Helen takes a bag of her unwanted clothes to her local charity shop every month as part of her regular wardrobe update routine. She used to use resale sites such as eBay and Depop but explains that ‘selling online is such a faff so I donate. It makes me feel less guilty for wasting clothes I’ve never worn and is much easier and quicker!’
Ellie*, another monthly charity shop donor, agrees. ‘I would love to sell clothes but realistically I don’t have time to do everything,’ she says. ‘The best way, I think, is to organise a charity to come and collect the stuff.’
As packed-to-the-brim wardrobes are now a norm rather than a luxury, regular charity shop drop-offs have become a key part of our purchase and purge cycles.
It’s not hard to understand how this has happened; the fashion industry is on fast forward. The amount of clothing produced has more than doubled since the year 2000 and the industry now churns out around 80 billion garments a year. That’s more than ten for every person on the planet. Every single year.
Donating unwanted clothes to charity can feel cathartic. We assume that our donations will be hanging on the rails within the next few days, ready to rake in some cash for a well-meaning organisation. But in fact, they might not make it into the shop floor at all, instead being shipped off overseas.
WRAP (Waste and Resources Action Programme) estimates that around two thirds of re-used clothes end up overseas, while Andrew Brooks, author of Clothing Poverty, found that as much of 90 per cent of our charity donations are exported.
Sian, who likes to donate to Dog’s Trust, is shocked to hear this. ‘I find that really surprising,” she says. “I drop it off at a specific charity because that’s where I want it to go.’ The reality is, however, that we’re simply donating more than the UK’s 10,000 charity shops can handle, with Barnardo’s alone receiving over 100,000 bags a week, according to retail and trading director Roy Clark.
In 2016, we consumed 1,130,000 tonnes of clothes in the UK alone and only kept it for an average of 2.2 years. While £140million worth of clothes goes to landfill each year, there’s still plenty that’s shipped abroad. In fact, the UK is the world’s second largest exporter of clothes behind the US, shipping more than 350,000 tonnes – or £342million worth - in 2014. The majority goes to Sub-Saharan Africa, in particular Togo, Ghana, Kenya, Benin and the Ivory Coast.
In January 2019, it was reported that Kenyan imports of ‘mitumba’ (a Swahili term meaning ‘bundles’, referring to the huge, plastic-wrapped bundles of used clothes) reached record levels in 2018. In the first nine months, imports reached 134,000 tonnes; just a touch less than the amount imported in the whole of 2017.
Despite so many second hand clothes bypassing the charity shop rails entirely, donors like Sian needn’t worry that their clothes aren’t making money for their chosen charity; they most certainly are. Globally, the second hand clothing trade is valued at over £2.3billion according to Brooks. However, the profits come at a price for the nations that receive them.
The never-ending wave of second hand clothing that floods the shores of Africa sells for as little as 5 or 10 per cent of the cost of a new, locally made garment, undercutting domestic textile industries. Not only does this put skilled makers and merchants out of work, but it makes African nations dependent on our donations, stifling home-grown development.
A 2008 study published by the Economic and Social Research Council found that ‘the UK textile reclamation industry is by far the largest financial beneficiary’ of the second hand clothing trade, while another conducted a couple of years earlier, found that relaxing restrictions on global markets in the 1980s led to textile and clothing jobs in Ghana dropping from 25,000 in 1977 down to just 5,000 in 2000. Kenya, meanwhile, has lost over 400,000 textile jobs in recent decades and now has only 15 functioning textile mills.
‘We’ve basically dumped places such as Africa and Haiti with our unwanted clothing for God knows how many years,’ says Orsola de Castro, co-founder of Fashion Revolution, the organisation that is ‘radically changing the way our clothes are sourced, produced and consumed’.
‘In the case of East Africa,’ de Castro continues, ‘they have absolutely wiped a huge quantity of local, artisanal infrastructures. So we’re talking weavers, spinners, ginners and artisans who, for millennia, have been producing local cloths with local traditions.’
Aware of the disparity in benefits and keen to protect their own textile industries, East African countries have floated the idea of a total ban of second hand clothes imports. In 2015, the East African Community (EAC) announced that second hand clothes would be completely banned from their markets as of 2019.
This hasn’t pleased America, who argued they would lose out enormously if the move went ahead. They threatened to suspend the African Growth and Opportunity Act, an economy-boosting, duty-free deal. The threat was enough to get the EAC to back down, eventually.
However, news of Kenya’s record imports has started conversations of a ban swirling again. Government bodies and organisations representing local manufacturers are determined to carve out space and income for their domestic textile industries, in order to bring back thousands of skilled jobs.
But the problem doesn’t stop if a handful of countries ban our unwanted stuff, we’d simply find somewhere else to send it. Much like our rubbish and recycling, we don’t like to see the evidence of our waste so we choose to palm it off on others who are then left to deal with it.
The issue extends beyond the export business, threading through how much we discard, how much we buy and how much is made.
‘Donating to charity once a month, it’s actually exacerbating a problem, not solving it,’ says de Castro. ‘The UK charities are awash with clothes and your local charity shop has really turned into your local bin. We need to rethink the whole relationship that we have with buying cheap clothing often and then donating it.’
Looking at the language charity shops use, it’s easy to see why so many of us believe that donating our clothes is completely virtuous. Oxfam, for example, uses the line, ‘Have a clear-out and beat poverty too’, while the British Heart Foundation encourages donations with, ‘Fill bags. Fund Research. Beat Heartbreak.’
I was once inspired by these mottos and felt a sense of satisfaction every time I’d drop off a few bags full of clothes, helped by the subsequent emails I got informing me just how much my donations had made for the charity.
Should we just stop giving to charity altogether? Not quite. It is true that charities are reliant on the income from our second hand clothes and many within the sector work hard to maximise the value of our donations right here in the UK.
Beth, who runs a northern branch of Barnardo’s, handles every single donation that comes in and is proud that she puts around 90 per cent out on the shop floor. Not all donations are so diligently sorted, however, and the contents of clothes bins, for example, head straight to sorting centres, less likely to reach your local branch.
Encouragingly, de Castro believes exportation can be done ethically. Oxfam’s Frip Ethique is one example of a more carefully managed export programme. After diligent research, the charity set up the social enterprise in 2006, sending considerately chosen, suitable clothing to Dakar in Senegal in line with their ethical supply policy. This is then ‘bought by Frip Ethique at market rates, sorted by its employees and sold to local traders’. A representative went on to explain that workers get ‘a fair wage, steady employment, health care and pensions.’
Frip Ethique accounts for 30 per cent of all clothes sent to Wastesaver, Oxfam’s Batley-based sorting facility. However, the programme doesn’t account for all exports, with garments still being sent to the likes of Ghana and Benin, who are among the top-most exported to African countries.
While people continue to deal with the negative impact of our cast-offs, it’s important we analyse our own behaviour. It’s up to charities to be more transparent; it’s up to us to slow down our consumption and learn to treasure our clothes; it’s up to brands to churn out less garments and see used clothes as a resource; and it’s up to governments to value the lives and livelihoods of those beyond their own shores.
As de Castro succinctly puts it, ‘It’s not one organisation or one sector of this industry that needs to act. It’s everyone working together.