There are many ways to avoid sending old clothes to landfill. The obvious answer that comes to mind, is to take clothes to a second-hand store. But what do you do with clothes that are too worn out for wear?

Keeping a small storage box of fabrics and old clothes can be great for filling a need later. When there’s something the heart desires, a helpful question to ask is, “How can I find or make something for this purpose without buying something new?”

In our case, I’d been wanting somewhere tidy to store plastic bags and packaging for reusing and recycling. Most homes of my parents’ generations and older will have something like this – a tube of fabric with elastic at the bottom that can be hung in the pantry. They traditionally store plastic shopping bags to be reused as bin liners etc.

In spite of efforts to avoid plastic bags and packaging, you’d be surprised how much still finds it way into our home. So I decided we would benefit from at least three of these storage tubes:

• 1 for plastic packaging that is recyclable through the REDcycle Program but not through the local council facilities;
• 1 for plastic shopping bags – these are handy to keep and reuse for sharing plants (even if you don’t use these yourself, you’re more than likely to still end up with some in your house somehow);
• 1 for rags.

As it happens, old pyjama pant legs and old t-shirts are perfect for the job! The pyjamas are already tubes so there’s little sewing involved. And for the t-shirts, it’s a great way to stop slightly holey shirts from ending up in landfill when they still have some cuteness to offer. You only need on half of a t-shirt per tube. Reusing these t-shirts was doubly exciting, because it meant they were replaced with more socially and environmentally conscious tees from Fairtees. So I knew that not only would be replacement t-shirts be easier to wear knowing that they are fairly made and traded, but they are also designed to last a long time with their organic cotton fabric and high quality stitching. It will be a while now before I should have to worry about what to do with that old t-shirt!

As for the rag tube, the less pretty old clothes make fantastic rags. And they are very absorbent. You can use them instead of paper towel – which means washing and reusing after each cleanup rather than paper towel in the bin! It’s a win. They’re also great for dusting.

Of course there are many different ways to re-purpose old clothes than pantry tubes and rags, but we hope this is a somewhere to start, and a place from which more reusing and recycling will take place!