Recycle Old Jeans with Blue Jeans Go Green

I recently got a great question in my inbox about how to recycle old jeans that are too tattered to wear or even craft with.

We've all wrestled with this, right? Jeans tend to take a beating - more than other clothes in our wardrobes - and at a certain point they are just too tattered to wear and too threadbare to even bother repairing. What do you do when they get to that point? I did some searching and found a service that will recycle those old blues: Blue Jeans Go Green.

Blue Jeans Go Green accepts your old jeans and turns them into denim insulation! That means that when you recycle your old jeans, you're doing double duty: you're keeping them out of landfills and you're helping folks reduce their energy bills. Not too shabby, right?

When you recycle old jeans through this service, it gets turned into UltraTouch insulation, a formaldehyde-free, zero VOC insulation. My favorite part of this whole process is that not only do you keep all of that organic matter out of the landfill, but they donate up to 250,000 feet of insulation to Habitat for Humanity to help them build more energy efficient homes.

Here's how to recycle old jeans through the mail with Blue Jeans Go Green:

1. Box up your jeans. They ask for no more than 100 pieces of denim per parcel. They take any denim, so that means denim tops and housewares are fair game too.

2. Print a shipping label. You can download their pdf label by clicking here.

3. Ship it. You cover the shipping costs, but you can use whatever shipping method you like. Since denim is heavy, I'd go with a flat rate USPS box. That tended to be the cheapest option when I was shipping heavier items for my crafty business.

That's it!

Do you need to recycle old jeans from your wardrobe? Have you found other services that make it easy to keep them out of the landfill? I'd love to share more resources in the comments!

Image Credit: Remixed Creative Commons photo by Ten Speed Photography