16 March 2021
If you’ve got damaged clothes, textiles or shoes that aren’t quite right for donating, you might like to drop them off at one of the services below.
We can recycle cardboard, glass, tyres and e-waste, yet recycling our clothes and shoes isn’t so clear-cut. Why? Like fixing an old car, you’ve got to take a used t-shirt apart before you can put it back together.
Most clothes and shoes made today contain blended fibres, and these have to be extracted from one another before being recycled. It’s a complex and expensive break-up – one that most brands don’t know how to mediate. To make matters worse, textile recycling is still in its infancy in Australia and there are no commercial textile recyclers here. Unfortunately for our pale blue dot, it’s cheaper to send used clothes to landfill and make new items from virgin materials. So we do. Meanwhile, most items end up in charity bins, in the ground, or sold into secondhand marke