Clothing Recycling 101

40 Days, 40 Colleges to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Earth Day

Wearable Collections is celebrating the 40th anniversary of Earth Day with an exciting recycling challenge. Our goal is to conduct clothing drives on 40 colege campuses over the course of 40 days.

The Challenge

According to the Council of Textile Recycling, the average American discards of 68 lbs of textiles annually. That correlates to 340,000 lbs of textile waste for a campus of 5000 students. We are looking for motivated students to organize a clothing collection on campus. Whether you represent an environmental club, sports club or fraternity/sorority, this is an opportunity to stand out as a leader on campus.  Wearable Collections will provide you with all the support you need to ensure  a successful clothing drive. The only requirement is the enthusiasm to make a difference on campus.

The Reward

When less clothing ends up in landfills we are all winners. However, on top of feeling good for taking a proactive stance on the environment, Wearable Collections will dedicate 25% of the gross proceeds from the collections to either your organization or the organization of your choice.   It is possible to raise as much as $1000 for your organization.

Rules

We at Wearable Collections aren’t exactly stickler for rules, but we do request that you contact us by March 30th, 2010. The duration of the collections is up to the respective organizations, but we feel to maximize promotion and collections, the drive should be at least one week.

Depending on the region where you are hosting the drive, there will be a deadline set for the day of collections as follows:

Washington DC (and 60 mile vicinity) – The pick-up date will be Friday April 16th

Philadelphia (and 60 mile vicinity) – The pick-up date will be

Thursday April 22, Earth Day!

New York City (and 60 mile vicinity) – The pick-up date will be Friday April 30th

Boston (and 60 mile vicinity)- The pick-up date will be Friday May 14th

For more information on how you can be an eco-ambassador on campus please e-mail us at ecorep@wearablecollections.com or simply fill out this form and we will contact you swiftly.

Courtesy of our friend Mike Lieberman

Wearable Collections wants to be clear that we are here for you, fashion industry. There is no need for you to be slashing your clothes and sending them to landfills. There has to be a better solution.  If you read the NYTimes, or one of our faves, racked.com (photo courtesy of Racked), you may have noticed the hub-bub H & M have brought upon themselves by slashing and tossing perfectly good apparel.   We are not even going to pretend to  know what goes on in the mind of some  corporations.  We do know that it is customary for them to slash samples and returns. Obviously, the companies have a right to protect proprietary designs. It just seems wrong on multiple levels in this era both economically and environmentally to be continuing these rituals.  Wearable Collections would like to offer our service to to any company who would like to break this habit.  We are already collecting nearly 100,000 lbs of used clothing a month in the NYC metro area.  We could easily include any and all of your stores as part of our daily collections. We can even provide you with a clothing recycling bin free of charge so that your customers can easily recycle clothes within your stores.  Once the clothing is collected, it is brought to a sorting facility to determine a new home for it.  Industry standard calls for 50% of these items to be re-used as second hand clothing,  providing cheap clothing in emerging markets, 25% of the collected items will be used as rags in heavy industry, and 20 % is sent to facilities where they are broken down into fibers to be re-used as low grade fiber products. From any load 95-97% will be re-used in one form or another.  We provide our service at no-cost to our partners and will donate 20% of the gross proceeds of the sale of the clothing to the charity of our partner’s choice. H & M should know, no one has to lose!

To join the Wearable Collections clothing recycling program please e-mail us at info@wearablecollections.com

Wearable Founder Adam Baruchowitz lead a workshop this weekend for AJWS/Avodah on how to scale a social venture. Here is a list of ten pieces to the scaling a venture puzzle:

Passion- Your idea needs to be something you are passionate about.  You will be dedicating endless hours and energy to your project so it needs to be something you enjoy thinking about, and something that really drives your interest.  You will need to sell your idea to others , your passion will give them confidence to support you.

Think Local- Think of problems/needs facing your local community, master them, become an expert on them. Chances are there are other communities facing the same problems and that your solutions can be transferrable to other communities.

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Today we placed a clothing recycling bin inside (eco)compasion, greenfinds.com store at 2 great jones st. This bin is open to the public. So people in the village feel free to drop off your used clothes and get some eco-holiday presents for loved ones.