Yes, You Can Recycle Fabric Scraps and Old Shoes!

Do you sometimes hesitate to get rid of things like old socks and stained and ripped jeans because you feel bad that it will be sitting in a garbage dump, polluting the earth? I certainly felt this way, and being the creative person that I am I always had plans to make sock puppetts or a hat or use the jeans to patch other jeans and so on. Of course, mostly, I just had mounds of unusable stuff in piles that I never ended up using because I am too busy with my myriad other projects.

For anyone else with these guilty feelings about throwing stuff in the trash, there is some very good news in the case of anything fabric.

I recently discovered that charities bag up unwanted donations of clothing to be sold for scrap, which to me is a much better fate than sitting in a landfill taking up valuable space, so I would say that any fabric at all should go to charity, perhaps labelled “scrap fabric” so they know to just chuck it in the recycle pile.

Apparently Goodwill loves scrap clothing. They may not try to sell it, but your stained or shabby dress or blouse is sold to a bulk fabric shredder who will recycle it. Your old socks will be shredded and made into something useful rather than buried in a landfill, and Goodwill earns a bit of money toward education and training people looking for work.

I know that Nike also recycles used running shoes and shreds them up to make things like basketball courts.