Dirty laundry: what really happens to your clothes when you donate them to charity?

Only a fraction gets resold on the domestic secondhand market, but there are ways consumers can help reduce waste

Every year, Australians donate the equivalent of 250m pairs of jeans to charity (around 200,000 tonnes of textiles) and send another 200,000 tonnes to landfill.

But only a fraction of donated clothes get resold in Australia. So what happens to your old jeans when you donate them? And how can consumers play their part to minimise waste in the process?

The golden rule for wardrobe cleanouts

Standards for what is resellable in Australia are high. When you’re doing a wardrobe cleanout the golden rule for donation is: would you gift it to a friend?

If you make your donation directly to a charity store, the staff will sort through the garments to determine what, if any, can go straight on the shelves. Anything not kept by a store or that gets dropped into a charity bin will go to a redistribution centre. According to Peter Allan, the executive officer of the ReFuture Foundation, about 16% of everything that ends up at a redistribution centre is kept and sold locally.

But according to Virginia Boyd, the director of retail for Vinnies New South Wales, this can increase to as much as 40% or 50% when donations are made in store rather than being dumped out the front or dropped off in clothing bins. “When people leave stuff outside, the weather gets to things and that really impacts the keep rate,” she says.

The most efficient way to dispose of unwearable garments is to arrange a collection through Upparel or Textile Recyclers Australia.

So where do most clothes end up?

What doesn’t get selected for local resale gets sorted and graded at centralised facilities. According to the Australian Fashion Council (AFC), sorting significantly increases the value of each item of clothing – unsorted the value per item is around 20-25 cents; when sorted this can increase to 80-85 cents per item.

The same AFC report found that at this stage, about 14% of donations are deemed unwearable because they are soiled or torn and are sent to landfill. The rest – about 100,000 tonnes – is purchased by, and exported to, major sorting facilities overseas. More than half goes to the United Arab Emirates, a quarter is sent to Malaysia, and the remainder goes to countries including Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Fiji and the Solomon Islands. Here the garments go through yet another round of sorting and are divided into two categories: wearable and unwearable.

The wearables and unwearables

According to Charitable Reuse Australia, 22% of the textiles exported are deemed non-wearable by the sorting facilities and are downcycled into cleaning cloths or rags, some of which are reimported back into Australia and sold at retail. Another 6% is declared contamination or waste and is discarded.

According to Allan, “around two thirds of the clothing is deemed wearable by the sorting facilities”. This is then separated into grades based on the condition and categories according to the appropriate age, gender and climate. “The sorting facilities end up with bales of wearable clothing sorted into 400 different categories,” he says.

These are sold to secondhand clothing markets in Africa, eastern Europe or southern Asia where they may be purchased and worn by the local community (so long as the sorting was effective). But it’s at this point that visibility over exactly where Australia’s clothing donations end up is lost.

Waste colonialism

While there are clear benefits to the global secondhand clothing market (including providing affordable clothing and livelihoods to developing communities, environmental benefits from extending the life of clothes, and the trade is worth around $50m domestically), it is not without its critics.

Reports of clothing dumps in the Atacama Desert and on the beaches of Ghana highlight the burden of clothing waste created by wealthy countries such as Australia. Especially since we are the biggest consumers of cheap fashion in the world.

Despite the lack of visibility into the final destination of Australia’s clothes, Allan insists the impacts of the trade are positive. “We have anecdotal evidence from people receiving clothing in those destination markets that less than 5% is not wearable,” he says.

But Liz Ricketts, the founder of The Or Foundation, a not-for-profit that works out of Kantamanto markets in Ghana, says it’s important to draw a distinction between what arrives as waste – which might be as low as 5% – and what leaves the market as waste. Their research indicates this is as high as 40% per bale.

What about recycling?

Cover photo:  Secondhand clothes that don’t get selected for resale get sorted and graded at centralised facilities. Composite: Getty Images