In the past two years, we’ve moved twice. The first time we moved, we packed a bag of clothes intended for recycling or donation. Then, we got lazy and simply brought that bag with us while moving. The second time we moved, we brought the bag, still packed, without a second thought.

7 months after settling into our new home, we decided enough was enough. We were going to get rid of all of the clothing and shoes we weren’t wearing anymore!

The problem — and a big reason why we procrastinated for so long — is that finding a place that isn’t going to just resell¹ (or worse, ship overseas²) your clothing is not so easy! King County’s Threadcycle program has a list of partners that will accept used clothing, but every partner on the list resells and/or ships abroad. Heck, some of the organizations are even for-profit (e.g. Value Village, which “marks [clothes] up for resale at its own thrift stores”, and USAgain)!

The next obvious step is to search on Reddit but:

• The Reddit API protests made Reddit hard to use at the time and also raised questions about the durability of information there (besides Reddit itself going down, people are removing their old comments and posts).
• You still have to sift through inapplicable organizations (lots of pointers to Goodwill) and vet each individually (both for quality of the organization and acceptable items).

Luckily for you, I already slogged through a bunch of Reddit posts and came out with a few options. Here, I’ll discuss some promising ones I found as well as the organizations we ended up giving our clothes to, both as donations and for recycling (don’t donate stuff that’s not suitable for wearing!).

If none work for you, the best way to keep looking is probably to find shelters and domestic violence centers, or you can try a Buy Nothing group!

Promising organizations that will accept most clothing donations

While there are actually a decent amount of organizations that accept clothing donations to give away directly, many of them have item restrictions. That’s fine if you only have allowed items or are ok sorting your stuff and making multiple trips to donate things, but it’s certainly not convenient. Thus, I’m only going to list places that will accept almost anything that is in good shape.

Adult clothing

These places take adult clothing but we didn’t select them for various reasons.

West Seattle Clothesline

The West Seattle Food Bank operates The Clothesline, which is a free clothing bank. They accept “new or like-new clothing, bedding, hygiene products, tents, and suitcases/backpacks to be distributed to the community”. The only drawback? They’re in West Seattle, which can be quite the hike if you weren’t already planning to be in the area!

The Bridge Care Center

Located in Ballard, The Bridge Care Center provides resources for those experiencing homelessness or economic hardship. For example, they distribute adult clothing, shoes, and hygiene items. Unfortunately, at the time of writing they are about to move and thus have restrictions on acceptable items. However, you can check their donations page to see if those restrictions have now been lifted.

Elizabeth Gregory Home

The Elizabeth Gregory Home is geared towards supporting women who are “experiencing homelessness, trauma, or economic insecurity”. As a result, they only accept women’s clothing. While they don’t explicitly say that they give out clothing for free, they offer lots of free services and items so it would be strange if clothing donations ended up being resold.

Children’s clothing

Since we only had adult clothing, we didn’t donate to any of these places but they appear to be reasonable options.

Wellspring Family Services

Wellspring Family Services provides services for families facing homelessness. They operate a free family store for parents to shop for children aged 0-17. Consequently, they only accept donations for children 0-17 years old.

The Works

The Works provides free children’s and teen clothing for Shoreline School District families. However, donations are only accepted during the school year.

Where we donated

Jubilee Women’s Center

Jubilee Women’s Center supports women experiencing poverty. They operate a boutique where women can shop for clothing. They accept women’s clothing and don’t list any specific restrictions (though obviously only donate clean items in good condition).

Facing Homelessness

Facing Homeless operates The Window of Kindness. Volunteers hand out “socks, gloves, snacks, sleeping bags, and other supplies” and chat with those that drop in. They find that most of the people they serve are adult men so “dressier” women’s clothing should be donated elsewhere, but otherwise they accept most things you can think of with a few restrictions on what needs to be new. A few other things to note:

• Their “Donate Supplies” page says to email them to schedule a drop-off, but the main Donate page has a Calendly link to book a slot directly.
• There’s no “store” to walk into and drop things off so you might have to wait in line to get someone to come out to take your stuff.

Where we recycled

The Recology Store

Recology is a company contracted for solid-waste collection in Seattle. For some reason, they also operate stores in King County where they sell products that promote a zero-waste lifestyle.

While I don’t know how I feel about buying products from a waste management company, the nice thing about the Recology Stores is that they accept hard-to-recycle items and only charge a fee for non-customers³. Besides clothing, I was happy to find that they accept Styrofoam — we’ve been driving all the way down to Styro Recycle in Kent to recycle that⁴!

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any specific information about Recology’s recycling process for textiles, but I would hope that a literal waste management company is processing them correctly!