One of the interesting points raised in The True Cost documentary was that only around 10% of clothing donated to charity in the U.S. is sold in thrift stores. This sounds a far cry away from the UK where we have charity shops on every high street but I thought I would do some extra research to help clear up the facts. Also with a charity shop related outcome possible, I need to know how effective they actually are for recycling our unwanted fashion.

Where do your old clothes go?

By Lucy RodgersBBC News
Every year, thousands of us across the UK donate our used clothing to charity - many in the belief that it will be given to those in need or sold in High Street charity shops to raise funds. But a new book has revealed that most of what we hand over actually ends up getting shipped abroad - part of a £2.8bn ($4.3bn) second-hand garment trade that spans the globe. We investigate the journey of our cast-offs and begin to follow one set of garments from donation to their eventual destination.

UK consumers ditch more than a million tonnes of clothing every year.
The Western world's growing desire for fast, disposable fashion, fuelled by the ready supply of cheap goods manufactured in China and elsewhere, means we are consuming and then disposing of an ever greater quantity of garments.
Encouraged by charities and recycling companies, we are handing more and more of these old clothes over.
Almost half of the garments we now throw out end up going to a new home rather than ending up in landfill or at an incineration plant, estimates the Waste & Resources Action Programme (Wrap).

Few would dispute that diverting clothing away from landfill and giving it a new life is a good thing.
But Dr Andrew Brooks, lecturer in development geography at King's College London, argues in his book Clothing Poverty that many donors don't realise that the majority of the cast-offs they hand over to charity will be traded abroad for profit.
"The way most people encounter the second-hand clothing trade is their High Street second-hand store. I think there is a common presumption amongst the general public that if they give something to charity it's most likely to be sold in one of these shops, " he says.
"And while many garments are sold in these shops, the demand is relatively low compared to the supply, and far more get exported overseas."
According to the latest available UN figures, the UK is the second largest used clothing exporter after the US. It exported more than £380m ($600m), or 351,000 tonnes, worth of our discarded fashion overseas in 2013. Top destinations were Poland, Ghana, Pakistan and Ukraine. The US's key trade partners are Canada, Chile, Guatemala and India.

The article then goes on to explain how the fact these items are shipped overseas instead of sold 100% in our charity shops isn't necessarily a bad thing as they provide affordable yet good quality clothing to relatively poor people in developing countries. There was also a case study of a businesswoman in Uganda who acts as a personal shopper for the affluent, buying second-hand clothes cheaply and selling them on for profit. This is a method I used to do when I was younger so the story had some personal resonance to it. I feel like the major message is that I'm getting from this article is around the British dislike of secondhand clothing. Supply of clothes to charity shops outstrips demand for said clothes and therefore we ship them out of the country to poorer places where people are more humble and don't mind wearing used clothing. What we really need is an attitude change to promote upcycling and avoid the environmental costs of shipping vast quantities of clothing abroad. If people started buying well made second-hand clothing less regularly instead of fast fashion often then, of course, our problems would be halved.

Another BBC, however, contradicts the first one's angle on the positives nature of UK second-hand clothing exports by going into why certain African countries want to ban imports of this nature.

Why East Africa wants to ban second-hand clothes

A Kenyan, selling second-hand shoes, on 18 September looks at a moving train in the Sinai slum of Nairobi. — *Image captionThese second-hand shoes are all carefully cleaned before being resold in Nairobi*

Many people in Africa buy second-hand clothes sent from Europe and the US.

But East African countries could ban imports of used clothes and second-hand cars in the next three years, putting an end to a lucrative trade in the region.

Who wants to ban second-hand clothes and cars?

Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda could all ban second-hand clothes and leather.

They make up the East Africa Community (EAC).

The EAC directed member countries to buy their textiles and shoes from within the region with a view to phasing out imports by 2019.

Before the meeting on Wednesday, the EAC also proposed a reduction in imports of used cars.

When will the ban happen?

The EAC suggested phasing out imports in the next three years.

However, the newspaper The East African reports that it depends on the five countries' heads of states all agreeing to a common industrialisation policy.

It adds that the proposal suggests a ban would only come in after an increase in local textile production.

Why do they want an import ban?

The idea is to give a boost to local manufacturing, and help the economy.

One argument is that the imported clothes are so cheap that the local textiles factories and self-employed tailors can't compete, so they either close down or don't do as well as they could.

A release from a previous EAC manufacturing and business summit says the leather and textile industries are "crucial for employment creation, poverty reduction and advancement in technological capability" in the region.

Are second-hand goods bad for your health?

Second-hand underwear has been called unhygienic.

The EAC urged governments to make sure that used-clothes imports complied with sanitary standards.

instead urging East African governments to make sure that used-clothes imports complied with sanitary standards.

Used knickers were banned in Ghana in 2011 and a Ugandan bill also proposed a ban in the country last year.

Second-hand cars have also been blamed for causing accidents.

BBC Swahili analyst Alex Mureithi explains that, to avoid paying taxes, people pay bribes at ports to import cars.

Those cars then do not go through any safety checks.

To give some idea of the extent of smuggled imports, it emerged in December that over 2,700 shipping containers had disappeared at Dar es Salaam port in Tanzania.

How common are second-hand clothes?

People walk around Gikomba Market, East Africa's biggest second-hand clothing market, on July 10, 2014 in Nairobi. — *Image captionEast Africa's biggest second-hand clothes market, Gikomba, in Nairobi sells used clothes coming from the US and South Korea*

In Uganda, second-hand garments account for 81% of all clothing purchases, Andrew Brooks says in his book Clothing Poverty.

According to UN figures from 2013, South Korea and Canada combined exported $59m worth of used clothes to Tanzania while the UK alone exported $42m worth of used clothes to Kenya.

Where do used clothes come from?

People in countries like the UK donate used clothes to charity.

Mr Brooks' research explains that demand for the clothes sold in charity shops is low compared to supply.

He estimates that more than 70% of all UK reused clothing goes overseas, where they are sold.

Mr Brooks says people believe that their clothes will be given to those in need or sold in High Street charity shops to raise funds and don't realise that their donations will be traded abroad for profit.

This is an interesting flip side to the first article and one that is very logical. As a developing country, you wouldn't want other countries waste clogging up your market places and depriving your economy of money of material production even if it means environmental benefit for the world as a whole. It is very easy for us to sit on our high horse in the UK as a post-industrial country and say that we are helping clothe the third world and that global material production should be cut because we don't need the economic improvement for infrastructure and standard of living. This is the case with a number of near-critical environmental problems such as the toxic waste from leather production in India. It is very hypocritical of us to stomp on economic growth without ecological consideration when we arguably started the problem with production in the 1800s during the industrial revolution. I think for this reason any solution I am looking for to our second-hand clothing problem has to be internally contained within the UK and cannot rely on the current culture of exporting so that it is no longer our problem.

Studio Practice

Sunday 3 March 2019

Research into what happens to clothing in UK charity shops