This article explores the global trade of secondhand clothing, highlighting the efforts to extend the life cycle of garments and reduce textile waste. It features the story of Whitehouse & Schapiro, a family business that has been sorting and reselling used clothing for over a century.
After it leaves your wardrobe, nearly every garment eventually winds up burned for fuel or tossed in a dump. There is a growing effort to fend off the tsunami of ultra-fast fashion currently flowing into landfills, from chemical recycling that can melt down modern fabric blends to boutique designers giving old clothes new life through upcycling. But the first stop for most used clothing is a donation bin, where it enters the global supply chain for secondhand items.
The conveyor belt in their plant outside Baltimore is like a moving garage sale; Electronics, kids’ toys and wall art flow past employees whose job is to sort goods for resale around the world. About half of what they receive is clothing, according to Cyprienne Crowley, who oversees operations. “The rest of it is all this other stuff: luggage, glassware, shoes, accessories that all have other markets as well,” she said. “They’re all perfectly usable items that have another life in them. If it can be reused and worn again that’s the most efficient thing that can be done with it.” This is a family business. Crowley is married to the company’s president, Brian London, whose great-great-grandfather started what would become Whitehouse & Schapiro in 1907. In the decades since, the company has evolved from a local scrap collector to a global trader in used clothing. “Some might look at this and be like, ‘Oh, it’s at its end of life.’ Well it’s at the end of life in the U.S., but I have a whole line of people outside a store in Nicaragua waiting for this stuff to come down there,” London said. “They’re ready to use it and they’ll wear it out, and at some point it’ll reach its end of life.” In the warehouse, there are mountains of bags stamped with the label “GOOD SHOES,” and heaps of bulk clothing, bound and stacked like bales of hay. Windy Norman has been working the conveyor belt at Whitehouse & Schapiro for more than 30 years, sorting goods for resale around the world. “People might think it’s trash, but it’s somebody else’s treasure. I mean the clothing that comes through is great. We even just had a fur that came in a few minutes ago,” said Windy Norman, who has been working the conveyor belt for more than 30 years. “A lot of people are really wasteful. A lot of that stuff has nothing wrong with it.” Fur coats may come down the line sometimes, but more often these days, London said it’s ultra-fast fashion that is not made to last. “Things are made to only be worn a few times,” he said. “As that lower-end stuff becomes more of the bale and you have less reusable stuff, at some point the economics of it wouldn’t make sense. As costs go up and the reusable items go down, you start getting to a problem point.” Clothes that can’t be resold can be downcycled into insulation or wiper rags for the restaurant and oil industries. Two-thirds of American textiles end up in the landfill. Another 19% is burned for energy, and just 15% gets recycled. That ratio is worse in many African countries that buy a lot of secondhand clothes, especially when “There are some bad players in this industry who ship things that are basically almost trash. For us we always stand by our product, we look at everything we ship,” Crowley said. “Reputation is very important.” Reselling clothes can keep them out of the landfill for a few more years. But even secondhand clothes eventually end up as trash, whether it’s in the U.S. or abroad. “The misconception is that these clothes are just being dumped somewhere. That’s not true, someone’s purchasing it. It’s just that with those materials getting lower and lower value, that system is having a lot of challenges,” said Rachel Kibbe, CEO of the trade group. “We see a solution and also an economic and job opportunity by figuring out how to recycle that which can’t be resold.”; enacted last year, that aims to hold clothing makers accountable for their products’ entire life cycle. Regulators are hammering out the details of how it will work, and similar legislation is on the table in that includes provisions on textile reuse and recycling. If it’s state-by-state, she says textile recycling could end up like recycling for plastics and paper, only capturing a fraction of the waste that’s out there. “The reason recycling has been such an absolute failure is we don’t have unified laws in place,” Kibbe said. “We don’t have unified federal policy providing directions around what can we recycle, what can’t we recycle, what type of infrastructure to do we need, what kind of unit economics does that make? It has not been successful doing it piecemeal.” You might have a shirt in your closet that says “made from recycled material”, but the next step in the journey of clothing is finding ways to make sure that it doesn’t end up in a landfill
TEXTILE RECYCLING SECONDHAND CLOTHING SUSTAINABILITY WASTE MANAGEMENT FAST FASHION
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