on an old tired tee. A dash of color acts as a great pick up. Or just scrawl a bold message in colorful fabric inks to wear your affiliation.
- For those handy with a needle, embroidered motifs are another option to dress up an old shirt or a tee.
Recycle Upholstery Fabric
If you’re changing upholstery, don’t trash the old fabric. Thick upholstery fabric can come in extremely handy for a variety of uses, and work as effective substitutes for everyday paper products in the home.
- Upholstery fabric makes excellent recycled kitchen towels and wipes. To make the towels, cut the fabric into neat rectangles of a convenient size and edge them to prevent unraveling. For wipes, use smaller rectangles. You will have a nice pile of absorbent, reusable towels that last quite a while, provided care is taken to keep them clean with regular washing and drying.
- Pretty floral fabric, especially if it is a little thinner, can also make attractive table napkins. Cut the fabric into napkin size squares, taking care that the motifs work to advantage. Use decorative thread for the edging. If the motifs are defined, you might even want to pick out the outline with a simple stem or chain stitch in embroidery thread.
Recycle Linen and Other Scrap Fabric
Tired bed linen, tablecloths and other scrap fabric make great raw material for patchwork sheets and quilts.
- Team up different shapes and sizes of scrap fabric and cut linen, and stitch them up together for an exciting new sheet for the nursery or even the master bedroom. Use contrasting decorative thread to show up the thread-work.
- Old flannel sheets can also be used to make cloth diapers, since the fabric soft and well used.
These are simple recycling ideas that anybody can do at home, and will go a long way in reducing waste and recycling household trash. On a different scale, there are textile recycling programs that recycle different kinds of old fabric and reuse pulp and fiber in the manufacture of paper.
Related Reading
If you found this useful, you might also want to read about waste paper recycling and recycling computers at home and in the office. You might also want to read an interesting article by Debra Lynn Dadd at Designare, in Textile Recycling by Worldwise.
