What to do when decluttering?

[Scootergrrrl]

We are having a huge muck-out of the house as I'm drowning under a mountain of crap. Various things will be sold/charity-shopped/given away and the real junk will obviously be binned or recycled but what about the stuff which falls in the middle and couldn't be sold or given away but is too good to be binned? Do homeless shelters accept warm clothes, for example, or can charities sell tatty clothes to the modern version of the rag man? Please help - I don't want to have to bin stuff which might have a useful continuing life!

bhf sell to the rag man

As far as I know most charity shops do have a rag bag, why not call the one you were thinking of dropping off to and ask? In my area old clothes and rags can be collected with our recycling bins or dropped at recycling centre, and some supermarkets have old clothes/rag deposit bins with the glass/plastic/newspaper bins in the carparks(think the clothes ones I have seen are salvation army (?).

our local tip has a material recycling bin (like the glass ones IYSWIM) I put any holey/stained things in there as I figure they must be able to do something with them

That's a good idea, Eddas, I think ours has the same - have been wondering what to do with an huuuge bag of dd's outgrown knickers & socks which I can't bring myself to bin, so this thread is great!

Our tip has a big skip for raggy /tatty clothes so I send a lot of our stuff up there.

If you live near one recycle shops are great for getting rid of old clothes/bedding etc that is too tatty for the charity shop but still some life left.

Freecycle is great for passing on things like this to be reused by someone else - it's where I list all my son's outgrown clothes/shoes - they're snapped up in a flash.

I collect together our stained stuff to make patchwork quilts. You'd be amazed how much material one takes so it's always good - have started asking my friends for any stuff which is no good for reuse because of a big stain etc - because quite often baby clothes have nice embellishments which can be made into a nice patch and reused that way.

The the rest can go to the ragman where they are shredded to create loft insulation or packaging materials.

whomovedmychocolate is it easy to make a patchwork quilt? do you sew by hand or do you have a sewing machine? I would quite like to make DSone, would be a nice project.

the girls' school has a bin to collect cloths and textiles to sell to the ragman.

i wish i could sew and learn to quilt!

I sew by hand and it's dead easy. Particularly as you only need to commit to doing one patch at a time which takes about five minutes. I use a coaster as a template (it's hard so I can draw round it onto the material, cut it out and then sew it to the next one. When it's big enough, you can sew it (I tend to machine sew) to old towels/duvets/blankets/whatever and then put a backing fabric on and sew on a folded on bit of material all the way round for a border.

The current one is 'jeans that are too big for me and worn round the bottoms' and 'various bits of fishy curtains that someone gave me'.

textile recycling is what we use. the most important thing when decluttering is just getting the stuff out of the house, not hanging around for months while you get around to ebaying it or whatever (need to take my own advice here). I try to put things in the boot of my car once they're bagged up, which means I'm more likely to get rid, quickly.

Freecycle is the best! A great way to give your new stuff a home. Freecycle groups match people who have things they want to get rid of with people who can use them, and so keeping usable items out of landfills.
www.uk.freecycle.org

Look on your Council's website to find out what they do with textiles for recycling. Ours (Surrey) says this: "These materials are sorted and any item worthy of reuse is passed on to low income families either in this country or sent to third world countries. The rest is made into industrial rags."

On that basis, anything made of cloth goes into a bag and into the Council textiles bin and I leave the rest up to them!

textile recycling
charity shop
freecycle
compost
etc