Recycle Used Clothes at American Eagle
Too many clothes still end up in landfills—to the tune of 22.3 billion pounds of clothing, shoes and other textiles EVERY YEAR (yikes!!). But even if you repair your fave skirt, do clothing swaps with your friends, and sell the good stuff on eBay, you still have clothing left that you just can’t wear (and hey, we’re not all crafty enough to make usable things from old clothes).
Now you can drop old, clean clothes off at American Eagle in the special I:CO boxes (see image at bottom), and to encourage your effort, “Customers who participate in the program will be rewarded with a text code for $5 off a pair of AEO jeans to be used in store that day. All proceeds from the program will be donated to the Student Conservation Association, one of AEO’s national charity partners.” Pretty awesome that not only will I:CO recycle your clothes, but they also make a donation to the SCA.
What does I:CO do with the old stuff? “I:CO works with partner brands to collect and sort all donated materials by more than 350 different criteria to determine their most effective next use, from reuse and recycling to upcycling into new materials and products.”
Sounds like a smart solution!
Starre Vartan
Starre Vartan is founder and editor-in-chief of Eco-Chick.com and the author of the Eco-Chick Guide to Life. She's also a freelance science and environment writer who has published in National Geographic, CNN, Scientific American, Mental Floss, Pacific Standard, the NRDC, and many more. She lives on an island in Puget Sound with her partner and black cat. She was a geologist in her first career, and still picks up rocks wherever she goes.
