Campus California Tackles Misconceptions Regarding Clothing Collection Boxes

Campus California debunks three misconceptions regarding the textile recycling industry and clothing collection boxes. The collected items are sold wholesale and the surplus is used to fund programs that train and send volunteers to developing countries in Africa and South America. Textile reuse has strong environmental benefits and also allows the organization to contribute towards improving human conditions and eliminating poverty locally and overseas.

Its clothing donation drop-off boxes, which are spread throughout the San Francisco Bay area, and more recently in Phoenix, Arizona's metro area, prevent used textiles from entering landfills.

Due to recent controversy over the limited landfill availability in the United States, Campus California addresses three common myths to help inform consumers about where their used clothing may be headed:

Myth #1: Only rags and/or scraps go to landfills, not reusable, wearable clothing.

The truth is, a majority of all used textiles, such as clothes, shoes, sheets and other materials, are entering the waste stream. While environmental efforts are growing in the United States, in 2009, the Environmental Protection Agency reported that the recovery rate for all textiles was only 14.9 percent or 1.9 million tons, while 10.9 million tons of discarded clothing was dumped into landfills last year, says idonategoods.com.

Myth#2: All donated clothing should be distributed for free to the needy or to local thrift stores.

In reality, many thrift stores are overwhelmed with donations and there is no local demand to reuse all donated textiles.

Campus California's Public Relations Manager Jan Sako says, "I have spoken to a number of people from the general public who are firmly convinced that all donated clothing is or should be distributed to the needy locally or sold in thrift stores locally. People are generally not aware of the vast amounts of textiles that go to landfills because in a lot of areas there are many more people disposing of clothing than poor people needing these or just people shopping for used clothing. People should donate to their church or charity that distributes clothing locally, but 10+ million tons a year is just much more than all the needy people in America can use."

Myth#3: It is better to bury textiles in local landfills than transport them over long distances for recycling.

The energy saving and environmental benefits from not needing to produce new textiles are vastly larger than the energy costs of collecting and transporting used clothing to new markets. Landfills have recently gotten positive attention for their waste-to-energy methane capture and carbon sequestration, but safely maintaining landfills for a long period of time is not as cost effective as recycling the clothing. According to a 2004 CBS Interactive Business Network article, the initial construction cost of building a landfill is estimated at $33 to $36 million with $4.7 to $5.3 million annual landfill operating costs. .

Clothing donation drop-off boxes are a very easy, convenient and environmentally responsible way to dispose of unwanted clothing and shoes. In 2010, Campus California collected over seven million pounds from the San Francisco Bay Area alone. According to statistics by the EPA and The Council for Textile Recycling, reusing and recycling creates four to ten times more jobs than disposal and land-filling on a per-ton basis.

For more information on the positive environmental impacts of recycling textiles, visit www.campus-california.org/.

Campus California Funds Volunteer Training Programs Through Sales of Used Clothing

Organizations like Campus California are continuing to support development work in Sub-Saharan Africa and South America. Through grants to several US non-profit organizations sending trained and highly skilled volunteers to numerous development projects, Campus California is standing by its commitment to provide support to the important work being done together with of many other government agencies and international NGO's like Humana People to People. Campus California recognizes the importance of continuing the efforts to create development in some of the poorest regions of the world even through the challenging economic environment currently in the USA.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/07/31/prweb8679056.DTL#ixzz1TtjdTiDn

This is what global warming looks like.

Reduce, Reuse & Recycle everything in you life!

From clothing through food & transportation. Our daily choices have a deep impact on the planet and its people. 1/3 of the world’s grain production is used to feed livestock; Meat production accounts for app. 18% of GHG emissions worldwide. Our wasteful use of resources also contributes to hunger & poverty! Every year more than 10 million children die of hunger and preventable diseases. We must rethink our choices. It is important that all our decisions regarding the use of our resources, including clothing, are made consciously & taking into consideration the impact it has on our planet. You can help reduce the impact of producing new products by reusing, reducing and recycling everything in your life!

The Volume of Clothing in California’s Residential Waste Stream Increases over Time; More Recycling Programs like Campus California's Collection Boxes Are Needed

The net volume, as well as the proportion of textiles going to the landfill in California keeps increasing because existing recycling programs do not address this material. Campus California clothing donation boxes provide an option for a cost-free and effective program.

Clothing collection boxes placed by organizations like Campus California have become increasingly common in our cities and provide a simple and cost-free option for the general public to dispose of unwanted but still usable textiles. Significant environmental benefits can be gained through clothing reuse not only because textiles in landfills generate methane and other Green House Gases (GHG), but also through decreased use of farmland for water-and-pesticide intensive cotton production.

Waste characterization studies conducted for CalRecycle and its predecessor the California Integrated Waste Management Board (CIWMB) between 1999 and 2008 show that during this period the overall volume of discarded textiles, as well as the proportion of textiles in the (residential) waste stream has increased significantly.

While in 1999 California’s residents disposed of (landfilled) over 330 000 tons of textiles; in 2008, despite the recession this number was 506 000 tons, a 53% increase. The proportion of textiles in the residential waste stream increased during the same time period from 2.4% to 4.2%, a jump of 75%! As a reference point, the population of the state during the same period increased only by approx. 10%. Studies commissioned more recently by cities across the nation show similar trends and there is little doubt that viable textile recycling programs will need to further reduce the volume of resources buried in the landfills.

Compared to other recyclables like glass or plastic, textiles are much harder to recycle through the common “Blue cart” system because clothing can easily get soiled or damaged during the process of collection and separation from other materials and this makes it unsuitable for further use. To prevent textiles from getting into the same pipeline as other recyclables seems to be a much better solution, and cities and counties are increasingly looking for suitable programs as part of the larger movement towards Zero Waste.

Campus California services the largest number of clothing donation boxes in the San Francisco Bay Area. More than one thousand locations are available for the public’s use 24/7 and more are being added all the time. As a non-profit organization, Campus California uses the proceeds from the sale of collected clothing to support recruitment and training programs for Development Instructors, dedicated international volunteers working with sustainable development projects in different parts of the world. Since the start of the program in 2003 this organization has collected over 10,000 tons of donated clothing; in April 2011 a new branch was open collecting clothing in the Phoenix metro area in Arizona.

Campus California book donation program continues

Campus California’s “Books for Schools” program is continuing to distribute children’s books that are donated to our collection boxes to elementary and middle schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. Every day the need for resources at our local schools grows, with budget cuts, it gets harder and harder to keep the standard in education and have enough personnel and resources available for each student. Most recently Burckhalter elementary in Oakland, Stage elementary in Richmond and Friends of the library  - a parent group in San Carlos, CA, received several hundred children’s books each.

Reduce: a sacrifice or a change of habit?

On a society geared towards consumption, the amount of waste generated in the United States has been increasing. Between 1960 and 2009 the amount of waste each person creates increased from 2.7 to 4.3 pounds per day*.

Often when considering the three R’s (Reduce, Reuse & Recycle), one might think of reduce as a sacrifice, as abstinence from some “privileges”. We must look Reduce not as a sacrifice, or as lowering our quality of life, but as a change in our everyday habits.  When specifically looking at textiles, the amount discarded has nearly doubled in the past 10 years. Yet 85% of all textiles in the US end in the landfills. We can make sure all our clothing is recycled/reused; When we ensure we donate, recycle or simply consume less clothing, we are also reducing the need for cotton production; in that way reducing the amount of pollution of the soil by pesticides, less energy and water used, and more land left for use in agriculture (as an example).

We all share one home, our planet; we must all take part and consider the impact of our actions have for the future.

*Source: EPA – Environmental protection agency 

Cotton production and the challenge of reduced consumption and reuse

Human race is changing nature on a global scale. How much can we take before nature breaks down, before the world, as we know it, ceases to exist?

Among many challenges we face, from food security, water shortages, preservation of biodiversity, to the CO2 emissions, is the heavy use of pesticides.

Pesticides are a global environmental problem. Approximately 20,000 people die from poisoning every year, ground, surface water and soil contamination and ambient pollution.

The mainstream production of cotton, currently, uses the same weight of pesticides and fertilizers per t-shirt as the weight of the t-shirt itself! (Cotton producers account for 25% of the worlds agricultural insecticides and herbicides) 925 gallons of water are used on the production of one lbs. of cotton!

Organic cotton addresses some of these concerns, but it does not address the excessive use of water.

The average American consumes an average of 70lbs of clothes; household and shoes a year, of those and average of 60lbs per inhabitant are discarded.

Reducing our consumption of cotton products and reusing are a step towards the reduction of the environmental impacts of cotton production today. 

Related articles

• Why Organic Cotton is Better (alchemicgorilla.com)
• Pesticide residues in cotton fibers (oecotextiles.wordpress.com)

No Clothes In The Blue Cart - The Challenges of Textile Recycling

California with its state mandated recycling goals have been in the forefront of the 3R (Reduce-Reuse-Recycle) movement for some time now, with SF Bay Area cities being top achievers in waste diversion most of the time. Paper, plastic, metal, bottles, cans, yard waste and now increasingly most other organics as well are being recycled or composted through curbside pick-up programs. With these largest components of the waste stream covered, municipalities are trying to tackle other materials that the existing programs are not able to handle. Textiles are one of these materials, currently comprising between 3-4% of the landfilled volume in the US, or 10 000 000 tons annually. 

    

Clothing buried in a landfill is a bad thing, we all agree on that. Let’s look at the number one challenge we encounter as we plan to seriously reduce the volume of textiles in the waste stream: textiles need to be in a clean and dry condition in order to be reusable or recyclable. That, as you can imagine is pretty hard to achieve inside an average recycling or garbage cartL. The big machines moving and sorting the recyclables from your blue cart at the local Materials Recovery Facility are not gentle enough for the clothing to be of a much use when it comes out at the end of a sorting line either, not even considering that really tough pieces like jeans often like to wrap themselves around different moving parts and tend to stop the whole sorting line…

The one viable solution so far is to divert textiles from the waste and recyclables streams at the source (or more precisely, by the source – you). There have been for a long time now several different outlets for people to donate unwanted clothing to: thrift stores, churches, donation stations and similar establishments. All of these require you to take a trip somewhere where you would not be going otherwise (except the church, maybe), they have limited opening hours (exactly matching your time of work) and the popular ones tend to be swamped with donations. Most of these places are very much worthy of your support and provide important services to the community with money raised through the sale of donated clothing, however they are not the solution for the larger issue of many millions of tons of textiles generated in the USA every year. Let me repeat: Please support your local charity with clothing donations, they fill an indispensable role in the society and help a lot of people through providing various social services. But do not mistake asking people to drive fairly far and stand in line to donate their unwanted clothing to be the sole environment-friendly answer to the problem of textiles in the waste stream! We need more diversion programs because only about 15% of textiles currently generated in the US are being recycled and this number has not moved in the last 15 years!

What are the other options? Placing the clothing out for curbside pickup is simple and convenient, IF the organization that asked you to do so will actually come by and do the pick-up, AND it’s not raining, AND the scavengers don’t get to the bags first…

Another option is a clothing donation box at your local … grocery store, gas station, supermarket, hair saloon, bank… you name it. Places where people normally go anyway, places where people can go any time, 24/7. Convenience and availability are two key factors in a successful recycling program and Campus California's unattended collection boxes fulfill both of these requirements. There has to be enough boxes in an area so they are easy to find and not far away from where people live or work. A very important factor on the availability side is that the boxes once placed remain on the same location for a long time, often for years. If you don’t have time or forget your bag of clothes at home today, you can bring it tomorrow, or next week.

One of many benefits of having a program capable of diverting large volumes of textiles or other materials from the waste stream is that your garbage collection company will have to pay less money for the disposal of materials they cannot recycle. That in turn translates into lower garbage disposal rates for the average consumer (or at least into not increasing the existing rates).

A little background info: when your local waste management company picks up your garbage, it has a long way to go before it’s laid to rest, so to speak. And there are a number of expenses the operator incurs along the way that will eventually make it into your monthly garbage bill. As strange as that may sound, I don’t believe garbage companies actually like to collect large piles of refuse. Why is that? Because garbage is nothing but expense for them! It costs to collect and truck it to the transfer station and all they can do with it is to ship it to the landfill. And they have to pay the landfill operator to bury it as well! You would think all is well because that is what you are paying them for, to collect your garbage and to get rid of it. Except that your garbage rate alone would not cover the cost of disposal.  In fact part of the disposal costs for your refuse is usually covered by the proceeds from the sale of bottles, cans, plastics and other materials in your recycling cart. So the more recyclables and less “garbage”, or “refuse” there is, the better it is for the garbage company, and more importantly for you, the ratepayer as well. (Unfortunately this is not so good for the landfill operator…)