The Journey of Your Donated Clothing; What’s the Real Story?
Reading this article. If you can even call this an article. You might think: contradictory. Having viewed my portfolio. But…hear me out. As business becomes BCorp. Planet and people matter. As does profit. This is me looking at fashion through a different lens. Enjoy.
Has capitalism Missguided us?
Take, make, waste. Sound familiar? The fashion industry is unapologetic in exploiting vast swaths of land for raw materials across the poorest areas of our globe, knowingly over-producing garments by the metric ton just to force-feed them to our generation’s youngest and most impressionable, with the false ideals that this wasteful lifestyle is something to strive to. This relates to over 70% of the 53 million tons of produced fibre being discarded into landfill in some of the world’s poorest countries. Plus, out of what isn’t hopelessly buried, just 1% ends up being recycled to produce new clothes: so what’s the real story?
First, let's look at demand. In the last five years or so, clothing spend has increased about 3% annually, so there is a definite fuel to the reckless behaviour of manufacturers. Wardrobes throughout the UK hold about £30 billion, yes billion, of unused clothing from that one college party or a quick night out. That’s enough for nearly 500,000 new social homes. The reckless individualism and self-expression that capitalism enables is having serious implications on the markets that fashion brands choose to pursue; it’s not a harmless fleeting attitude anymore. After people buy and don’t use their clothing bargains, around 336,000 tons of it ends up in landfill every single year. Undoubtedly, there is a lack of education when it comes to extending the lifespan of these supposedly useless garments; the fact it’s easier for it to just become someone else's problem speaks volumes to how we have a failing system of recycling and reusing.
First, let's look at demand. In the last five years or so, clothing spend has increased about 3% annually, so there is a definite fuel to the reckless behaviour of manufacturers. Wardrobes throughout the UK hold about £30 billion, yes billion, of unused clothing from that one college party or a quick night out. That’s enough for nearly 500,000 new social homes. The reckless individualism and self-expression that capitalism enables is having serious implications on the markets that fashion brands choose to pursue; it’s not a harmless fleeting attitude anymore. After people buy and don’t use their clothing bargains, around 336,000 tons of it ends up in landfill every single year. Undoubtedly, there is a lack of education when it comes to extending the lifespan of these supposedly useless garments; the fact it’s easier for it to just become someone else's problem speaks volumes to how we have a failing system of recycling and reusing.
Charity collections: unintentional harm?
For when we think we’re being responsible with our clothing deemed useless to us, charity shops are the UK’s largest and most common form of collection. It amounts to about 650,000 tons of the stuff every year, so all that dropping off at clothing banks, door-to-do collections and high street take-back schemes amount to a hefty sum. The UK charity TRAID claimed that it accounts for 330,000 tons of textiles being diverted from landfill - saving millions of tons carbon emissions by simply reusing and recycling what looked to be waste.
TRAID transforms old clothes, excess textile runs and anything in between into patterned gold, funding incredible global projects along the way to make the industry more sustainable, one stitch at a time. They transform all of this into around 11,000 garments every single week for resale and reuse across the UK, again with profits being diverted into their fund-raising efforts; a full cycle of responsibility to improve working conditions and global impacts.
Consumers in the UK often think they’re doing the right thing when donating their old tops and jackets to charity shops up and down the country, but the truth may be way more sinister. You’d imagine that anything of value could be resold for the benefit of the specific charity, and anything a little less desirable is recycled into something ultimately useful. Wrong.
The majority of clothing lovingly handed over to charities is lugged abroad into the second-hand garment trade, where $4 billion worth of used clothes and textiles are globally exported every year. This accounts for 60% of everything donated to UK charity shops, plus it’s hidden to most good-intentioned donors. The UK is the second-largest partaker in this modern rag trade after the US, diverting our waste to countries like Pakistan, Malaysia, Ukraine, Russia and Kenya. Ultimately just 32% of what we donate for recycling and reuse is done so in the UK. Selling our waste to poorer nations is not a sustainable solution to our shoddy habits. It’s wrong.
The modern Silk Road
Moving away from the hypocrisy of the UK and down to the continent of Africa, 80% of people wear second-hand clothes, imported from every corner of the globe, made up of the wealthiest and most wasteful nations. Including us. However, these clothes aren’t simply given away by the various donation platforms, they’re resold through profiting intermediaries who mark-up and offload to local communities. What started with good intentions is a murky landscape of waste and immoral profit.
The real journey of a garment goes a little like this:
There’s that one t-shirt in your wardrobe that’s a little tattered, a little too worn and a little too yellow. That colour was a great idea at the time but it’s just so not your colour this season. Step one - Depop. The issue is, no one wants it. After forty days and forty nights of reducing the price, adding new emojis and totally irrelevant hashtags, it’s just not working out. So it’s probably time to chuck it instead. That huge pile of ragged, undersized and pretty ugly clothes you've been meaning to flog for ages grows one layer taller and it’s probably time to bag up and go. But you're helping the local community right? Not quite. Out of that bag, the charity shop manages to sell maybe 15% of what you gave and no offence to your oversized knitwear and odd-striped pants, but they won’t exactly fly off the rails. At this point, merchants step in and take everything that couldn't be shifted. They’re taken to sorting plants on a clean, quiet, efficient diesel… nope, on a bumbling old transit spitting out smoke.They split up what you bagged into quality and type, then it’s tied into bales for another round of shipping. This time not across town but across oceans. It almost sounds romantic, scouring the world for a new home but it couldn’t be any further from reality. The packed bales arrive in a foreign port for sale on the second-hand clothing market, often again having to ship somewhere new for sale. So what started with good intentions and bad taste now means tons of emitted CO2 and foreign communities are being taken advantage of in the name of profiteering for TNCs.
All bad?
Let’s step back for the big picture. There are benefits in this twisted system, as thousands of tons of clothing is diverted from incineration of unceremonious burial. It also allows for clothes to have a second life to those who rely on second-hand clothing being abundant. In some countries like Uganda, over 80% of bought clothes are priorly used. Economically it’s a bit of a disaster as the textile trade is so vibrant, and this re-use trade is directing money straight back to the ocean-conquering companies that perform this whole plate balancing act.
There’s also a massive environmental crisis surrounding this operation, as the initial impacts of production are compounded even further by that of further shipping and processing, often thousands of miles worth. Plus a large proportion of those garments can end up being landfilled in the very country they were produced after a demonic round-the-world-cruise on the bitumen burning tanker of your choice.
Well then surely there’s a positive side to cheap clothing being available to typically impoverished nations? Not really. A typical pair of jeans in these markets is the equivalent of about £1.90 with a t-shirt being roughly £1. It may sound cheap to us but in areas like Mozambique where average daily income is about £1 it doesn’t sound such a great deal.
There’s also a massive environmental crisis surrounding this operation, as the initial impacts of production are compounded even further by that of further shipping and processing, often thousands of miles worth. Plus a large proportion of those garments can end up being landfilled in the very country they were produced after a demonic round-the-world-cruise on the bitumen burning tanker of your choice.
Well then surely there’s a positive side to cheap clothing being available to typically impoverished nations? Not really. A typical pair of jeans in these markets is the equivalent of about £1.90 with a t-shirt being roughly £1. It may sound cheap to us but in areas like Mozambique where average daily income is about £1 it doesn’t sound such a great deal.
Efforts to change
Charity shops are undoubtedly good intentioned. They try their best to raise funds for some truly great causes, and when there is a large quantity of stock that just doesn’t sell, this can be a great way to keep money flowing. But surely there’s a better way.
Many charities in the UK have started assessing their total impacts and seeing where they can be more sustainable in their behaviour. Since no laws or regulations are preventing the kind of neglect that goes on, larger charities have begun creating their own industry standards to align with, setting up systems of recycling to prevent the actions of the past. Oxfam for one pledge that nothing that is donated ever ends up in landfill, creating solutions such as their online shop to make their existing inventory more accessible and more likely to sell, plus a decentralized approach to selling means less miles covered by these measly fabrics. They also pride themselves on having a state of the art recycling system, with the capacity to sort 80 tons of clothing per week to find some value in what would typically be discarded. Although they still partake in this global export of clothes, their more sustainable approach includes social enterprising to help local causes profit from the exercise instead of larger companies.
Time to change
For way too long, the system of clothing donation has been hidden behind a curtain of neglect and obscurity, with the good intentions of donators being turned into smoke and profit by negligent intermediaries. If the whole system was completely transparent, maybe we would think twice about dropping that bin bag of (if we’re honest) mostly perfectly fine items.
Consumers and brands alike have a role to play. Supply and demand is a two-headed devil that can’t be fixed from just one side - so what can we do to change? If everyone in our generation alone did their part we could see substantial changes in the way we treat our clothes. The average lifetime of an item of clothing in the UK is 2.2 years - imagine if that could be extended by just nine months then the whole cycle would have to adapt to be more forward-thinking and beneficial for those involved.
Now to you
More than 60% of people living in the UK say they have some amount of unwanted clothing or fabric in their homes, so before you, bag and bin imagine what could be done to extend the life of whatever you’ve grown to hate. Try repairing. Try making. Try something, try anything to make use of what will be misused. Sites like Wrap have plenty of guidance on upcycling. TikTok has made this type of thing stylish and fashionable so why not jump in on the trend. There are so many ways to change the outcome of your donation, and once our behaviours change as a whole, fashion brands and producers alike will have no option but to listen and adapt. Don’t feed the twisted system. Help to reform it. Do your research and share it with your friends, look at what actions will create the most social value and never stop questioning the systems we’re used to.
Be educated. Be curious. Be proactive in your choices. After all, every single one of our actions matter.
Words by: James Gee, Amelia Slinger + me.