recently I have torn my jeans which, at least here in America, probably sell for around $10-20 depending on luck. One of my relatives sewed it up in less than 30 minutes of work so now I have my jeans back
MPSIMS aside, the above story illustrates that in many cases sewing up clothes seems to constitute significant value creation. Even assuming that such jeans could have been bought new in a poor 3rd world location for $4, if you can repair them on average in an hour, you can make an hourly wage of $4. Which isn’t bad money in many places for a job that most people can learn after some months of systematic instruction and practice.
Well, so why don’t we hear about “donate all your torn clothes to benefit Africa” drives? Why do charities require clothes to be undamaged? Why don’t they take the damaged clothes, ship them to the countries they are assisting, fix them up with local low wage tailors and sell them for an appropriately low price? Or is there just a glut of pristinely undamaged Western second-hand clothes flooding into 3rd world that makes mending unnecessary?
I think your estimates are way off. If I can buy a new pair of jeans in a poorer country for $4, why on earth would I buy an old, torn, stitched back together pair for $4?
I’m guessing that the economics don’t really work out, for one reason or another. The first thing that came to mind is that if you didn’t require a standard of quality in donated goods, you’d get a lot of stuff that was complete junk. In order to avoid shipping complete rubbish over to the 3rd world, you have to pay someone expensive 1st-world salary to comb through them and discard the trash. Depending on the economics, you’d either have to pay that person to be there at a donation center at all times to turn people with trash away, or you’d have to deal with the fact that a drop-off point without an attendant will end up with a lot of junk, and you’ll have to dispose of it.
The next thing that came to mind is that 3rd world countries are probably not at a loss for ripped clothes. Those tailors can just as easily mend their domestic ripped clothes as import ours, then mend those.
first of all “$4” might be an underestimate and the cost may well be much higher. Second, you can pay your tailor a lot less, maybe $1 per hour. And you can sell the mended clothes for significantly less than the cost of new ones.
Transport costs don’t seem to deter the charities that make money by reselling second hand clothes (the not torn ones). Or do you think they always sell this stuff right here in America and just take the money instead of shipping it to Africa and selling it there?
My mother’s church shipped a whole container of donated stuff to a mission school in Africa. Much of it was older computers & similar electronics, books, etc. But they asked for clothes, even old, worn ones. They were used as packing/cushioning material around the computers. When it arrived in Africa, the clothes were unpacked; the good ones used by someone to wear*, and the worn/torn/unrepairable ones were cut up to make patches for quilts, rag rugs, etc.
Though I did wonder at some of the donations: a down-filled, fur-trimmed hooded parka for a Minnesota winter – who would wear that in equatorial Africa?
Someone climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, which is on the equator but has regular snow and genuine glacier on top?
More commonly - they might be disassembled with the down used to stuff pillows, the shell used as a jacket, and the fur used as decorative trim. That’s just off the top of my head. Wouldn’t surprised me if resourceful people could come up with more suggestions.
When I was out of work last year, I put in some time in a local charity shop - we never turned away donations of textiles of any kind - anything we couldn’t sell was bagged up in refuse sacks and the rag man called once a week to buy it for quite a decent price (it was something like 4 or 5 pounds a sack IIRC).
I understand it went off to a depot for sorting (presumably to pick out items that could be sold as vintage or some such), then it was exported to Africa where the decent items of clothing would be used as they are, the rest sorted and processed for fibre for making paper or blankets, or cut up to make patchwork bags, or shredded for use as packing material.
