Jane Powers on recycling textiles
We used to wear our clothes until they dropped off us. Or we outgrew them, and there was usually a smaller person waiting in line for them. But nowadays fashion changes in the blink of an eye and new things cost just a few quid, so it's rare for clothes to wear out. Now we have more clothes than we need.
Charity shops welcome clean gear in perfect condition, but they won't thank you for grubby and worn-out cast-offs. Clean and dry items may be left at textile banks at recycling centres. Desirables include old clothes, bed linen, curtains, blankets and paired shoes. Duvets, pillows and carpets, on the other hand, are not wanted. But before you consign them to landfill, consider whether they might make a warm bed for a pet. Old carpet, as every organic gardener knows, is an effective weed suppresser, and you can use it to reclaim overgrown areas if you're not too concerned about its serviceable appearance.
Many of the clothes banks in Ireland (77 of them) are operated by the charity Enable Ireland. The collected textiles are brought to a warehouse in Blanchardstown, in west Dublin, where they are separated into "saleable" and "unsaleable" categories. Items in the first group are distributed among the charity's network of 19 shops; those in the second are sold on to Cookstown Recycling, in Co Tyrone. There, they are again sorted into various classes, then sent off to processors in Britain, where they eventually take on another use. Old jumpers, for instance, may become mattress stuffing, cotton rags may be turned into industrial wipers, and other materials may live again as soundproofing in cars, or carpet underlay.
A proportion of textiles is not reusable, and ends up in landfills. But even those textiles that do move on to fulfil other purposes may take a long and circuitous route to get there - a route that is inevitably travelled by vehicles burning fossil fuels. So the closer we can keep the recycling of our unwanted fabrics to home, the better. Old towels, for example, make the best cleaning rags you are likely to find - so do give them a second life. I don't know if anyone still sews pillowcases from the intact bits of ripped sheets, but many of our mammies did, giving us the softest ever surfaces to rest our heads on at the end of a day.