Charity shopping and textile recovery

• Mar. 15 by Chloe Botting (1)

Recycling clothes is a great way of helping your environment that people often forget about. Some of your local charity bins will even accept clothing and textiles and home recycling bins provided by your local council can be used for textiles too.

However a more rewarding way of recycling your clothes is taking them to your local charity shop. Charity shops are on every street corner in Birmingham so instead of throwing your old threads away donate them to a charity. This way not only will you be giving to charity but you will be helping your environment.

Oxfam in particular is a great charity shop for recycling because clothes that are not wearable or do not sell get sent to Oxfam’s Wastesaver, a textile recycling plant based in Huddersfield. It is really important to recycle in every aspect of our lives that we can, and textiles is often a part of the recycling industry that gets forgotten.

“It is estimated that more than 1 million tonnes of textiles are thrown away every year, with most of this coming from household sources.” (www.wasteonline.org.uk)

Textile recovery helps our environment on so many levels, reducing the need for landfill and reduces global warming through the decomposition of woollen garments in particular. This all results in less pollution because we save energy on not importing goods from abroad.

Oxfam and The Salvation Army in particular sort collected material and then sell it onto merchants. The Salvation Army, Scope, and Oxfam also use a bank scheme alongside with other methods. The Salvation Army is the largest operator of textile banks in the UK, including a door to door service and there are now over 2000 banks. An impressive 70% of items put into clothing banks are reused as clothes. The majority of the UK population is already involved in charity shopping because it is such an effective method of recycling. But if you are yet to jump on the bandwagon here are some tips of where to find some in Birmingham.

Oxfam

St Mary’s Row, Moseley

110 Kings Heath High Street

880 Bristol Road South, Northfield

86 High Street, Harborne

The Salvation Army

496 Stratford Road, Hall Green

9 New Street, Erdington

72 Shadwell Street, Birmingham

24 St Chads Queensway