by John Haag,
Lincoln Warehouse Manager,
Catholic Social Services of Southern Nebraska
The number 81—keep that in mind for a bit.
You are probably wondering where this is going, and will it require me to dust off my math skills? Together, we will dip our toes into one of the program areas of Catholic Social Services of Southern Nebraska (CSS), and no math skills are required!
The program area is “Sustainability.” Now anybody with access to a dictionary, or even better, a phone, can look up what the word itself means, but how does that apply to CSS? CSS defines sustainability as: “upholding our Catholic identity as a guide for how we care for creation and our Southern Nebraska community through prayer, learning, assessment, action, and advocacy.” In addition, CSS is hoping to create a culture of “Reuse, Resell and Recycle.”
Now, let’s focus on the “care for creation” part of the above definition. CSS has provided trailers to various parishes and communities in order to increase convenience of donating goods. Currently, there are donation trailers located in Lincoln at St. John, St. Peter, St. Michael, North American Martyrs, Pius X High School, and in Wahoo and Ceresco.
In the last two years, CSS has shifted the focus of its donation trailers from a furniture, household goods and textile mix, to a textile-heavy focus and not so much furniture and home goods. Why, you may ask? We will get to that.
So now we can explore a little bit of the textile world. According to Secondary Materials and Recycled Textiles (SMART, www.smartasn.org) the average U.S. citizen throws away 81 lbs. of clothing each year. Oh wait, 81? Wasn’t that the number we are to keep in mind! Yes, it is!
Unfortunately, about 95% of all textiles that end up in the landfill are recyclable. A stained T-shirt can be recycled into wiping cloths, worn out denim recycled into household insulation, stuffed animals recycled into car seat stuffing.
Forty-five percent of textiles thrown away are usable clothing that could have been donated to a secondhand store, like our Gift & Thrift stores in Lincoln, Auburn, Hastings and Imperial. Nationwide, only about 15% of textiles get donated or recycled. That comes to about 26 billion lbs. of textiles added to U.S. landfills a year. Ouch!
That’s a lot of figures! Well, let’s answer the “Why” question. CSS’s sustainability program sells clothing in our thrift stores, as well as our online stores. Even with these amazing outlets, some clothes just won’t sell. That creates a lot of clothes with nowhere to go. To keep these unsold clothes from ending up in the landfill, CSS in both Lincoln and Hastings operate clothing balers.
We create 1,000-pound bales of unsellable clothing and sell the bales to a broker. The broker we have been using is a partner with SMART. SMART partner companies keep about five billion pounds of textile waste from landfills worldwide. That’s a pretty good number, but consider that SMART is only part of the 15% that is recycled in the U.S.
So, for CSS’s Sustainability Program, we know that there is so much more that can be done. Just think that between 5-7% of our landfills contain clothing textiles that could have been recycled, reused or resold, instead of just being thrown away.
But that’s not all the CSS Sustainability Program is working on. To keep in line with our desire to create a culture of Reuse, Resell and Recycle, CSS is partnering with Star City Recycling to find new outlets for our very generously donated items other than textiles. A few of these outlets include books, plastics and small appliances, with more to come.
By now, our toes should be well dipped, but there are just a few more numbers to think about. Two million tons of recycled textiles is the equivalent of removing one million cars from the roadway. Awesome, right?! CSS Lincoln, which started baling clothes in January 2020 has recycled 961,869 lbs. of clothes. That’s not bad at all.
CSS has been greatly blessed by our very generous donors and partners. CSS is excited to not only create a culture of Reuse, Resell and Recycle but also to be good stewards of all God’s creation.
