South West Recycling Links for Textile, Furniture, and Architectural Recycling

Company overview

South West Recycling Links is a British collector and sorter based in Minehead, Somerset, in the south west of England. It sources from local charities and community groups, sorts in house, and sells to buyers in Europe, Africa, Asia and America.

The company describes skilled sorters covering everything from rags to bales, produces creams through to grade A and B, and bales into categories on customer demand. The range covers children's, ladies' and men's clothing, household rummage, shoes and toys, alongside a separate stream of small electronics and fridge freezers.

A single-county catchment, stated openly

The most useful line on the site is a restriction rather than a boast. On the donation form the company states plainly that it can only collect items within the Somerset area.

Almost nothing else in this directory admits a geographic limit that specific, and the admission is worth more to a buyer than a claim of national coverage would be. It tells you two things immediately.

First, the volume has a ceiling. A collector working one English county cannot scale to a container a week however good its sorting is, so ask for the monthly tonnage before you build a programme around it. If the answer is smaller than your requirement, that is not a failure on their part, it is arithmetic, and better to know in the first email than in the third month.

Second, and more interesting, the character of the goods will be consistent. A national collector averages together wardrobes from wealthy suburbs and poor estates, coastal towns and inner cities, so its bales are a blend that shifts as its collection rounds change. A single-county collector is drawing from one population, which means the mix you see in your first bale is a fair guide to the tenth. For a buyer who has found a stream that sells well in their market, that predictability is worth paying for, and it is the opposite of the trade-off you make with a large supplier. Anyone comparing several second-hand clothing suppliers should treat catchment size as a real variable rather than assuming bigger is better.

Bale weights set by what buyers actually ask for

The company lists its popular customer demands as bales of 45, 55, 80 and 100 kg.

Note the framing: these are described as what customers want, not as what the press produces. That is a small distinction with a real implication, because it means the press is flexible and the four weights reflect market preference rather than machine constraint. It also maps neatly onto four kinds of buyer.

Forty-five kilos is the classic market-trader unit, light enough for two people to carry off a van and sell intact. Fifty-five is the same idea with a little more in it, common for shops that break bales themselves. Eighty is a small wholesaler's unit, needing a trolley but still manageable by hand. A hundred kilos is where you cross into equipment territory and it becomes a container-packing weight, cheaper per kilo to press and ship but requiring handling gear at the far end.

So pick the weight for your last mile rather than for the price per kilo, and get the tolerance agreed in writing. A bale sold as 45 kg that arrives at 41 kg has cost you nearly ten percent on a purchase you thought you understood.

Charity-sourced material, and the question to ask about it

The stated source is local charities and community groups rather than cash-for-clothes counters or clothing banks. That difference matters and is worth one specific question.

Material coming through a charity can reach a collector in two quite different conditions. Either it is donated goods the charity has not put on its shop floor, in which case nobody has picked through it and the good pieces are still inside, or it is what the charity could not sell after weeks on display, in which case local shoppers have already had first refusal. The two are worth very different money, and both are honestly described as coming from charities.

So ask directly whether the goods reach them before or after the charity's own retail stage. A collector who works with charity partners will know the answer for each partner, and the reply tells you more about what will be in the bale than any grade name. The grade definitions explain what creams and grade A should contain once that origin question is settled, and the account of how sorting houses work through incoming material explains why the answer moves the yield so much.

Practical details and honest caveats

Contact runs through info@, sales@ and a named individual at [email protected], plus 07770 617514, and the company says its teams are available seven days a week. The named address in the contact list is a small point in its favour: in a trade where almost every enquiry goes to a generic inbox, a person's name means somebody is accountable for the reply.

Three caveats belong on the record. The site carries a 2020 copyright and has not obviously been updated since, so treat everything on it as needing confirmation. No street address is published beyond the town. And no defect rules, minimum orders or prices appear anywhere, so the whole specification has to be built by email before you commit.

For a wholesale buyer who wants a small, consistent regional stream rather than volume, and who is willing to do the verification work a stale website makes necessary, this is a reasonable first call. The free collection service is limited to Somerset, but purchases ship worldwide.

Frequently asked questions

Where is South West Recycling Links based?

In Minehead, Somerset, in the south west of England, with telephone 07770 617514.

Where does the material come from?

From local charities and community groups, with free collection available only within the Somerset area.

What bale weights are available?

The company names 45, 55, 80 and 100 kg as the weights customers most often ask for, and bales into categories on demand.

What grades does it produce?

Creams through to grade A and grade B, plus rags, across children's, ladies', men's and household rummage, shoes and toys.

Which markets does it supply?

Europe, Africa, Asia and America, alongside reuse within the UK.