Donating lightly used clothing has never been easier. In addition to resale stores that pay for clothing they resale at affordable prices, clothing drop sites set up Saturday mornings throughout large urban areas, as well as permanent drop boxes conveniently located in grocery store parking lots, make finding a good home for lightly used clothing easy and simple.
A combination of today’s harsh economy for some of the least fortunate and a more urgent sense of people trying to be more careful about waste can lead to a win win situation for everyone involved. Donating clothes helped keep 2.5 billion pounds of fabric from landfills in 2006. Those donated clothing items, as well as the efforts of other to donate household items to institutions like Goodwill and other similar charitable organizations, are in turn resold to others at affordable prices. Many times the donation centers and retail locations are also staffed by some of the people in our society who are most in need of a good job.
Donated clothing centers provide tax-free places to donate clothes and some even provide a pick-up service to make the donating even more convenient. Charities that will pick up donations advertise their times, and some make automated phone calls to designated zip code areas to remind donors that a pick-up time is about to occur. According to a recent survey, 50% of people making donations prefer a door-to-door pickup option. the other half say they would not go more than 10 minutes out of their way to make a drop off.
Whether you are a mother who is tearfully packing up boxes of outgrown clothing as you prepare for your oldest daughter to leave for college, or you are a tearfully happy mother able to tell her daughter that she can buy all nine pairs of the shorts she likes at an affordably priced retail store, donations of lightly used clothing just make sense. Take the time to contact one of the 1,507,231 tax-exempt, charitable organizations in the U.S. to see how to find a good home for your gently used clothing, as well as household items and appliances. Your thoughtful generosity can reduce the amount of waste in our crowded American landfills as will as provide a needed service to those less fortunate. Studies show that as much as 90% of textile waste is easily recyclable and can easily be given to people in need. It is time for you to be part of the solution, not the problem!
