HELPSY & City of White Plains Collaborate Diverting Tons of Clothing from Landfill
The City of White Plains had a problem… they had tons of unwanted clothing filling their landfills every year. HELPSY had a solution… set up clothing recycling bins at the City’s Gedney Way Recycling Facility to collect these discarded textiles. By setting up and servicing these receptacles, HELPSY not only saved the city tipping fees (waste disposal and carting fees), HELPSY offered reimbursement per pound for items collected to the City of White Plains… funds that can then go to support other recycling efforts.
“The City of White Plains has been dedicated to textile recycling with great results and community buy in,” said White Plain’s Mayor Thomas Roach. “The service was resumed after Covid, when we partnered with HELPSY, a local White Plains business. We are on target to divert over 20 tons of textiles from the waste stream this year and are pleased that we can support a local business at the same time.”
The EPA estimates that 85 pounds of clothing gets thrown away by the average person every year. Of that amount, 95% can be recycled. The largest clothing collector on the East Coast, HELPSY partners with organizations and municipalities across several states to collect unwanted clothing and other goods.
“HELPSY’s mission is to keep clothes out of the trash,” says Dan Green, Co-Founder and CEO of HELPSY. Over the past year, HELPSY has worked with 113 municipal recycling departments and collected approximately 1.7 million pounds of textiles from those collaborations. Through a combination of clothing drives, home pick-ups, thrift store partners and clothing receptacles located in 10 states, HELPSY diverts nearly 30 million pounds of textiles from landfills every year.
HELPSY is dedicated to changing the way people think about clothing recycling while adhering to the highest level of social and environmental performance, earning the company a Certified B Corporation designation…using business as a force of good ™.
Clothing and other textiles that are diverted from landfills, such as the one in White Plains, are given new purpose with HELPSY. Much of the clothing is sold at local or global thrift stores. The remaining textiles, unfit to be re-worn, are turned into wiper rags and fiberfill for furniture.
The future looks bright for HELPSY and other clothing recycling companies as textiles are the fastest growing waste in the country. American’s discard 30 billion pounds of clothes every year. The potential worth of these discarded items is between $10-$12 billion in bulk. Considering those numbers, recycling clothes makes sense both environmentally and financially.
