Macklemore got it right in his hit song "Thrift Shop" when he said "One man's trash, that's another man's come up." Thrifting offers an afterlife to many discarded objects through an impressive process of collection, sorting and resale. Items that don't sell are usually recycled.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of our clothing ends up at the dump, and with fast fashion producing more clothing than ever, that's a big problem. According to the Environmental Protection Agency's most recent report on waste and pollution, textile production surged from 1.3 million tons in 1960 to 13 million tons in 2018, a year that saw 9 million tons of textiles disposed of in landfills.
Fast fashion brands such as Topshop, Zara and Forever 21 generate millions of tons of clothing, with stores and customers rapidly discarding clothes. H&M recently got heat for burning some of its unsold clothes, while Nike has received criticism for slashing shoes they discard, rendering them useless.
The unsold clothes that don't immediately make it into landfills in the U.S. are "donated" to other countries, such as Chile and Ghana, which have become dumping grounds for textile waste. One such place is Chile's Atacama Desert, once a vast expanse of unobscured landscape of vibrant red-orange rock canyons and peaks. Now, as far as the people of Alto Hospicio can see, the desert bears a new geographical feature: mountains of clothing.
Due to its duty-free ports, Chile receives millions of tons of clothing from the U.S., Europe and Australia, resulting in an overwhelming amount of discarded textiles that the country can't keep up with.
Thankfully, all hope is not lost.
Consumers can do as Macklemore, and turn to thrift stores. Not only do secondhand stores help reduce the need for clothing production as items get reused, but most of these stores ensure that clothing is recycled when it doesn't sell.
Brent Hendricks, executive director of Global Neighborhood Thrift, explains that his store — a local nonprofit that provides job training to refugees — takes any and all donations in an effort to divert items from landfills.
"If you think, 'No one's gonna want to wear this,' still donate it to us, and we will get what we can out of it," Hendricks says. "We will find a place for it that, 95 percent of the time, is not in a landfill."
Outside of the thrift store, there's an entire textile recycling ecosystem that most people don't get to see, he says.
Once items make it through a rigorous grading system at Global Neighborhood Thrift to determine their value, they are either sold in the store, sold to other vendors through a commodities broker, or taken to other facilities to be fully recycled into industrial rags, insulation, carpeting, and more.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology, which promotes American innovation and industrial competitiveness, reports that while 85 percent of our clothing currently gets thrown away or burned, the 15 percent that gets donated is almost entirely reused in some way. Only about 5 percent of what's donated still makes it to landfills or incinerators.
This cycle also benefits Goodwill and other secondhand stores, because textiles are a commodity they can sell. Hendricks says that it makes practical sense for thrift stores to ship their textiles to be recycled.
"If you can make a couple cents a pound off of it instead of paying a couple cents to get rid of it, it just makes good business sense," he says.
Hendricks encourages everyone to go to Global Neighborhood Thrift and other thrift stores to stop the cycle of fast fashion, and to get high quality, long-lasting clothing.
"After you donate the stuff that you're getting rid of, choose to come in and buy clothes in a thrift store instead of just perpetuating the cycle," he says. "We have 25,000 square feet full of clothing for sale. We have so much stuff, and if you buy it from us, you'll save money and you won't perpetuate that cycle. It's kind of a two-for-one." ♦