Where Do Rags Come From?

Ypers Mar 15th 2018

Where Do Rags Come From?

We’ve been in business for nearly 100 years, and in that time, we’ve supplied millions upon millions of rags to our customers.

We’ve supplied everything from colored cotton rags to huck rags to terry towels. And again and again, our customers ask the same thing: “Where do my rags come from?”

And the answer is “A few different places.” Here’s a quick snapshot of some of them:

Recycled clothing

The average American throws away 81 pounds of clothing a year, only 15 percent of which gets donated or recycled.

Donated clothing that can’t be worn again is sorted into different categories: t-shirts, denim, flannel, etc., cut into a variety of rag-sized pieces and packed into 5, 10, 25 or 50-pound boxes.

The rags that come from recycled clothing include:

Industrial laundry facilities

Many hotels and hospitals rely on third-party laundry sources to clean their bedding and towels. These services process millions of pounds of cloth a day, and after some time this cloth can get ripped, stained, torn or otherwise not up to the standard of a hospital or hotel.

When that happens, we’ll buy these items and cut them down to a useable “rag” size and box them up for you. Everything we get is 100 percent sanitized, cleaned and processed.

The rags we get from industrial laundry facilities include:

Bed sheets, including knitted sheets and pink sheets
Patient gowns
Terry cloth and huck towels
Washcloths
Thermal blankets
Receiving blankets

Textile mills

Textile mills produce 55 billion pounds of cotton each year, crafting everything from t-shirts to towels. But not everything that comes out of these mills are ready for sale.

Rather than throw these defective products away, textile mills sell them to companies like us, and we turn them into cotton rags.

These rags come from products such as:

New white t-shirts
New colored t-shirts
New washcloths
New huck towels
New terry cloth towels

Whether you’re in the food service industry, the industrial/manufacturing sector or in charge of a large government building, Y-pers can help you make sure you get your work done, whether you need cotton rags, terry towels or fleece rags.

Posted by Ypers