Ideas for Reusing Old Clothes and Textiles in the Garden
28.06.2023 - 11:47
/ treehugger.com
Upcycling old clothes and textiles in your garden can be a great way to find new life in old materials, and keep those items from waste streams. Making use of these old materials can also help us reduce the things that we may need to buy to maintain our gardens and transform them into the productive and attractive places we want them to be.
When thinking about how to use old clothing and other reclaimed fabrics in our gardens, the first thing to consider is which materials we are talking about. Both old synthetic fabrics and natural fabrics can have a range of uses in a garden.
The uses for synthetic fabrics can be very different from the uses for entirely natural fabrics, which will break down and rot over time. Some suggestions for upcycling both of these types of fabric are outlined below:
Before we begin talking about the uses for clothing and textiles in a garden, it is worthwhile taking the time to consider the caveats to this.
The elephant in the room when it comes to synthetic fabrics reuse and upcycling is the microplastic particles, which these materials shed through their lifetimes and will continue to shed over time. These particles are one of the reasons that, wherever possible, we should aim to choose natural fabrics rather than synthetics when choosing clothes and soft furnishings for our homes.
Of course, some fabrics will be worse than others when it comes to shedding microplastics, and it is best to avoid using these worst offenders in your garden, to avoid further contamination of the environment.
Jasemin Abazi / EyeEm / Getty Images
Old natural clothing or other household textiles made from natural materials like linen, cotton, wool, silk etc. can also be very useful in a garden, though they will