With this simple bag, you can earn food and travel rewards — and recycle your old clothes, too

There’s a new way to get rid of your old clothes: It comes in a big brightly colored bag, and there are major rewards involved.

Fast-growing startup company Trashie launched the Take Back Bag last year, and it’s been hugely popular since — you can even get the bags from Walmart now.

So how does it work? All you have to do is put your old clothes, sneakers, towels, and even sheets that you want to get rid of into the bag, send it back to Trashie’s recycling center, and the team will work its magic from there. And you get access to Trashie’s rewards platform in the process.

Let’s get into the nitty-gritty

What’s the reward system all about?

Once you send back your Take Back Bag full of clothes, you get $30 worth of “Trashie Cash.” That’s good to use on such things as reduced prices on movie tickets with AMC Theatres, meals with HelloFresh, sneakers with Allbirds, and plenty more.

The list is long, but supplies are limited, especially for popular deals. Trashie recommends users check in weekly to see what new deals are available.

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Is there a cost?

Each Take Back Bag costs $20 upfront. Once you fill up that big neon bag and send it off (shipping is included), you get those $30 worth of rewards. Bonus: You don’t have a huge pile of old clothes in your closet anymore.

What exactly can go in these bags?

Clothes you want to get rid of, winter jackets, sweaters and socks with holes in them, old shoes, pillowcases, bathrobes, backpacks, purses, and even your old Halloween costume. And that’s just the start of the list.

“Whatever really fits in the bag … ​​as long as it doesn’t have extreme biohazard or soil or anything extreme that we can’t recycle,” Trashie CEO Kristy Caylor explained in a recent conversation with TCD.

What happens after I send off my Take Back Bag?

The Trashie team inspects and sorts the items in your bag into over 250 categories, making sure that roughly 90% of all donations are kept out of landfills. According to the company’s website, around 70% of items are re-used globally, while over 20% are recycled into new fibers for things like pet bedding.

Plus, Trashie recycles all the Take Back Bags that it gets back.

How am I helping the planet with this program?

According to Trashie, every Take Back Bag diverts up to 15 pounds of textile waste from heading to a landfill.

Or put another way: That’s over 150 pounds of CO2 diverted — which is the equivalent of *not* burning 75 pounds of coal.

Bottom line:

Roughly 85% of all textiles end up in landfills every year, so even the small steps we can take by bagging things up for recycling programs like Trashie’s can help. And a Trashie Cash reward doesn’t hurt one bit either.

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