You start the yearly cleaning of your closet, filling trash bag after trash bag with too-tight clothes or ones you never wore. After dropping them off at your local thrift store, you may feel good about yourself since you think you’re helping others to get cheap clothes. However, how many of your clothes will actually be brought onto the racks to be sold?
Only clean, intact clothing will be accepted. This means if any of your donations have stains, holes, broken/missing buttons or zippers, dust, pet hair, or severe odors, they’re going to be tossed in the garbage bin. Used underwear and socks are not accepted for sanitary reasons. Seasonal and vintage clothes are more likely to be accepted due to higher sales probability. Make sure your clothes will hold up to thrift store standards before you give them away. If they don’t, they may end up in the trash. It’s important to remember this instead of just blindly giving your unwanted clothes away. It may be smarter to give your clothes to friends, family, or close people you know have a use for them.
What a lot of people don’t realize is that only about 25% of clothes donated will be accepted into thrift stores. This means the majority: 75% are probably going to end up in landfills, being burned, ending up in areas that could disrupt the natural environment, or in developing countries’ local markets. Wouldn’t clothes brought overseas help the people in these other countries, though?
The amount of excess clothing being shipped from the US floods into these markets, leading to economic instability and more waste later. Instead of our landfills (The United States’) being filled with unwanted clothes, developing countries are being stuck with them instead. The amount of waste will continually pile up around the people living in these areas. What if we recycle our clothes instead of donating them?
While recycling can be a good option for clothes that are too worn out for thrift stores, only about 12% will be recycled. This is because only textiles made of 100% cotton or wool will be accepted to be recycled. In the age of fast fashion, it’s hard to find any clothes that aren’t made from synthetic fibers. At the end of the day, it’s important to do your research. Have a clear understanding of where your items, clothes or not, will go when you give them away. It’s too easy to be ignorant.
