What do I do with old clothes and textiles?

This post has been updated. It originally published on April 3, 2024.

A change in season means you’re likely rearranging your closet to make room for spiffy In a perfect world, you’d never have a reason to get rid of any of what’s in your closet. You’d store all your clothing correctly between seasons, your size or style would never change, and a messy meal would never fall on your lap. (And if it did, you’d have a picture-perfect laundry routine to keeps duds clean without needlessly wearing them out.) But we’re imperfect creatures in an imperfect fashion world. 

Americans trash around 68 pounds of textile waste per person every year, which, along with leather and rubber, makes up more than 9% of all solid landfill waste.¹² The volume of castoffs may only grow in coming years due to the breakneck speed of fast fashion. The average American purchases 53 new pieces of clothing a year, four times as much as we did in 2020.³ 

With all this excess, maximizing the use of clothes you do buy and finding ethical ways to get rid of what you no longer have a use for is vital. Here’s what you need to know about getting rid of your duds when you’re done with them in a way that’s good for the planet and the people on it. 

What is the environmental impact of fashion waste? 

When a piece of clothing that still has potential to be worn or reborn hits the landfill, all the resources devoted to creating it—from fossil fuels to water to acres of farmland—is essentially wasted, as well. The industry’s energy-intensive methods and complex supply chains contribute between 8% and 10% of the world’s carbon emissions, which is more than the aviation and shipping industries combined.⁴  By 2030, textile production could produce 2.7 billion metric tons of carbon emissions a year,⁵ up from around 1.3 billion tons in 2015.⁶ For reference, total U.S. carbon emissions reached around 6 billion metric tons in 2022.⁷  

So much of the clothing we create is discarded or never worn. Between 10% and 40% of all clothing produced is never sold,⁸ but the negative impacts don’t end once duds make their way to consumers. More than half of all materials used by the fashion industry are made of plastic, which is usually derived from non-renewable fossil fuels.⁹ When those polyester wares head to landfills, they release microplastics into the environment.¹⁰ “People don’t associate [plastic pollution] with clothing quite as often as they probably should,” says Kathryn Horvath, an associate with the Waste is Out of Fashion campaign at the nonprofit organization Public Interest Research Group. 

What to do with unwanted clothes in good condition

If you’ve decided some of your garments need a new home, there are several ways to get rid of them sustainability instead of sending them straight to the landfill or incinerator. 

Resell or consign

Reselling old clothes is an increasingly popular option for many shoppers and sellers. ThredUp, a secondhand resale marketplace, estimates that the global market for preloved clothes will reach $350 billion by 2028, with the American market growing 11% every year.¹¹ About a quarter of all consumers resold clothing in 2023, with 33% of Gen Zers and Millennials reselling.

The best selling method will vary depending on what you’re selling and your preferences, including how involved you want to be in the sale and how much money you want to make. If you want complete control and every dollar of your sale landing in your pocket, for example, a post on Facebook Marketplace could do the trick. But if you want to cast  a wider for potential buyers, apps like Poshmark, Depop, ThredUp, and Etsy may be more up your alley—though your earnings may take a hit. Local consignment or thrift shops are yet another option, but each one will have their own profit split and policies. Check out our full reselling guide for a full breakdown of the pros and cons of different options.

Find (or host) a clothing swap

If you’re OK not banking any coin for your gently-worn clothes, finding (or hosting) a clothing swap is an excellent option. Swaps are increasingly popping up at local libraries, schools, and other venues, so typing “clothing swap near me” into Google is a good first step. Or you can also host your own. The concept is simple enough: Pick a date, set some ground rules about what types of wares you’ll swap, invite friends, and get to trading. There are plenty of great guides to help get you started, but this one from PIRG is a good baseline. 

Your swap’s success will depend on how many people join in, whether there are enough high-quality items that fit you and, frankly, your confidence in saying “no” to a bad trade. A swap also makes for a fun birthday party, shower, or other celebration if you have a loved one who loves to shop and cares about the planet. 

Donate locally

Donating well-maintained threads can give them a new life and help families in need. In fact, about 2 out of every 5 children in America face clothing insecurity because their families can’t afford weekly expenses. Not to mention, doing good by helping others literally makes our brains happier. But not all of those donations are actually doing good. 

Some donation centers (like Goodwill or Salvation Army) are inundated with more than the centers’ surrounding communities might actually need. Just one Salvation Army donation center can receive thousands of clothing items every day. During the pandemic, quite a bit of what people dropped off was straight-up garbage. 

When those clothes aren’t locally useful, they often end up exported to other countries. The U.S. sent nearly 1.58 billion pounds of secondhand clothing out of the country in 2018. Ghana, for example, receives around 15 million used garments from North America, Australia, and Europe each week. And in Chile around 59,000 tons arrive each year, amounting to mountains of trashed clothing in the Atacama Desert.

So, how can you be sure your donations wind up good hands? If you want to avoid the biggies like Goodwill and Salvation Army, you’ll have to do just a bit of legwork. The first thing to do is keep the items as close to your community as possible. Your best best is to go specific: Search for a local charity that’s focused on your community, or find an organization whose focus is on a specific type of need. Organizations that help refugees or assist disenfranchised women with their careers may have a specific person or family in mind. 

Suss out if your donations will actually be used, you’ll want to ask the organization a few questions. Ask how they direct clothing to those they serve, what their acceptance guidelines are, and what happens to rejected clothing. A reputable outfit should be able to give you solid answers.

Take-back programs and bags

Clothing take-back programs are gaining in popularity. Some brands—including Levi’s, The North Face, Patagonia, and Reformation—run their own programs to resell or recycle their products. Even if your garments have lost their luster, some brands will still accept them; Nike, for example, donates or recycles certain well-worn items, such as athletic sneakers and tops, regardless of the brand (your shoes could even become a basketball court). According to ThredUp, brands offering resale programs jumped up 31% in 2023 compared to 2022 levels. 

Take-back bags are also an option for anyone who doesn’t have time to chase down a specific branded program. You can purchase a sack from a company like Trashie or Retold Recycling, cram it full of your castoffs, and send it back to them. They’ll then separate what can be reworn from what can’t, and send clothes for resale, donation, or recycling. 

As for your socks that have seen better days, GOLDTOE and Terracycle collaborate on a free sock recycling program that takes any brand (as long as they’re clean). Smartwool also collects any brand of clean socks to make new products, and BOMBAS does the same for undies and socks. 

What to do with clothes in less-than-good condition

Not every piece of used clothing can find a new home in its original form, but if most of the material is still in decent condition, it can be useful in other ways. Just be sure to strip fabric scraps of any zippers or notions, meaning the buttons, collar stays or snaps. Those items can be reutilized in separate crafts or sewing projects.

Repair

Just because a button has popped or a seam has ripped doesn’t mean an outfit’s life is over. Mastering a few basic repairs—like patching hole, raising hem, or even upsizing a shirt or pants—can add years to the life of garments. If repairs are out of the question, just a teeny bit of skill can turn an old item into something new; creating a new look can be as easy as chopping jeans into shorts, sewing on a patch, or throwing an item in a bucket with some dye.

Repurpose

If you’re crafty, it’s entirely possible to find ways to repurpose or upcycle scraps at home. Depending on the condition, sturdiness, and type of material, the fabric could work as a way to  patch up other items that still have life. Or old duds can become entirely new things like pet toys or fabric garlands.

Your scraps might also be just the thing someone else needs. If you’ve got a connection to a local school, see if teachers might need fabric for classroom crafts. Posting your scraps on Facebook’s ‘free and for sale’ or ‘buy nothing’ groups is another option.

Make rags

Unusable clothes made of absorbent fabrics (think cotton and linen) make great replacements for paper towels. Cut ‘em up and stack ‘em up under the kitchen sink or in the broom closet. This is a solid option for less-pretty materials that might be repurposed in more visible ways. Our guide to breaking your paper towel habit can help make sure you use them. One pro tip: Keep a spare basket or bin nearby to chuck your used rags in until you have enough to launder.

Recycle (proceed with caution!)

Textile recycling should be a last resort for those absolutely unsaveable fabric items, but here’s a zipcode-based guide on how to find one near you. Overall, textiles can prove difficult to recycle, and less than 1% of textiles used for clothing gets turned into new garments.¹² That’s because apparel is often made from a blend of materials, which vary in how easily they can be recycled. Natural fibers like cotton or wool can be recycled mechanically, but the process creates lower quality products and must often incorporate virgin cotton (an issue also prevalent with mixed-plastic items). 

At the same time, a polyester t-shirt isn’t likely to ever become another polyester t-shirt. Most recycled clothing is made with polyester sourced from recycled plastic bottles, also known as polyethylene terephthalate, or PET. It’s hard to reuse the material from garments because they also incorporate other things like zippers and buttons, which are tricky to separate. That also means it’s unlikely that clothes made from plastic bottles will ever get recycled ever again—so the recycling loop ends there. Some companies have found solutions, like taking pre-consumer 100% polyester waste from factories, or using chemical recycling methods to recover PET from clothes (such as wielding enzymes or hot-compressed water on fabrics). 

Still, the greenest solution is likely donation or reselling rather than the more energy- and resource-intensive recycling process. No matter what, it’s best to make sure your old rags won’t end up in the dump.  “I think it’s a very complex question,” Horvath says. “Obviously, it’s better to donate clothing, or donate it to a credible recycling program—if that’s an option—versus just throwing it in your trashcan, where it’s just gonna end up in a landfill or being incinerated.” 

The moral of the story: Consume less

There may be a multitude of ways to get rid of things we don’t need, but knowing where to send our unwanted stuff shouldn’t be an excuse to run to the mall. Donating, selling, and repurposing items is great, but it’s only good for the planet if we also make a concerted effort to buy less stuff to begin with—and when we do need something new, buying secondhand is the best way to keep our economy circular. And who knows! Someone else’s forgotten suit jacket or sundress may just become your new essential. 

1. Textiles: Material-Specific Data, United States Environmental Protection Agency, Nov. 2023 ↩︎
2. Advancing Sustainable Materials Management: 2014 Fact Sheet, United States Environmental Protection Agency, Nov. 2016 ↩︎
3. Global Fashion Industry Statistics, Fashion United ↩︎
4. An Overview of the Contribution of the Textiles Sector to Climate Change, Frontiers in Environmental Science, Sep. 2022 ↩︎
5. Fashion on climate, McKinsey & Company, Aug. 2020 ↩︎
6. A New Textiles Economy: Redesigning Fashion’s Future, Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2017 ↩︎
7. Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks, United States Environmental Protection Agency, Feb. 2024 ↩︎
8. Doing more with less, OC&C and WGSN, ↩︎
9. Fashion’s tiny hidden secret, United Nations Environment Programme, Mar. 2019 ↩︎
10. Fashion and the SDGs: What Role for the UN?, UNECE, Mar. 2018 ↩︎
11. Resale Report, ThredUp, 2025 ↩︎
12. A New Textiles Economy: Redesigning Fashion’s Future, Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2017 ↩︎