- 1). Donate your old clothes to charity. Do this by arranging for a pickup from your home, by dropping off your clothes at a local charity, or by taking them to a clothing drop box that belongs to a charity or for-profit organization. They can usually be found in grocery-store or shopping-center parking lots.
- 2). Call your local department of sanitation to see whether it offers curbside textile recycling. Unfortunately, most cities and counties don't yet offer this service, but some areas, such as Somerset County, New Jersey, allow textiles to be recycled in curbside bins. Other areas are working on creating textile recycling programs.
- 3). If your area doesn't recycle textiles at curbside, find out which city or county officials you need to contact to encourage the development of such a program.
- 4). Contact local quilters' guilds if you want to recycle fabric scraps: they are always in search of small amounts of fabric to make quilt pieces.
- 5). Look online or in the Yellow Pages for specialized textile recyclers: for example, if you have an old carpet that you'd otherwise throw away, search for a carpet recycling company. A comprehensive list can be found at the Carpet America Recovery Effort Web site.
- 6). Recycle textiles within your own home. Old clothes can be repurposed as rags for cleaning, polishing and wiping. Once you've wrung every last bit of use out of that rag, though, don't recycle it: it may now be impregnated with chemicals from cleaning products. If it's then recycled, it might contaminate the other textiles in its recycling batch.