Growing up, a bedroom clear-out was a reliable ritual. Everything I’d grown too big for, gotten bored with, or simply couldn’t justify keeping anymore, went into a big black bin bag. That bag then made its way to a charity shop, or donation bin, at which point I’d dust off my hands, feel somewhat virtuous, and move on. Job done. Good deed achieved. Woohoo! Someone, somewhere, was about to have a great time in my old ASOS going-out top.
What nobody really tells you, though, is that most of the time, this isn’t where the story ends.
The life of a donated garment
You assume that dropping off a bag of clothes at your local charity shop means that they get neatly steamed and hung up for the next thrifty shopper to discover. For some items, that’s exactly what happens. But for a significant portion of the journey, it is much more complicated and considerably farther from home.
Most donated clothing doesn’t stay in the country where it was donated. Much of it travels abroad, often to markets in the Global South, arriving in enormous, compressed bales. In Accra, Ghana, these bundles have earned the name “obroni wawu” – translated as “dead white man’s clothes” (a bit unsettling). These are the castoffs of people who have already moved on, shipped across the globe, and sold by the kilo traders who are hoping – because their living genuinely depends on it – that somewhere in the bale, there’s something worth having.
Many of those traders work in Kantamanto, one of Accra’s largest second-hand markets, where roughly 15 million garments arrive every week. Of those, around 40% are considered worthless upon arrival. They don’t make it to the stalls. They go straight to landfill – much of it ending up on the Korle Lagoon, where a steep cliff-like slope has formed, largely composed of discarded textiles, while animals graze atop it.
And it isn’t just Ghana. The Atacama Desert in Northern Chile – one of the driest places on earth – has become one of the world’s fastest-growing textile landfills. Mountains of clothing piling up in the sand, visible from above. Chileans, understandably, were rather taken aback to find themselves hosting this. The clothes arrive partly via duty-free ports, where goods can be imported and exported without standard tax charges, and what doesn’t sell at local markets quietly migrates to the desert. The landscape is slowly becoming a graveyard for last season’s fast fashion.
The scale of this is hard to grasp. Around 60% more clothes are bought today than fifteen years ago, but each item is kept for roughly half as long. A few years ago, estimates suggested that 85% of all textiles go to a dump each year, and – this is the part that’s even harder to grasp – a full rubbish truck’s worth of textiles is discarded every. Single. Second.
A writer I found on Substack decided to push a little further than most. Skeptical of Goodwill’s language about “diverting” clothing from landfill, they carried out their own experiment. They purchased some AirTags, tucked them into donated items, and waited. Despite Goodwill’s claim that donations spend at least 3-4 weeks on the shop floor before making their way to the bins, within two weeks, 75% of the clothing had turned up at the New York Elizabeth Channel. What was supposed to live in a thrift store for a few weeks ended up nearly 700 miles from its original home in Indiana. From there, much of it made its way to Pakistan, where 270,000 tonnes of textile waste are discarded every year.
Someone else’s country, someone else’s problem
From hearing this, it’s tempting to feel individually implicated. To perhaps wonder if your charitable efforts have actually just ended up in a Chilean desert, or maybe a hillside in Accra.
But the conditions which construct the life cycle of today’s garments, aren’t the result of individual consumers donating too generously. They’re the product of an industry that has spent decades expanding production while externalizing its consequences elsewhere. The “elsewhere” is often a country still navigating the long tail of consequences stemming from its once colonized past. Formerly having their sovereignty drained by Western powers, they’re now also expected to absorb Western waste.
Today, living a fully sustainable life is, for all intents and purposes, impossible. The options available to most people are imperfect by design because a system built on endless consumption doesn’t really make its exit particularly easy.
I’ve seen the argument that “over-thrifting” is a problem in itself, depriving people who genuinely need affordable clothing. And while keeping charity shops accessible does matter, the idea that the sole issue is people buying too many second-hand clothes when garments are being discarded at the rate of a truckload per second requires a certain commitment to missing the point.
Now, I’m not going to tell you to stop donating or feel guilty every time you clear out your wardrobe. The bin bag of old going-out tops isn’t the villain here. What might help, though, is letting the image of that landfill sit with you for a moment before the next impulse purchase. Not out of self-punishment, but because the real cost of a £4, 100% polyester top has to go somewhere.
And right now, it’s going somewhere most of us will never have to see.