In a show of our commitment to our community and to those affected by Hurricane Sandy, Wearable Collections has decided to raise the amount we pay our partner charities from 5 cents per pound collected to 10 cents per pound until December 31, 2012.  We know many of you are struggling in the aftermath of the storm and we would like to do our part. Whether you are a school, community group, church, temple or other relief organizations, please fill out the form on our Host A Drive page and we will help coordinate from there.

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 [email protected]

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