The clothes off your back

In the first few weeks of using an Ohio-based company, Simple Recycling, to haul away clothes and some household items, nearly 36,000 pounds of material was picked up, according to Lori Welch, environmental specialist for the City of Lansing. That means about $360 for the city. At that rate nearly $10,000 in cash could flow into the city’s coffers in a year, eliminating tens of thousands of pounds of perfectly usable items from being buried.

The city is “mainly motivated by keeping stuff out of landfills,” Welch said. “The main mission is to reduce waste. As a bonus, they do pay us a penny a pound for the material collected in the city. It has not been clearly identified how it will be used. Maybe beautification projects.”

The new service is offered in Lansing, East Lansing and some communities around Detroit. Simple Recycling launched in Lansing Dec. 1. The city gives the company the list of addresses of residents who receive recycling service and Simple Recycling mails them info and a special bag for materials like clothing and textiles and soft goods. It costs residents nothing. They just set out the Simple Recycling bag on their normal recycling day. Simple Recycling picks it up.

Welch said the service has another sideline benefit: less unsightly piles of items around donation bins around town.

“It would sure be nice if it would reduce that,” Welch said. “Those bins can become dumping grounds unfortunately. It would be definitely a plus to keep those bins neat.”

Officials with Simple Recycling could not be reached for comment.

Some are concerned the new service will hurt local nonprofit thrift store operations.

Deborah Mulcahey, a Lansing resident, wonders if people will choose to place their items on the curb for simplicity and stop taking items to places like the Volunteers of America Thrift Store or St. Vincent De Paul Thrift Store in REO Town.

Steve Maiville, director at St. Vincent said, “We’re not anticipating a big impact. We have a loyal group of donors who seek us out to donate.”

“Time will tell more than anything else,” he said.

According to the Secondary Materials and Recycled Textiles Association, recycling old clothing and other textiles is a $1 billion industry. Forty-five percent of items that are collected either curbside, from bins or that are unsold from charities are bundled and resold either to other secondhand clothing markets in the U.S. or exported to “emerging market nations where demand for top quality secondhand clothing is particularly high,” according to the association’s website.

Maiville said selling to the textile recycling market “is a source of income” for St. Vincent as well.

“A penny a pound is low,” he said. “We get more than that.”

He said the market can pay 8 to 20 cents per pound for used and unwanted clothing and textiles. Recycling of clothing and textiles is “multiple layers deep,” he said.

Items “wind up in parts of Africa, Eastern Europe, Ukraine,” he said. “The market will vary depending upon availability of the items overseas.”

He said the price for clothing has declined because of Ebola. There’s less ground transportation available to get the items into Africa, he said.

Maiville said 65 percent of products like clothing and textiles get recycled in Britain but only 15 percent is recycled in the U.S.

“We’re a great throwaway society,” he said.

Welch agreed.

“It’s very easy to say that perfectly good stuff gets thrown away in the trash,” she said. “Whether they do it because they don’t know of another option or have no means to deal with it responsibly. But yes, some percentage of perfectly good stuff ends up in the waste stream.”