Recycling textiles?

Raiden333

I've spent the last couple months wearing a rather poor pair of shoes with some holes in them, leading to holes in a lot of my pairs of socks. The kind of holes you can't even hope to repair and just have to throw the sock out. But I was wondering, are there any programs that collect unwanted cloth to recycle back into the textile industry? Thought I'd check before I toss all these into the trash.

I'm in central-coastal California, if that makes a difference.

Dunadan019

Raiden333 wrote: »

I've spent the last couple months wearing a rather poor pair of shoes with some holes in them, leading to holes in a lot of my pairs of socks. The kind of holes you can't even hope to repair and just have to throw the sock out. But I was wondering, are there any programs that collect unwanted cloth to recycle back into the textile industry? Thought I'd check before I toss all these into the trash.

I'm in central-coastal California, if that makes a difference.

most churches hold clothing drives where you can donate unwanted clothes to people for free... but i doubt that they will accept holey socks (no pun intended).

if you want to recycle worn out socks, why not just rip them down one side and use them as a rag. thats what i do with ruined t-shirts.

Pure Din

I used to work at a recycling center in NJ, and we took holey and worn out clothes, which were then sold to factories which would rip them up and use them as rags. Personally though, I usually use old socks for cleaning the outside of my car. You don't even need to rip them up, just wear one like a mitten and then your hands won't get dirty when you clean.

Szechuanosaurus

Yeah, second hand cloth can be used for all sorts of things; filler, underlay, respun into wool, etc.

Sometimes the charity shops that have the big bins for second hand clothing will also pass on unusable clothing to recycling plants, so if your local council doesn't have an obvious method of recycling rags you could try contacting the charity organisations and checking what they do with any unsellable rags that are donated to them.