5 Surprising Ways to Recycle Your Underwear!

Yeah, I was surprised when I saw that title too!  This isn't something I'd normally do... sure a t-shirt for a rag in the garage or outside, even for household cleaning, but not underwear for heaven's sake!  Well, I'm here to learn, so let's see what Organic Gardening has to say about this.

Even if you’re done with your undergarments, there are several productive things you can do with them.

Here’s the Victoria’s Secret that your garbage man hasn’t been telling you: Your underwear is 100 percent recyclable. While he may not want your old undies, there are plenty of people who do. And the Environmental Protection Agency wishes you would hand them over. According to the agency’s estimates, 80 percent of unwanted textiles wind up in landfills, and each of us tosses 37 pounds of clothing per year. So the next time you think about tossing those holey drawers in the trash, toss them in your washing machine instead, and then choose one of these methods:

1. Donate
Goodwill stores will take—CLEAN!—underwear and bras in pretty much any condition (again, reiterating that they must be clean!). If they aren’t in good enough condition to resell, the nonprofit sells them to rag houses that shred the material and use it in various applications, such as furniture or automobile stuffing, or for industrial cleaning rags. Goodwill uses the money from the sale to fund its job-training programs.

You can send any old, unusable bras to BreastTalk, where they will be used to generate cash for breast cancer research. Or, if your bras are still in wearable condition, send them to The Bra Recyclers, a textile recycling firm that sends donated bras to needy women around the world.

2. Get Crafty
Check out this cute little purse you can make from a used bra on Craft Bits.

3. Compost ’em
For 100 percent cotton bras and underwear, cut off the elastic waistband, then cut the cotton into strips or squares and put it in your compost bin! (Synthetic materials, such as Lycra, won’t compost, so send any garments containing Lycra blends to the charities above.)

4. Toss it—in a box
You may have seen those clothing drop boxes that are popping up with increasing frequency in communities nationwide. They’re normally operated by for-profit businesses (not nonprofits like Goodwill) that collect your used clothes and sell the garments or the materials to the textile recycling industry. If you can’t find a charity nearby that will take your used underthings, you can locate boxes operated by one such company, USAgain, on its website.

5. Help a kid
All kids need clean underwear when they go out—they do, after all, listen to their mothers. When your kids grow out of their underwear, send it in good condition, cleaned, to Project Underwear, which will distribute it in developing countries and send you a postcard telling you where it ended up.