We love to give props were props is due. While we love each and every one of our partners, we feel it is important to give credit to those buildings that produce week in and week out. We do this list every year so you may see some familiar names, but there are some new buildings on the list and a new champ so take a bow residents of The Verdesian in Battery Park City, you have diverted the most textile waste from landfills out of all of our 200-plus buildings for 2012. Her ore our top 12 producers:

1) The Verdesian, 211 North End Ave. – 10425 lbs

2) 45 Fairview Avenue – 9900 lbs

3) The Solaire, 20 River Terrace – 9825 lbs

4) Hillman Housing, 530 Grand Ave, bldg F – 9725 lbs

5) The Epic, 125 W 31 st. – 8950 lbs

6) The Vanguard, 77 W 24th st. – 8625 lbs

7) 50 Murray st – 8275 lbs

8) 180 Riverside Dr -8100 lbs

9) 160 Riverside Dr. – 8075 lbs

10) The Bromley, 225 W 83rd st. – 8000 lbs

11) The Helena, 601 W 57th st. – 7900 lbs

12) The Langston, 68 Bradhurst – 7525 lbs

To all the residents of these buildings, we tip our caps to you. Thanks for your efforts. If you are reading this list with envy, and wondering how your building can get a bin, please fill out a request on our website and we will do our best to bring our convenient service to you and your neighbors. Thanks to all of our partners who have helped us once again to have a record breaking year.

We are getting tons of calls and emails from groups about how they can work with Wearable Collections to help those in need. YES, we can help you with the over-abundance of clothes that you have collected. We are, however,  best suited to take these items and turn them into monetary donations for the organization of your choice.  We will collect the items, weigh them and donate 10 cents per pound.

If you are a community group or school and are looking for a way to support relief efforts, we suggest you host a clothing drive and we will direct funds to the organization of your choice.   The added benefit to all of this is that we will also be keeping these items out of landfills.

If you know of a group in need of specific clothing items, such as jackets or blankets, we can speak with our sorting facility and find a way to facilitate the distribution to those in need.

Following, is an overview of how we operate and our mission. Wearable Collections sets up clothing collection bins and hosts clothing drives throughout the NYC metro area and northeast, to make it convenient for our partners to recycle their clothing and textiles. Our focus has always been to keep clothing and textiles out of landfills, and facilitate other uses for them, such as: being re-used as second hand clothes (45%), recovered as wiping rags (30%) , reprocessed into fiber products such as stuffing, insulation and sound proofing (20%). Out of all the textiles discarded in America,  it is estimated that only 15% gets recovered from organizations like ours, while 85% are headed towards landfills. Wearable Collections’ goal is to educate people on the need to recycle clothes and to provide convenient drop off locations to actually recycle them.

Once the items are collected  in an efficient manner, they are brought to a sorting facility that pays Wearables a market rate for credential (untouched) clothing. We then dedicate 5 cents per pound to our partner charities. Wearable Collections is a for-profit business that has a social mission of supporting our charitable partners.   The sorting facility plays an important role in the recycling process. They break down all the bags collected and organize them into separate grades. They have customers on the other end who have various demands for each of the graded materials.  Through the Wearable Collections network, most of the materials re-used as second hand clothes are sent to emerging markets in Central and South America, where they are sold to a final consumer.

We hope by describing how our business operates it is clear how important sorting the goods is to the distribution process. We receive bags of clothing that have not been touched or sorted. We have no idea what are in these bags until they have been sorted. This takes a lot of time and labor and therefore has costs involved.

All of our trucks were submerged in water due to the storm and we are trying to get up to speed with our service. We are working as fast as we can do get up to speed with our usual collections. Also, our sorting facility was knocked out of power for a week and they too are slowly getting back to normal production. We are trying our best to accommodate all requests and appreciate your patience.

The Robin Hood Foundation has put together a growing  list of organizations looking for other kinds of donations, if you know of others please add to comments or email us at info@wearablecollections.com

Thanks for all your support and best wishes on a speedy recovery.

The Wearable team would like to send out our deepest sympathies to all of those affected by the storm.  We stand in solidarity with all of you and pledge that when we get back up and running we will do what we can to support our community as a whole.

Wearable Collections incurred some serious damage to our fleet of trucks, all of which were submerged under 4 ft of water. Salt water is not very kind to the internals of vehicles. As it stands now, all of our trucks are out of commission.  These trucks are the lifeline of our company, so it will take us a little while to get back up and running. We have already received great support from our friends, including Movers Not Shakers, who will lend a hand and even a truck to our business.  We expect this to be a difficult week in regards to getting vehicles and gas but know that we are making our best efforts to service all buildings and organizations that we have commitments to. Thanks for your patience and best wishes on a speedy recovery to you all.

Our good friends at PS 29 in Cobble Hill were at it again this weekend hosting their semi annual recycling event. On top of being able to recycle textiles, attendees were also able to recycle electronics and have their hard drives shredded. Amazing organization + incredible promotion = successful event, resulting in 4150 lbs of clothing being recycled. This is certainly a model that ought to be repeated in other communities.

We are more than thrilled to expand on our successful greenmarket collections. The greenmarket collections have already diverted over 1.5 million lbs since their implementation. That number is sure to increase drastically as we are now operating in 20 weekly markets, bringing convenient greenmarket clothing collections to even more NYC communities. We want to thank GrowNYC as a great partner and look forward to years of continued success. This is another step on the path to eliminating textile waste. For a full list of greenmarket collection locations, click here.

We are very proud to announce a major milestone in our collections. This past June we surpassed the 5 million lbs. collected mark. We owe a debt of gratitude to all of you who helped us get there. Those of you who: requested bins for your buildings, donated at the greenmarkets, hosted a clothing drive for your organization, or created an innovative hub of collection. We are nothing without those who support us, so you all deserve a round of applause for your efforts. This little project that we started in 2005 has spun into a mandate in the city and the 5 million lbs diverted from landfills are a testament to efforts of all of our supporters and activists who have helped make Wearable Collections one of the leading textile recycling companies in NYC.