Goodwill Industries, etc.: Supply vs Demand of Cast-offs

Factual Questions
1

Occasioned by nothing in particular …

Every year I seem to end up with a 3 or 4 large trash bags of cast-off usable clothes and household goods that I donate to Goodwill or the equivalent. Which got me to wondering …

How is the overall balance of supply and demand for goods at thrift stores and the like? Are major players like Goodwill Industries drowning in cast-offs they can’t sell, or are they sucking wind with empty shelves and disappointed second-hand shoppers? Is the situation highly regional? If so, do national operators like GI truck stuff from region to region or is that cost-prohibitive? Is there a booming but hidden trade in saleable materiel between these sorts of charities?

My curiosity actually predates COVID by years but it’s certainly reasonable to expect demand for cheaper second-hand goods will be climbing in the months ahead. Recessions are always bullish for the second-hand business. So the answer may be different here in 2020 than it was in 2019.

Note I’m not much interested in questions about cash donations. This is entirely about the supply of goods.

I suppose a corollary question would be that if/when a second-hand charity finds itself drowning in stuff what is done to dispose of it? Old clothes could be sold by the ton to a rag-maker, but pretty much everything else they receive looks like it’d end up in a dumpster. And as with recycling, the low value per ton says not much effort can be invested in handling any of this stuff before it becomes a money-losing proposition from end to end.

Said another way, at the margin am I (are we all) doing Goodwill et al and their customers a favor by giving them old stuff or should I/we be throwing it away to save them the trouble of paying to do the same? Let’s assume I/we are smart / charitable enough not to give them anything that’s truly unsaleable trash.

2

Just about 2 weeks ago, I heard a fascinating podcast that discussed all the above questions with detailed and nuanced explanations. You can find it here :

I think you will find all your answers there

3

Missed the edit window. I will try to summarize my understanding:

  1. The hubs for recycled clothes export are Mississauga, CA and Houston, TX
  2. Most of the recycled clothes consumers are in Africa
  3. Most recycled clothes are sorted into 3 categories : A. Quality stitching and quality cloth (put on display racks and then exported) B. Not so good quality but can be cut up for rags C. No good as clothes or rags (cheap jeans for example) head to landfills
  4. China has gotten good with making clothes to a price point. But even African customers prefer good quality used clothes than the same priced Chinese clothes because they have longer lives (number of washings)

The podcast talks about electronics and other stuff too. So give it a listen.

4

Donating stuff with little resale value is a big problem for charities as they are ultimately the ones who will have to pay any refuse disposal costs. As noted, clothing has some value as rag, but most household goods are multi-material junk with limited design life and no ability to be fixed.

Anecdotally, in our part of the world at least, Covid shutdowns allowed all those long-deferred wardrobe/garage/shed clean-outs to take place, at the same time as many donation processing places were closed as well and now they are faced with a glut of material they cannot use or even on-sell for its scrap value.

5

:smack: I’d utterly forgotten about the export trade. I was thinking of this as totally a local process or maybe involving adjacent states. Not exports to e.g. Africa.

Donations of broken or obsolete stuff is just dumb / unthinking / wishful thinking. Nobody needs your broken cassette tape player, nor even a working 8-track player. That stuff is trash. Heck, a 3 year old smartphone is almost trash.

6

No it is not. In the podcast linked above, this is discussed. Depending on the country, there is a good demand for older phones like iPhones because these phones are well built and are robust compared to the cheap Chinese phones.

So I forgot where but some places in the world, iPhone 7s are in demand and another place iPhone 8 etc etc

People even take totaled cars From the US (as described by insurance companies) and refurbish them.

7

Well, except that thrift stores are full of previously owned clothes, not to mention eBay. I buy a lot of high quality used clothes, Orvis is one brand I look for… And cheap cloth gets recycled into Red Cross blankets, hardly ever into landfill.

8

In the podcast, I linked, it was said that Walmart quality jeans go to the landfill because they cannot be cut into useable cloth for rags.

Also checking online :

“ . On average, 700,000 tons of used clothing gets exported overseas and 2.5 million tons of clothing are recycled. But over three million tons are incinerated, and a staggering 10 million tons get sent to landfills”

9

Goodwill seems to vary a lot from region to region. In Ontario, Value Village and Talize are also popular. Some religious groups and charities also operate thrift stores.

My town has some Goodwill stores that deal exclusively in books and multimedia. They are well run, have great selections and reasonable prices, and are very popular (even among those who might not shop at a Goodwill). It surprises me this idea has not caught on more widely.

Most Canadians buy and own more clothes than they need. I would guess 5-10% of donations are good quality items that could easily resell at moderate prices. Perhaps another 20-25% of clothing donations are good enough quality or desirable brands to sell in foreign markets, which is big business. Maybe another 25% could be converted to rags, masks, fuel, etc. Charity shops and their for profit equivalents receive and throw away a great deal of junk.

10

Goodwill targets donation centers in affluent neighborhoods and shopping centers in less affluent neighborhoods.

They are a well run business and made over 6 Billion USD in revenue in 2018. Goodwill Industries International | Company Overview & News

11

I’m currently reading this very interesting and often entertaining book, which is about the fate of used merchandise, primarily clothing, in several parts of the world.

https://www.amazon.com/Secondhand-Travels-Global-Garage-Sale-ebook/dp/B07QPPRR6N/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=secondhand&qid=1593999284&sr=8-2

12

@ am77494

Please post a list of subjects touched on in the podcast, as evidenced by the posts, few (including myself) are willing to spend the time listening to it. Posting, listen to the podcast doesn’t address the comment. This a written discussion board after all. :upside_down_face:

That said, don’t know if this was covered on the podcast or not, but Goodwill is hated by some in the videogame (and other) collecting communities because often high end, rare or popular donations go directly to shopgoodwill.com, an auction site that lists items at eBay prices or higher. Taking away the likelihood of getting an item donated by someone in their community away.

So just because you may see sparsely populated shelves in your Goodwill store, doesn’t mean that really good items aren’t being donated. It’s just that you’ll never seem them hands on.

13

See above, post #3, I summarized my understanding as it relates to the OP.

14

We don’t have the equivalent of “Goodwill” here in the UK, but we have a great many charity shops. Just before lockdown, I took a load of stuff to the one nearest to me, which is in a relatively poor part of town. I got chatting to the manager.

She told me that The main demand in her shop is for work clothes, school clothes and coats. There is a big demand for toys at Christmas, but their limited storage means that they can’t keep any but the best.

When they get a donation, they sort through it and split it into four piles: Quality goods, useful stuff, recycling and landfill.

Quality stuff gets passed to a partner shop that specialises in high-end clothes and goods. They can sell most of the ‘useful stuff’, and a local recycler calls weekly to take rags and scrap metal for a few Pounds.

Some years ago, I knew an antique dealer in The Cotswolds. Every Monday, he toured round a selection of charity shops to see if they had anything interesting. If they had, he would sell it for them and split the profit. This was mostly jewelry, paintings and pottery, but there was the occasional piece of furniture.

15

I thought the idea was to maximize the amount of money raised by the donations? So if an object is selling for higher on Ebay or elsewhere, it’s a good thing that it’s being listed for that price.

16

OP here. I used “Goodwill” just as a readily recognized US brand name with scale; the discussion is not meant to be about them as such.

They are perhaps a bit different than other second-hand shops in that part of their mission, perhaps their main mission, is to generate jobs for semi-handicapped marginal workers. And yes, there is plenty of controversy out there about whether they’re a force for good or an exploitative racket. As it relates to goods, their whole schtick may be more a matter of converting cash donations plus saleable goods into man-hours of “useful” labor. To some extent, whether the laborers are sorting stuff destined for the landfill or destined for Africa doesn’t matter if the labor itself is the driving goal.

Here’s a different example that may be closer to where I was going with my Qs:

Near us there’s a city-supported elder community center. Folks can be picked up by shuttle bus at home to go to the center, hang out, play cards, do activities, get some lunch, etc. Pre-COVID they had day-trip outings to shows, buffets, etc. You don’t have to be elder poor / working class to use the place, but that’s certainly the main demographic who does.

For years they had a thrift store. As many of the center’s regular attendees aged out, they (or their next of kin) donated their worldly possessions to the store. Which got more and more stuffed. It eventually came to resemble a garage sale from the 1970s/1980s since that’s about when most of the stuff there had been bought new by the old folks.

Of course very little of that stuff ever sold. Each of the elders already had a house full of that stuff and each was slowly & fitfully downsizing as they aged. During a renovation / expansion of their facilities a couple years ago management shut down the thrift store permanently. Good bet the vast majority of that stuff went to the landfill.

To be sure that was close to a limit case; The kinds of things 85 yos donate is different from the things a 30 yo donates. But it remains that donating, like much of recent recycling, was actually a counter-productive feel-good exercise.

So when I/we donate usable stuff to a local charity store, how much are we simply burdening them with the need to landfill it later vs you/me landfilling it now?

17

One of the things touched on in the podcast episode (thanks for the recommendation am77494!) was that the sorting of recyclables is one of the worst/most expensive/labor intensive parts of the recycling chain. There seem to be really amazing channels for distribution and the actual breaking down (recycling) of items into individual components or putting items where they will best be re-used.

One example they gave in the podcast was recycling of aluminum cans, especially in states where there’s a cash incentive. People who walk around collecting bottles and cans to redeem are actually an important part of the system, as they are doing all of the work to properly identify and place the recyclables, as opposed to when they are just jumbled in with other types of recycleables and have to be separated en masse.

So, it would seem that donating your stuff to a place that does the sorting on your behalf does hold some purpose. Hopefully, they are able to do sorting that efficiently guides items to the proper channels - reuseable/resellable items and then items that can be recycled, further sorted into electronics, textiles, raw materials, etc - can be useful.

If your local charity shop just throws unsold shit into a dumpster then yes, there is more efficiency in throwing it into the dumpster yourself. But if they do in fact sort their cast-offs and get them into the right distribution channels, then it’s still useful for you to utilize them.

One would hope that a national consortium of shops such as Goodwill Industries does do the professional-level sorting and distributing but I have no knowledge of that either way.

You can do some of the legwork yourself when it comes to the top level sorting. Find places that are more niche than just a thrift shop. Get your used electronics to a place that recycles electronics. Consider the re-wear-ability (and then re-sell-ability) of your clothing, or its usefulness as rags, before dumping them all on Goodwill. Divert your building materials to Habitat ReStore. Look for a local furniture bank to take furniture.

Most importantly, the podcast points out, work on the “reduce” part of “reduce/reuse/recycle” to not have so much stuff to begin with!

18

Of course they do, since I have gone to a Goodwill store, bought things, and often buy books online thru Amazon from Goodwill stores.

The idea they just trash everything or send it overseas is ludicrous.

19

I didn’t say they trash everything or send it overseas, I just said that I don’t have knowledge of their specific practices.

And the OP asked in their last post if their local senior center thrift store does it or not, and I don’t know.

20

No, you didnt but it was implied in that Green America and Adam Conover links.