Rag prices rise..../

I think the price of rags must have gone up appreciably.........
there's a shop opened up locally now, where you can take your bags of clothes/textiles and get paid for them by weight...
I think the manager said that they pay 50p a kg.
 He said that one bright spark took his clothing in all soaking wet ( theyd weigh heavier wet of course lol) but was told they wouldnt accept them wet.........so chummy dumped them outside the shop in disgust!

Its another alternative to giving clothing to charity shops, car booting your cast offs or passing them onto folks free, via a freecycle group.
In fact recently charities have reported that they are stopping their door step collections, because so many bags are being collected, or rather stolen, by others before the charity has had chance to collect them!
Like the increase in lead thefts, seems textiles now have a profitable weight value too.

This should make us rethink our use of textiles/clothing shouldnt it?
That we casually and indiscriminantly cast them away, without due thought to the gathering of the products, the making of the fabrics and the true 'cost' of them to our lives and world.
That we don't mend anymore, we dont darn or patch as we used to do, we so easily now throw clothing/things away.......or worse....replace them with a more fashionable colour at a whim.
But most in our western society wont think twice, some of us will and do already, but most won't.
Although maybe some might since the ecconomic downturn has altered so many lives for the worse?

We used to do jumble sales using the large amount of donations given to us, to fund raise for our cat rescue group.
At the end of them we had a 'rag man' come take what was left and give us a cash in hand amount, dependant on how much  we had to give him.

It was about £120 a ton hed give to us when we started.... a good 20 some years back and although he would berate us for saddling him with bric a brac, books, shoes  and other 'junk' at the end.......he would take the sundry leftovers too for us.
He was adament he would just go to the tip with all that but we knew, and he knew we knew (lol), that he would box the dross and stick it in at the local auctions where he might get a £1 or more for a box of bits.
Am sure shoes would go to the third world somehow and there, folks would pay for them, well worn though most would be.
Metal would have been stockplied in his yard no doubt for he had his contacts.
But by the time we stopped doing the jumble sales, the rag prices had dropped and I can recall him giving us only £25 on one occasion for almost a ton and £5 of that was a 'donation' to the cause he said.....because he liked cats lol and that amount was all but wrung out of him!

We always sorted through what had been donated to us before and again at jumbles, pulling out anything we thought we might get abit more for on our weekly car boot stall.
So by the end what was left was not necessarily that great, but when the rag prices dropped, we tried to seperate afew bags of clothes and saleable items for whichever was the closest charity shop, so they might get a bit for what we passed onto them too, one way or another.

The manager of this new 'recycling' shop says he is opening 2 more shops here abouts too.............so yes, the rag prices must have risen alot!

I am reshuffling my work room again, offloading alot and taking it to scrapstore, finding things Id forgotten Id bought even............so dont let me go to another show for at least a year!
If I mention going ............PLEASE remind me about the 2 large bags of unopened new stuff that I have still to play with! lol

Now Im aware I promised a giveaway, I havent forgotten and am gathering a pile of goodies to offer, so I will be telling you about it shortly...I promise.


http://www.ragrescue.co.uk/products.php?category=vbooks
an interesting site for us stitchers, with english, french and german fabrics to buy

and I love the name of this firm lol

http://www.ragandphone.com/

I tried to find out online how much you can get for a ton weight and was gobsmacked to read this!

xStatistics: Price of textiles fetched by second-hand textiles fluctuates (in a similar way to other commodities such as oil and wheat). As at December 2011, virgin clothes (see definition below) were fetching around £1,000 per tonne. This was three times the price of five years before.

This rise has caused an increase in the number of commercial collectors in the UK (including misleading and bogus 'charitable' collectors). It's also led to an increase in the theft of bags left out for house-to-house collections.

'Virgin clothes' means they're as-donated, unsorted. However, once they've been picked over by charity shops (and the best items removed), the remaining items fetch a lower price.

 Obtained from http://www.charitybags.org.uk/textile_recycling.shtml

Maybe I should weigh in all my textiles!