When donating clothing to Big Brothers Big Sisters of Long Island, you are clearing the path to a child’s biggest and brightest possible future. But, did you know that donating clothing is also good for the environment? Here are a few reasons why recycled clothing is considered to be environmentally-friendly.
The Environmental Benefits of Recycled Clothing
Saving the Landfills
In our country, each person discards 70 to 80 pounds of clothing each year alone on average. That’s about 500 million pounds of clothing per year on just Long Island. When clothing is not donated or recycled, it all goes directly into our landfills.
That’s one of the ways donating to BBBSLI helps the environment. Every week, we alone prevent 212,000 pounds of textiles from going into landfills, and subsequently our waste stream.
Conserving Energy
When people are using recycled donations, they won’t necessarily be going out to buy new clothing. This is also an important factor for the environment.
For example, the manufacturing of a single cotton t-shirt uses 700 gallons of water alone. Crunching the numbers, if 300 million people donated a t-shirt, 210 billion gallons of water and one billion pounds of CO2 can potentially be conserved.
It’s not hard to see the environmental impact of recycled clothing donations through Big Brothers Big Sisters of Long Island. Therefore, if you’d like to donate clothing or other items, you can schedule a pickup or simply visit one of our many convenient bin locations across Long Island.
