What actually happens to the clothes you donate | GQ UK

I always think thrift store as a convenient place. Somewhere I can reliably and carefully pick up unwanted clothing to resell and wear again, or because the fashion industry recently renamed it, rebrand it.loved. In the process, the charity does great things with the profits from reselling it: supports troops. Rescue pets. Cure cancer. But, like many of us, I never know the full story.

Amidst the explosion of online shopping and the TikTok trend for fast food, thrift stores and thrift apps have exploded in recent years. In fact, in small towns like mine, the brick and mortar store is no longer a place to buy things, but more often a place to dispose of them. According to a British study, we only wear 44 per cent of the clothes we own. And when we need more space, how better to throw away our old clothes than donate them to charity?

Unfortunately, it’s never that simple. Consider: only between 10 and 30 percent of used donations to charity shops actually resell in-store. The rest disappears into machines you don’t see: vast sorting machines where donated goods are valued and then resold to commercial partners, often for export to the Global South.

The problem is, with the onslaught of fast fashion, these too-frequent donations are now just another way to get rid of the trash and the system can’t handle it. Consider: some 62 million tonnes of clothing are produced worldwide each year, amounting to between 80 and 150 billion garments to dress 8 billion people.

It’s rare for us to see the network of people involved in the processing, resale, and ultimately reuse of the goods we donate. The vast network that circles the globe like a ball of thread, delivering unwanted goods to people in places like Afghanistan or Togo or Bangladesh. Like anything we put in the trash, they get thrown away. In this case it is not thrown, but given.

I wanted to follow the thread, track the movement of the donation through the textile merchants who sent it, and then map out the surprising places of the clothing. So, on a spring day last year, I flew to West Africa.

Saturday in Accra, the capital city of Ghana. market day. Shoppers thronged the streets of the shopping center area, the streets filled with stalls and street vendors. When you’re looking for used clothing in Accra, there’s only one destination: Kantamato, the largest second-hand clothing market in Ghana, and perhaps in West Africa. Every week, 15 million garments pass through Kantamato, where some 30,000 traders are crammed into just seven acres of cramped space. The majority arrived, via container ships, having donated to charities in Europe and North America. From here, the garment will spread across Ghana and across borders, to the Cote DIvoire, Togo, Niger, Benin and beyond.

The second hand trade in Ghana and throughout West Africa exploded in the 1980s and 90s when Western charities flooded Africa with clothing, intended as fundraising and relief. When used textiles first arrived in Ghana, local people had never experienced such waste. In fact, they assumed that the owner of the clothes must have died, leading to the phrase Akan still inscribed at one of the entrances to Kantamato: Keep up the wawu, or the clothes of dead white people. (In Tanzania, used clothing is sometimes referred to as similar set authority, or “dead European” clothing.) But the donation, however well-intentioned, had done just as well a detriment. Unable to compete with the flood of cheap goods to Africa, the local textile manufacturing sector slumped. Between 1975 and 2000, the number of people employed in the textile trade in Ghana fell by 75 percent. Businesses can’t compete on price with products people throw away.