Donating Your Old Clothes
Today, textiles stands as one of the biggest and most popular industries today, and it is a vastly lucrative one, too, given how everyone in the world needs clothes to wear for work, for everyday life, or for formal events. A dazzling variety of shoes, coats, shirts, pants, dresses, scarves, and more all produced in great amounts every year, and markets around the world, especially the United States, purchase great amounts of clothes per year. The unfortunate truth, however, is that not all clothes end up going to used clothes donations or to charities like Red Cross pickup; often, clothes are simply thrown away and end up in one of the United States’ many landfills, and other times, old clothes are used as industrial rags or shredded to stuff furniture. However, charities like Red Cross pickup are always available to receive clothing donations any time of the year, especially around the holiday time, and the process of choosing which clothes to donate and sending them to a clothing donation center is fairly easy and can go a long way to helping reverse the trend of clothes getting discarded. A Red Cross donation center can be found in many urban areas, and finding one is often just an Internet search away. In the middle of all this, what should a person do to make sure that their old clothes end up with someone who needs them? What good can Red Cross pickup do? A lot, as long as people are ready to donate.
Waste and Charity
Many billions of tons of clothes are produced in the United States every single year, and while the market for all these new clothes is massive, so is the rate of wasting these clothes. In fact, given the total amount of clothes that are thrown away every year and sent to landfills, the total amounts to around 10 pounds or more of textile waste for every American, every year. These clothes are clogging landfills when they could go to Red Cross pickup sites instead, or being used as industrial rags or furniture stuffing. The good news is that while a lot of clothes are discarded, many more are going to charities every single year, and fighting the trend of clothes waste often simply means accelerating rates of charity and knowing what to do with old textiles. Already, there are some encouraging trends in place. It has been determined that 70% of Americans give to charity every year, whether for clothes other other items, and about 3% of all American income is given to charity every single year as well. Many higher-income individuals give generously to charity as well, and 63% of them say that “giving back to the community” is their main reason for their charity work. And finally, around the world, about 14.3 millions tons of donated American textiles, or even more, are sent to people and families worldwide. How can an average American person or household help contribute to the ever-lasting need for charity?
Making the Donation
Finding a Red Cross pickup is just the final step for giving to charity. When a person or household resolve to give to charity, the first step is to take inventory. This means that all clothing in a household, all shirts, jeans, dresses, coats, gloves, hats, and more, should be gathered from all across the home and assembled into a single massive pile on the floor, and many people may be surprised to see how many clothes they actually have and how many of those articles they do not actually want to keep. The next step here is for the household to start carefully picking through this massive stockpile and determine which pieces of clothing they need and actually like, and which ones can be donated. Clothes to be donated may be redundant with other, more desirable articles, or they may be out of fashion, a bit worn (not too badly damaged), too small, or for whatever other reason unwanted in the person’s wardrobe.
The clothes to be kept will be simply put back in the closet and wardrobe, and the rest can be packed up in bags or boxes and sent to a Red Cross pickup site and handed over to the volunteers who work there.
