According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), more than 84% of old clothes, shoes, belts, handbags, and textile items end up in a landfill or an incinerator. In fact, the average person in America throws away more than 85 lbs. of textile items each year. Textiles make up more than 6% of all the residential and municipal trash in the U.S. Clothing and textiles require a lot of resources to make, including water, fertilizer, and pesticides for growing natural fibers like cotton, as well as petroleum to make synthetic fibers. When we reuse and recycle textiles, it conserves the resources used to make them. In fact, collecting one ton of clothing conserves far more than a ton of the resources. The Simple Recycling service is designed to keep those items out of the trash, which is good for the environment.
Simple Recycling sends the material it collects to a facility in Chicago, where roughly 30% of the material is destined to local thrift stores for resale, 30% is appropriate for overseas markets, and the remainder is shredded and recycled into insulation and fiber for industrial wipers.