Spring Cleaning After Easter? Add cloth recycling to your list of tasks.
April 26, 2025Easter is an ideal time for cloth recycling as a spring clean makes your home feel ready for family gatherings. Getting rid of unwanted clothes frees up space for new things. The recycling location for cloth recycling can be out of town, they will come and pick it up.
Easter is here! It’s the most wonderful time of the year! For me, anyway. Christmas is lovely but it can be stressful and expensive. Easter is just a fun exchange of pretty chocolates. Also, I like that the chocolates come in a different shape than usual – an egg! Or a hen, or a bunny. Or an avocado, if you’re Heston Blumenthal and like to be different.
Cloth Recycling – Chocolate
But fun chocolate is fun chocolate, and two-thirds of British people actually buy some kind of Easter chocolate, which is quite a lot of people! So the majority of British people like fun chocolate too. We buy 8 kilos of chocolate a year each, on average, and it turns out we buy most of that at Easter. 8 kilos! That’s the equivalent of about 45 bars of chocolate a year. I suppose that’s just shy of one a week, or actually less, if we’re buying more at Easter.
So, anyway, why an egg shape? This is common to many countries across the world, who, probably independently, came to the conclusion that an egg = spring. This is because naturally, in the wild, eggs are laid in the spring time, when the weather is mild. Most baby animals are born at this time of the year, which is why you will see lambs in fields, also a symbol of spring time. This is because it would make no sense for very young and vulnerable babies to be born in a harsh winter or during a very hot summer.
Cloth recycling – Easter Eggs
Why is an egg representing Easter though, which is a Christian holiday celebrating the fact that Jesus rose from the dead after being crucified? Well, one explanation I was taught as a small child was that the tomb he was buried in, which was actually a cave with a boulder rolled across the entrance, was hollow, and egg shaped, like an Easter Egg is. Or maybe it’s the same as the stone that was rolled away from the entrance? This is quite a creative interpretation, since hollow chocolate eggs have only been around around since the last 150 years, and also, a cave is not often easter egg shaped, and an egg-shaped boulder would be quite difficult to roll away. It would be sort of ungainly, escaping across the Garden of Golgotha in uneven leaps and bounds.
It’s actually because spring traditions are around eggs are very old. Many old traditions were incorporated into Christian mythology in countries where Christian missionaries were trying to get populations to adopt their religion. The idea was if there weren’t too many changes, it would be easier for people to swallow.
Did you know your humble supermarket chocolate Easter Egg is actually a cosmic egg? A manifestation of literally Life and the Universe? When you eat one, you are taking part in a world-wide tradition that is thousands of years old. There are some absolutely fantastic egg traditions around the world. They are called “Cosmic Egg” motifs.
Cloth recycling – the Cosmic Egg
One of my favourite is the Hindu story of a golden egg which was cracked in two by the God Brahma to create the two halves of the universe, the physical and spiritual realm. The word for this, Hiraṇyagarbha, also means “Golden Womb”. Eggs and wombs can be somewhat interchangeable in mythology, as both as places where the seed of life comes from.
The Greek myth of the phoenix is also an impressive bird who rises from the ashes to be born again. It’s like the Jesus story. When it is time for the phoenix to die, it spontaneously combusts in an impressive display. Soon afterwards, a baby phoenix is discovered in the ashes of the parent bird. In the Egyptian version of this, the baby makes an egg out of myrrh and fills it with the parent’s ashes, to be placed at the alter of the Sun God, Ra.If you have seen the recent Oscar winning animation, Flow, one of the characters is a very beautiful and majestic Secretary Bird, who dies at the end, rising into the cosmos. I found myself hoping that she would be born again like a phoenix offscreen, as the film is about death and rebirth.
Cloth recycling – Resurrection egg, Cedynia, 11th-13th centuries.
See page for author, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Egg and the Moon and the Stars
The Chinese version of the Cosmic Egg looks like this: Pangu, the Creator, sat in an egg for 18,000 years and eventually got bored because it was so dark and stuffy. He smashed his way out. The white of the egg rose and became heaven while the yolk dropped to become the earth. The bits of the shell became the sun, moon, and stars.
In addition, cosmic eggs stories are found in other Egyptian stories, Roman mythology, Finnish tradition, Zooastrian and Dogon mythology too. Each of these stories, handed down orally through many generations, naturally has different versions.
As you are enjoying your much deserved chocolate, think about spring cleaning and donating some clothes. 17 million tons of textile waste go to landfill and municipal solid waste. It doesn’t matter if they are high quality synthetic fibers, natural fiber, fast fashion, or clothes and other textiles. They all take years to decompose. A charitable organization will collect textiles. Clothing donations to the Salvation Army or thrift stores provides environmental protection.The textiles industry in the united state relies on textile recycling or both pre consumer and used clothes in good condition.
