Clothes and blankets, it turns out, can keep you warm in more than one life.
That beloved sweatshirt that kept you warm through college but now has holes and stains is not necessarily destined for the dumpster anymore. It can still keep you warm and cozy in its second life as a piece of insulation."My house has it…textile insulation," said Serge Lazarev, Founder of
. "Fiberglass [insulation] is really bad. It's horrible to touch or inhale and textile insulation is really soft and like pleasant -- you could put your face down and sleep on it."says American’s shed each year and re-donates what he can to various charities and for profit or organizations, about 40% of what comes in, and recycles the rest. He partnered with a company that turns threadbare towels, stained shirts and torn jeans into home insulation.
"About 10 years ago, I was a polluter. I was operating gasoline, retail stations, mechanic shops, stuff like that," said Lazarev. "[The President] was talking about how the government was going to invest into green jobs and green fields, and it really resonated with me. I was like, ‘You know, it's time we started taking care of our planet because this can't go on forever like this.
He looked into new business opportunities. Getting into solar power was prohibitively expensive Lazarev said. Recycling bottles and cans was already a saturated market."And then I stumbled on an interesting statistic that said that 85% of the textiles were not being picked up for recycling, and it was going to the landfills and the light bulb went off," he recalled. "So I made that 180-degree turn around into recycling.
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