Donation Spotlight: JOSCO Products

Here at Austin Creative Reuse, we depend on the generosity of both individuals and businesses to donate materials so that they may be upcycled. Business donations are especially important to our mission because they are often large in volume and provided on a recurrent basis. As local businesses both small and large aim to meet their triple bottom line, ACR acts as a resource to process and reclaim byproduct materials that may otherwise end up in the wastestream. An example of an excellent partnership we hold is with JOSCO Products, an Austin-based textile recycler that has been upcycling discarded textiles into industrial rags for over 30 years. A byproduct of JOSCO’s textile reclamation is the strip of buttons from button-up shirts, which removed in their process. Through our partnership, these strips of cloth and button are boxed and delivered to our Reuse Center on a rotational basis. Then, through the hard work of our volunteers, the buttons are removed, sorted, and packaged for sale. The remaining strips of cloth, sans buttons, are then sent off to make more industrial rags.This process is a wonderful example of a full-cycle waste reclamation. Partnerships such as this are mutually beneficial and fully emblematic of both ACR’s and JOSCO’s environmental mission.