Taking Care of Your Textiles & Caring for Your Clothing: Help & Advice from East Riding of Yorkshire Council

What to do with your unwanted clothing, textiles & shoes during the current lock down period, plus tips on reducing textiles & clothing waste and ideas on their reuse within your home – advice from the East Riding of Yorkshire Council

Covid-19 restrictions and the temporary closure of charity shops, has made donating and reusing clothing, textiles & shoes more difficult. ‘Textiles’ are any fabric-based item such as towels/tea towels, bedding (sheets, pillow cases, duvet covers), duvets, blankets, throws, curtains, cushion covers etc. The council’s blue recycling bin cannot accept clothing, textiles or shoes through the kerbside collections. Please do not place any of your clothing, shoes or textiles items in the blue bin as this will mean the bin will have to be tagged with a little blue contamination tag on the handle, stating the bin was unable to be emptied. It is then residents’ responsibility to remove the contamination items before the next scheduled collection, ready for emptying.

Where can you take your old textiles?

Residents are still able to use these charity managed clothing banks around both Hull and East Riding (however these may be full due to reduced collections and processing). Charities who own & manage the clothing banks/bring sites on supermarket car parks & lay-bys have also had issues in complying with government safety guidelines, reducing their collection frequencies and ability to process as much volume of clothing, shoes & textiles. Please do not leave unwanted clothes or donations next to clothing banks/bring sites. This can be classed as fly tipping resulting in hefty fines. If they are full, please keep hold of the clothing until restrictions have been lifted.

Examples of recent fly tipped clothing and textiles at charity bring banks. All these items will be wasted. They cannot be recycled as they have become damp & mouldy due to the rain & snow elements

The Household Waste Recycling Sites (HWRS)/tips have remained open during this current lockdown period and do have clothing/textile banks, but the advice from the Government is to only visit the HWRS if it is an essential journey i.e. if the waste will cause a risk to health by being stored at home. If possible, please store clothing, shoes & textiles safely at home until the lock down restrictions have lifted.

Charity shops – Please do not drop off your unwanted clothes on charity shop doorsteps. Donating unwanted clothing, textiles or shoes is not currently as an essential activity. Leaving bags of clothes at charity shop doors can also be classed as fly tipping, which carries hefty fines

The advice from WRAP’s (Waste & Resource Action Programme) ‘Love your Clothes’ campaign is – “If you’re planning to have a clear out, please hold on to unwanted clothes, shoes & textiles for the time being until restrictions have been lifted. You can still do your bit to benefit others by donating or recycling them in the future. But above all, do not throw unwanted clothing in the rubbish bin. Check it can be repaired, refashioned, upcycled or passed to someone else after the restrictions are lifted.” Find more info here – www.loveyourclothes.org.uk

Other top tips for textiles recycling:

Use clothes dedicated selling sites such as Depop (website or app) or Vinted (website or app) to make money from unwanted clothing. They’re fast becoming well used by people to buy & sell unwanted clothing whilst people are restricted to stay at home.

Money saving expert has a great link & ‘How To’ guide of the best selling sites and how to get the most out of selling your unwanted clothing here.

Love Your Clothes have a great article and suggestions about not always buying new here.

There are many useful ways to lengthen the life span of your clothing and to reuse, refashion & upcycle your unwanted clothing and textiles. Some practical, easy suggestions anyone can do at home are:

1. Often baby stains on baby clothing are a reason people buy new items, when there is a lot of life left in those clothes. The video here has some really useful advice on how to treat baby clothing stains to make your clothing last longer.
2. Red wine stain removal advice can be found here.
3. Get a longer life from your clothing by knowing what the care labels mean, the clothing care quiz here is really useful.
4. Repairing minor issues on your clothing can prolong their life instead of just throwing away. The following links show how to repair the main issues of broken belt loops, broken zip pulls and worn collars/cuffs.
5.  There is information here with useful ideas and instructions on how to use up odd socks, make towels & old clothing into kitchen cloths (instead of buying kitchen roll) & homemade make up remover pads, upcycling jeans/denim and refreshing your wardrobe without buying anything new.

Mumbler top tips for textiles recycling!

My daughter is Barbie mad and we’ve spent a lot of time playing with them during lockdown. We made some furniture for their Barbie house from some old cardboard boxes and then used up some old textiles to make their bedding! We cut up an old pillow case to make a blanket and we cut out shapes from another old pillow case, put some stuffing inside and sewed them together to make pillows.

My son has been doing the Industrial Revolution at home school this term and learning about the cotton mills; to go with it he had a school project to learn to do some basic sewing and then to make a cushion. We started practicing by sewing rows of stitches onto old pillow cases, and adding buttons. I hadn’t thought about teaching my kids to sew but they both had a go and loved it and spent ages doing it. It was a great way to re-use old pillow cases! We turned one into a phone case! The final project was to make an actual cushion, we used an old duvet cover for this and followed a video on how to sew it (our school had made one but there are plenty on you tube). I feel they have learned some life skills as well as giving my old duvet cover and pillow cases a new purpose.