Clothing banks are (on paper) a great way of disposing of our old clothes. They are really convenient, and allow easy drop off, in our own time. Just put the bag in and never think of it again while patting your little eco-angel on the shoulder.
But, of course, you know the drill now, it’s a bit more complicated than that. Indeed, clothing banks have one major practical problem and a couple of deeply structural ones.
The practical one lies in the fact that most of these banks are in private, outdoor locations like parking lots, at the mercy of the elements. Coupled with the fact that they are often full of clothes literally overflowing the bank’s capacity, we easily end up with items that are completely ruined before they’re even picked up by the bank’s operator. That can be a bit discouraging when you’ve meticulously sorted and washed all your clothes after reading our “guide to donating your old clothes”.
While this poses a real issue in some municipalities (see article about Dundalk here) it could be somewhat addressed with enhanced collection, more banks, better regulations (which are on the way). Yet, these technical problems are far from being the only thing that we can criticize around the handling of our post-consumer textiles or PCT (the fancy name for discarded clothes).
Most people we interviewed in the street believed that the clothes put in those clothing banks are used for good cause and redistributed to charity shops or to shelters and other structures that help people in need directly. And it can be true:
but only when the banks are owned and operated by charities themselves.
Which is not the case for most of the thousands of textile banks you can find across Ireland.
In most cases, these banks are privately owned, by commercial collectors. And their business? Well, it’s not to reuse clothes in Ireland or give them away for free. No, their activity is simply to collect as much clothing as possible and export it in huge bales with very little sorting around the state and quality of the products.
It isn't because these items don’t have much value to us that they are not profitable for those companies. A lot of them only “partner with charities”. By donating a small amount of their earning to the charity (usually around 5%) they can put the name of the charity on their banks. Hence the confusion in people’s mind about what the end use and destination of their clothes are.
Although, thanks to a note from the Charity Regulator, this kind of partnership should be very clear on the bank as to how the charity is benefiting from it and what happens to the clothes. Although, it's application remains partial.
You can read about these rules and signal non-compliant ones to the regulator here.
So what’s the problem? Surely making money out of old clothing is not a crime, especially if part of the profit is going to said charities.
No, on the contrary, if anything, this market highlights the potential of Circular Economy and the capacity to build profitable activity around waste products and the value that it has.
The issue arises when profit is captured in Western countries through the collection, sorting, and tapping into stocks that still hold significant value, only to "distribute" surplus inventory (overstock, reverse logistics, damages, etc.) to "emerging overseas markets." This marketing talk actually translates into: selling what we don’t want (aka dump unusable items) to countries in the global south, while taking credit for “recycling” or “repurposing” the clothes.
To be clear, this is not a charitable act, merchants in receiving countries pay the full price for bales, without knowing in advance what they’ll really be dealing with. Figures from the Or Foundation operating in Ghana’s biggest second-hand market tell us that on average, only 18% of a bale is sellable right away. A staggering 40% will end up as solid waste. What's unacceptable is the impunity in which stakeholders are clearly sending waste abroad, under the guise of international market dynamics and loopholes in regulations to avoid liability.
That’s where we need to make a clear difference between textile banks operated by charities and the ones that aren’t. Charities do an excellent job at reusing the clothes that they receive, reselling over 50% of it nationally in their many stores around the country. This activity highly contributes to fund their charitable activities. The Irish network of charities involved in second-hand clothing is very efficient and one of the most developed in Europe.
Because we know that can be confusing, you can learn how to recognize "the good" textile banks here.
The root of the issue lies in the quantity that needs to be addressed. With an annual 35kg of textile per capita in Ireland (which far exceeds the EU average of 12 kg) charities cannot cope. That’s where the private sector enters the game, and found a much better way of making profit out of your old clothes: the international market. Rather than investing in sorting facilities and skilled workers, to reuse/resell or repurpose textiles here in Ireland, their activity boils down to collecting the clothes, putting it in bales and exporting it in bulks. The joys of a globalised market!
As we mentioned above, except from the high quality ones that can sell on the lucrative vintage market in western economies, the rest is exported again and again, until a good portion of what you disposed of is simply going to become waste in countries that can’t send it to anyone else. You can find a more detailed explanation of this process which is detrimental to entire communities and their environment here.
The textile waste crisis has very real and grave consequences. That’s why it’s important to deal with it earlier on at the production and consumption levels.
