Agree. See NPR's story from 2013 "The Afterlife of American Clothes" https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/12/10/247362140/the-...

Right, the mentality of a lot of people is I'd feel bad putting this in the trash so I'll put in the donation bin and then all thinking about where it actually ends up is for someone else to deal with.

That's as it should be. Nobody should expect every person in the country to individually solve the problem of how best to allocate that resource. The donation bin is the correct solution, so that the resource can be graded, sorted, sold locally, or compressed into bales and sold internationally.

Only if it's profitable for the donatee. It's not right for me to just dump my trash on your lawn and call it a "gift".

When that someone is someone who specializes in dealing with the issue, passing it along to them makes a lot of sense.

I don't know the best way to recycle used clothes (for any definition of best). It is likely that a used-clothes donation center does. If that donation center can make a profit, even better.

What if they can't make a profit?

It's a particularly American approach to recycling to assume that the onus on sorting / separating should not fall on the individual generating the trash. Other countries don't take this approach - instead, they place a high premium on disposal costs of unsorted trash, and require that anything you try to recycle be carefully sorted.

This kind of runs counter to how the entire rest of modern civilization works, doesn't it? I don't have the foggiest idea how to grow grains, refine aluminum from bauxite, knit a sweater, build a water purifier, manufacture pens and pencils, bleach paper and bind it into spiral notebooks, raise livestock, or pick coffee beans, so I indirectly pay millions of people to do these things for me and focus on writing code. Why shouldn't I indirectly pay someone to sit at a conveyor belt and separate my recyclables? Single-stream recycling is a godsend, and it's annoying that I have to drive across town or find specific vendors to recycle textiles, batteries, electronics, and stuff like that.

The problem is you don't pay for someone to separate your recyclables. If we were all charged for the garbage we generate, and also for how expensive it was to process, then it'd be fine. But in most cases, consumers in the US don't pay truly variable rates for the garbage they generate. (Even in the generally progressive San Francisco, you're charged a monthly fee based simply on how many trash cans you have - so pretty much everyone pays the same, and there's little incentive to generate less trash.) https://www.recology.com/recology-san-francisco/rates/

However, in our current scheme (at least in the US), when you don't sort your garbage, the cost of that is mostly just distributed across everyone else - both in terms of the cost to process the garbage, as well as the environmental costs of things like improperly disposed of batteries that end up in landfills.

There's efforts to automate the processing of mixed-stream recycling, but they're not widely available yet.

It's entirely possible that we'll see single stream recycling end here in the US soon, because the places we used to send it for processing (like China) no longer want to do it for us due to the environment problems. At that point, we'll either have to start doing a better job separating it ourselves, charge more for garbage and single-stream so we can pay for processing, or fill up our landfills even faster.

Or we'll realize that it's not cost-effective to recycle anything other than glass and metal and stop subsidizing plastic recycling at all. Glass and metal recycling wouldn't be any problem for single stream recycling because the value of recycled materials would make up for the cost of separation.

If we're going to subsidize forms of recycling that aren't cost-effective, I'd rather we subsidize forms of recycling that also aren't annoying to the end user. Forcing people to separate Plastic #1 from Plastic #5 when it's cheaper to just dump both plastics in a landfill in the first place strikes me as Kafkaesque.

You can't base recycling decisions only on what's "cost effective" while not considering revising the fees people pay to dispose of household. Generating trash isn't supposed to be inherently costless, and it really shouldn't be.

Even glass has become questionable in terms of recycling economics[0] based on current fees, partially because Americans generally fail to clean the containers properly.

"It's cheaper to dump it in a landfill" is frankly, a lame approach that ignores the environmental costs and short-sightedness of creating more landfills. Do you want to live on a landfill, or next to one? They're basically a toxic waste dump.

The obvious answer is to do what other countries do: charge a lot for disposal of non-recycleable/non-compostable garbage, charge much less for recycling properly (and that includes cleaning and sorting), and use the fees from the garbage to subsidize the cost of recycling. This results in 1) less waste in landfills 2) more recycling 3) less pollution and 4) less use of non-renewable resources.

[0] http://www.waste360.com/glass/focusing-economics-glass-recyc...

Doesn't this beget an economic feedback cycle? I.e., if it's more cost productive to send to a landfill, then more waste will be sent to a landfill, and so the costs to do so will go up as "demand" (waste) outstrips "supply" (landfill space). Then the cost effective pendulum swings back to recycling. Is that already happening?

In some ways, recycling should pay for itself. Consumers generate raw material for free, which through aggregation, sorting, and rectification (de-generating into raw-er materials) gains value for recyclers.

Depends how you define "cost productive". Cheaper on a cash basis, but that ignores the (not insignificant) externalities of doing that, such as landfill remediation down the road, and increased cost of transporting other trash to more distant landfill sites.

It's easy to say recycling should "pay for itself" but if you're going to do that, you need to consider the entire economic picture, not just how much value is generated from the recovered goods. There's also landfill savings, protection of the environment, reduced usage of energy (both in disposal and generation of new materials), etc. Given all of those, it can be entirely rational for a government to subsidize recycling heavily, because the overall impact is still "cost effective."

Maybe the place I volunteered at is weird but we did just throw those clothes into the garbage.

What a waste.

that's true, recycled denim makes for great insulation apparently https://www.homedepot.com/p/UltraTouch-16-in-x-48-in-Denim-I...

I think a lot of the fill in punching bags is some sort of garbled/blended fabrics of some mixed variety.

The North Beach branch of the San Francisco Public Library actually uses denim as insulating material within their walls.

http://sfpublicworks.org/project/north-beach-branch-library

"...and 11,350 square feet of insulation made from recycled denim, equating to approximately 4,500 pairs of jeans."

That's a lot of jeans!

It's kinda important to build with less flamable materials whenever possible.

A library, by definition, is full of flammable materials anyway :)

I remember this dude putting a bunch of materials to the test with a direct blowtorch flame. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NC79e0oztM. I was hoping he had a demo of denim; it's mentioned in the video description, but skimming the video I couldn't locate it in a reasonable time. You can look at his demo on treated cellulose around 1:48

Denim Batt at 12:39

https://youtu.be/8NC79e0oztM?t=12m39s

bummer ><, I was hoping it would perform a lot better. The brief coverage of the poor performers explains why I couldn't skim it and land on it. Only the strong contenders had long enough coverage to skim with a mouse hover over the timeline and spot them in the thumbnail. Sounds like it was trading on low allergic response vs flammability according to his commentary.

I imagine it was sprayed with a flame retardant?

Fabrics used for insulation are treated with flame retardant.

People also insulate with cellulose -- ground up newspaper. It is treated with boron to make it flame retardant.

Old clothes make excellent raw material for the production of shop rags. They can also be used to make high quality paper.

plus all those sketchy stuffed animals, when they run out of oily rags and newspaper!

(regarding the denim sound insulation and fire)

Maybe, but there's a pretty good chance it's treated with flame retardants before use, and cotton fabric generally doesn't really burn that well - or at least not fast.

There's a reason people working with hot glass wear long cotton shirts/pants for it.

I had a chemistry professor mention to the class she always travels with natural fabrics, cotton and the like, whenever she's onboard a flight. She mentioned something along the lines of it increases your chances of survival if ever there's a fire because synthetics melt and stick to your skin and burn like crazy.

I took some glassblowing classes and the first day safety lecture included a bit about this. Eye protection, closed toe shoes, and cotton clothes, precisely for this reason.

Especially when we were first learning, it was easier than you might think to spill or splash 2000F liquid glass on the ground when gathering it out of the crucible, and that'd turn synthetic clothes into napalm.

That's an ... interesting failure of statistical thinking. Fire in the cabin is by far less risky than many other potential harms he encounters en route to the airport.

Assuming your clothes fit properly, your choice of clothing will have little effect on your chances of surviving your journey to the airport. However, clothing that might help you survive a plane crash will likely have the same benefit in a car crash.

I used the term fire loosely, it was basically a plane crash and subsequent fire, an inferno in other words not a small camp fire around the center aisle seat.

>After all, I can't put them in the green recycling bin with my cans, jars, and plastic.

Depends, in SF you now can now put unfit fabrics in the blue bin[1]. For usable, they suggest place like USAgain.

[1]https://www.recology.com/recology_news/sf-accepts-new-recycl...

Actually, if they're really ruined, most recyclers will take them with the paper recycling.

Really? Even in Germany where a ton of things go in household recycling bins (including basically all plastics and composites), you'd have to bring ruined clothes to the recycling center separately. Definitely only paper/cardboard in the paper bin.

Where I live in the UK we just put the clothes in a bag next to the recycling containers and they get taken away.

They also take away car batteries, car oil, small appliances, batteries etc

In an effort to not have to go to the dump with them, as I didn’t have a car at the time, I actually chopped up two entire sofas with an axe and a knife and recycled them over the space of three months too :)

> as I didn’t have a car at the time, I actually chopped up two entire sofas with an axe and a knife and recycled them over the space of three months too :)

And for sofas that aren't in unsalvagable condition there are furniture recycling projects around the country that will collect old furniture, give it a bit of a sprucing up, and sell it.

Yes indeed. These were perfectly good ones but the furniture salvage people locally didn’t want them and no one came on gumtree or freecycle :(

Ah, that's a shame.

Or Craigslist 'Free Stuff'.

I'd rather throw it away than deal with the flakes on Craigslist. It rains here so leaving it on the curb will only ensure it loses whatever residual value it might have held.

In many places in US you don't have separate bins for paper, plastics, glass and what not, but only one (usually green) recycling bin for everything that is somehow recyclable.

In Japan, I think there were like ten bins, with clear instructions on how each should be used (eg take the label off the plastic bottle before binning it). It was a bit stressful before I got used to it.

Here in Seattle, at least, recycling has transitioned to blue and green is now used for municipal compost bins. I think SF is the same.

We (Seattle) used to have separate bins in the late 90's or early 00's. A lot smaller total volume than the 96 gal toters, though.

I remember that as a kid in general King county (many of the suburbs of Seattle).

However it's still not enough.

    * More bins for more specific TYPES of plastic
    * Better, machine readable, (BIG) labels
    * Financial incentives (carrot and stick)

I'll elaborate more on that last point. Restaurants should be encouraged to create takeout packaging that is more easily recycled and/or composted. Similarly wrappers, boxes, cups and packets should have a per unit tax for non-environmentally friendly units.

There should also be a push towards the use of glass and metal and paper over plastics. Sturdy glass bottles can be cleaned, thermal blast smoothed and re-used or broken down and recycled completely. Similarly metal lids and cans can also attain a new life with ease.

There's always tradeoffs. If you require people sort at home, more recyclables end up in the trash and/or people missort anyway.

I agree we should incentivize use of more recyclable materials (in place of non-recyclable or more expensive to recycle materials) in general.

Blue in LA as well.

Where "everything" may be limited. For example, I just went and looked: I can recycle "recyclable glass, aluminum, cans, plastics and paper".

At least where I lived in Germany, in cities, there were dumpster-sized stand-alone donation bins labeled "Kleidung und Schuhe" (clothing and shoes) everywhere.

It's often far less convenient to get to a recycling center in the US (especially for people without a car) so they do more of their own sorting.

I wasn't going to share a link to a barely related discussion from last month, but:

Recycling Chaos in U.S. As China Bans 'Foreign Waste' | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15888827

... China doesn't want recycling anymore!

I've never heard of this, and have heard a presentation on how paper recycling works that makes me kinda doubt it.

Knowing something about how paper making works, I'm not at all surprised by the idea; since part recycling is going to have reduce everything to fibers anyway, I'm not sure why including clothes which you could use as feedstock to make paper would necessarily be functionally any different to the recycler than reducing those clothes to fibers, combining those with other fiber sources, making paper out of that, and then putting the resulting paper into the recycling.

I loved this article on making paper for U.S. currency, which is produced by one company out of cotton and linen. Up until very recently, the company used denim as a source of raw material.

> "But recently, Americans decided they liked jeans that stretched, so jeans companies began adding spandex to their fabric. Money with spandex in it wouldn't be money anymore, which means much of Crane's time is now spent on a global search for waste cotton that wasn't used to make elastic pants."

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a24292/benjamin-hundred...

"Before the industrialisation of the paper production the most common fibre source was recycled fibres from used textiles, called rags."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_paper#Fiber_sources

What country are you in? It's technically illegal in New York to put anything but PAPER in the cardboard bin.

...is cardboard counted as paper?