No more hauling your hand-me-downs in plastic bags and shopping carts to your nearest green market or thrift shop, New Yorkers. City officials say they have partnered with Housing Works, a group that helps homeless people infected with the H.I.V. virus, to pick up donated clothing at apartment buildings in one of the first large-scale consumer textile recycling programs in the Country.
Titled RefashionNYC, the program has been in the works since last year, when the city started accepting bids for a 10-year contract committing a New York-based charitable group to regular pickups of clothing, linens, shoes and clean rags throughout the city.
The goal is to capture most of the 200,000 tons of textile and apparel materials that New Yorkers throw away each year but that could be reused instead, reducing the city's garbage disposal costs.
The new program is free and open to residential buildings in all five boroughs. All it takes, Department of Sanitation officials say, is for a landlord, building manager or superintendent to sign up online, obtain a metal bin from the city and assign a staff member to monitor the bin and schedule pickups when it is full.
Donations are tax-deductible, and the program will pay for itself through the sale of the donations, the officials said.
This partnership will help us achieve our PlaNYC goal of diverting 75 percent of our solid waste from landfills, David Bragdon, director of the mayor's Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, said in a statement. (PLaNYC is the Bloomberg administration's long-term plan to promote sustainability, conserve energy and address climate change in New York City.)
By making it easier for New Yorkers to donate or reuse their clothes, and saving taxpayers the high expense of long-distance transportation and waste disposal, Mr. Bragdon said, we are achieving our vision of a greener, greater New York.
Although textiles, including shoes and accessories like handbags and belts, are among the most valuable recyclables, textile recycling by consumers constitutes only a fraction of all recycling in the country.
Officials with the Secondary Materials and Recycled Textiles Association, a trade group, say that materials like stained or ripped clothing, buttons and zippers can all be reprocessed and find a second life as wiping cloths, carpet padding, seat stuffing and other products. In the end, they say, less than 10 percent of what is donated goes to a landfill.
But it has often been more convenient for car-less New Yorkers to throw old sweaters away than to carry them over to Goodwill. Residents can still find the closest thrift store or drop-off location for clothing donations at www.nyc.gov/stuffexchange, but soon they may prefer to use the donation bin in their lobby or right outside.
