‘Ask yourself, would I want to receive this?’

“Before you donate something, ask yourself, would I want to receive this in a time of need?”

That’s the message from Trashie, the recycling and rewards company that has been helping aid organizations sort through thousands of pounds of clothing donations received in the wake of the Los Angeles wildfires.

In an interview with The Cool Down, Trashie chief strategy officer Annie Gullingsrud, who was on the ground leading the company’s LA collection effort, pleaded with well-intentioned people to pause before giving clothes — and she gave us a behind-the-scenes look at what’s happening with all of those donations.

Sorting through thousands of pounds of clothes 

Trashie helps people get rid of their old stuff by offering a Take Back Bag that can be filled with unwanted items in exchange for rewards. The company also partners with big organizations such as Walmart and Marine Layer to collect and sort customers’ unwanted items into over 250 different categories for repurposing, recycling, downcycling, or landfill. (Trashie says it manages to keep 95% of items it receives from going to a landfill.)

In the aftermath of the LA fires, dozens of overwhelmed aid organizations, including the YMCA, OpenClosit, Dream Center, and American Legion, reached out to Trashie to help them sort through the massive volumes of clothing that were being donated. UPS, Happy Returns, and LVK Logistics donated trucks, drivers, and warehouse space to support Trashie’s efforts, picking up clothes from over 30 locations.

The Trashie team — including Gullingsrud and over 100 volunteers — told The Cool Down they collected over 73,000 pounds of clothing, packed them up, and loaded them into trucks, which took them to Trashie’s sorting and recycling facility in Texas.

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Why Texas? “We are able to handle the kind of volume that we’re talking about,” she explained. “To move it to a space with an unskilled team, or to a place that risks it getting moldy, and then going to landfill is not the right thing. … We need to get it to a place where we can properly handle it, giving the city some space to recover.”

Once the items are sorted, Trashie will make quality used clothing available to vetted aid organizations that serve populations affected by the fires.

“Some of the organizations that we’re picking up from will reach back out to us and say, ‘Hey, I’m ready,'” Gullingsrud said. “… They’re going to request certain categories, and we are making ourselves available to provide those categories back to the community.”

Trashie is also distributing cash or gift card donations in the same areas so that people can get things they actually need.

‘Fire victims … don’t want your Shein tube tops’ 

After getting a firsthand look at what was being donated, Trashie tried to get the word out to well-meaning people on their social media accounts — and by reaching out to The Cool Down — to think before donating.

“Stop donating to the LA fires — they don’t have the infrastructure or labor to sort your trash,” they said on Instagram. “Displaced fire victims don’t want your Shein tube tops and armpit-stained undershirts.”

“As much as I appreciate all of the people who dropped off donations, they actually dropped off a range of different things that you’re not necessarily going to want to give to somebody else,” Gullingsrud added.

That included well-loved party shoes and shorts with holes in them, she said. The amount of well-loved items donated was in some ways a good sign that people are getting good wear out of their clothing, she said, but many of the items really weren’t rewearable.

The problem: ‘They can’t handle the load’

What the Trashie team is seeing on the ground in LA is reflective of what happens with clothing donations in general, Gullingsrud said. People drop off their stuff at a charity organization like Goodwill or Salvation Army, where, “someone’s not going to shame them for what they’re dropping off; someone’s not going to turn them away.”

But those organizations, she says, are only equipped to “pull out the cream of the crop stuff.”

“They don’t have warehousing,” Gullingsrud said. “They’re not going to say, ‘Let me hold on to this for next season.’ Organizations just don’t know what to do with this stuff, and so they’re throwing them in the trash.”

That’s why an estimated 85% of clothes end up in landfills — or in open-air textile waste dumps and waterways in places like Ghana, Chile, or other countries where they can’t handle the load of unwanted clothing that they receive, according to Gullingsrud.

“Typical to what’s happened in other natural disasters, there’s just too many clothing donations, and the organizations were so swamped and cluttered with clothing donations that they couldn’t do their job — it was standing in the way of providing the people in LA were impacted by the fires the help that they needed,” she said.

“What we do is we provide an intervention.”

How to donate responsibly 

When you’re considering donating items, Gullingsrud recommends these simple tips:

• Check in with the organizations to make sure you know what they need. Some organizations may need money and, for better or worse, not clothing. If they don’t need clothing, “there’s actually a high likelihood that it’s going to go to landfill, unless there’s an intervention from an organization like our own,” she said. Don’t assume there will be and instead go straight to an organization such as Trashie if you’re looking to donate well-worn items so that there is no strain placed on a disaster response charity to manage items it cannot use.

• Consider where you’re sending your stuff. Make sure the organization you’re giving to “is going to be thoughtful and responsible about where the stuff is going.”

• If you wouldn’t wear the item, don’t donate it. “No one wants to wear your broken shoes from 1996.” Think about whether it’s something you or your kids would wear — and if not, make sure you’re disposing of it responsibly. (Trashie’s Take Back Bag allows people to send items that are not worthy of donation.)

‘This is a community movement’

Gullingsrud told TCD she’s grateful that partner organizations — and individuals like Alan, the man who supported thousands of  LA fire victims at the Santa Anita Race Track — called upon Trashie’s solution.

“I’m so grateful Alan picked up my phone call,” she said. “We’ve been doing this for a long time, and I know the responsibility behind what we do. … I wanted us to be the ones to be able to do it for the community.”

By helping to “declutter the city,” she said, they can help people in need get what they need most.

“We were poised to do this, we were so happy to help, and we wouldn’t have been able to do it without not only the partners of the warehouse, UPS, but also all the volunteers who showed up,” she explained.

“This is a community movement. Trashie is a community movement. … To me, that’s the most sort of cherished aspect of this. … It was beautiful. All of the hundreds of thousands of pounds that we were able to divert from a landfill last year is because of us, but really because of the people who leverage the bag.”

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