What Happens to Donated Clothes?

Donating your used clothing to charities has always been the right way to keep clothing out of landfills. After all, Americans collectively trashed 9 million tons of reusable clothes, footwear, towels and bedding in 2005, according to the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Solid Waste. But the clothing-donation chain is a lot more complex than donors realize, and many donations end up far from their intended destination as free clothes for the needy.

Charities generally sell the clothes rather than give them away. When clothes are donated to a nonprofit that operates a thrift store, the store usually sorts through them and selects the best items to sell on racks. The remaining items are sold to companies called graders, which sort them by class—men's shirts, women's pants, kids' shoes—and by fiber. The clothes in the worst condition are sold to textile recyclers, who turn them into rags, paper fibers or stuffing for furniture and insulation. Higher quality items are exported to developing countries, where they're sold, not necessarily donated, to people who can't afford new clothing. Nonprofits that don't operate thrift shops may still collect clothes and sell them directly to graders or to for-profit thrift shops, such as Savers, a chain of thrift stores in the U.S., Canada and Australia that last year collected nearly 600 million pounds of clothes. Savers, and other stores like it, may only sell a portion of what they buy, reselling the remainder to exporters and clothing recyclers, as nonprofits do.

So your clothing might not go directly to a poor person, but the nonprofits are using the money they raise from your donations for a good cause. Goodwill stores, for instance, are each considered individual nonprofits, and each store's proceeds go to fund local Goodwill programs. "When donors are giving to us, we're doing everything we can to get value out of that donation," says Christine Bragale, spokesperson for Goodwill Industries International, whether that means selling to the public or to a third party.

Exporting Poverty?

Internationally, the secondhand clothing industry has its controversies, too. Exporters and community-rights activists debate the economic impact of used goods on developing markets. The activists argue that this influx of first-world goods limits the availability of new merchandise and that indigenous clothing manufacturers are being undercut by much cheaper imports. In fact, some African countries—namely, South Africa, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Eritrea—as well as Indonesia and the Philippines have banned clothing imports to protect local merchants. But, "In many of the countries where used clothing is being purchased, processed and resold, it is the main clothing opportunity that exists," says Tony Shumpert, vice president of recycling and logistics at Savers, which exported 262 million pounds of clothing and household goods in 2006. The resale of these clothes also creates jobs and money (in the form of duties and import tariffs) to the countries into which they're imported, and in some cases, selling secondhand clothes may be a family's primary source of income. Furthermore, "new merchandise is very rare in those countries," Shumpert adds.