Environmentally, just buy cotton clothes from a thrift store, use them for years, and then give them back to a thrift store or clothing donation bins or use the

Environmentally, just buy cotton clothes from a thrift store, use them for years, and then give them back to a thrift store or clothing donation bins or use them as rags. And don't buy plastic clothes. Clothes are so cheap because of third world labor, and there's no real way to make recycling them economically viable. It's like plastic bottles, way easier and cheaper to make them new. If you're a luxury brand like H&M or Patagonia though, you can just offer it as a cost of doing business and recycle some tiny percentage of what you sell. Looks like H&M shreds theirs. Patagonia offers free repairs and also downcycles used plastic clothing (which they sell a lot of) into sleeping bags, bottles, etc. But Terracycle tried that a much wider level and never really made a difference. Mostly it's just greenwashing. Ecoconsumerism just ends up being a marketing tactic that preys on people's guilt without doing much for the planet. I'd argue most recycling is that way, clothes or not. It's a guilt reduction service, not waste reduction.