I’m intending to discard probably half of the contents of my closet, so normally I’d toss everything I’m getting rid of into bags and drop it off at goodwill. While I’m sure some of it is in perfectly good condition and would be resold, some is probably not resellable due to holes, tears, missing buttons, or other defects.
So what happens to those items they can’t resell? Is it a hindrance to goodwill to drop them off as well? Should I landfill these items instead?
Goodwill sells unsalable clothing to other recyclers:
So your donation still benefits Goodwill, and is better than ending up in the landfill.
Ah, thanks Fear Itself. To take it a step further, what exactly do these “salvage brokers” do?
Some of it is converted to high quality rag paper, similar to that made by the Crane Paper Company for currency, although the Crane paper uses new, never washed rags. I guess calling them rags if they’ve never been used is an oxymoron, but there you have it. Before higher tech methods of identifying conterfeit currency came up, they’d use a UV light looking for the optical brighteners in rags that had been washed.
So your unusable clothes will not become currency, although they may become high price hand calligraphed wedding invitations.
Some of it ends up at the dump. Lots of clothing is not even usable for pulping for rag fiber because it is made of synthetics or there are things like nylon thread stitching and embroidery that don’t mix. And of course anything that looks oily like the barrels of rags that service stations use - if they are too far gone to be cleaned and sent out again there is not much left to do. If you had tons you could sell them to brokers as fuel, but that just doesn’t happen. The landfill is the only sensible answer.
At home of course you could compost natural fibers. But commercial and community composters don’t want them because of those nylon threads re-emerging as snarls and ruining the batch.
This site seems to suggest that there is a pretty good market for old clothes.
ISTR a news story a few years ago on this–they followed a single T-shirt all the way from the US, where it was donated, to somewhere in Africa, where an exceedingly poor man paid something like a dollar for it, which was a tidy sum to him. When the reporters told him they had given the T-shirt away, the man was duly confused as to why HE had to then pay money for it. (But, of course, transporting bales of used clothing across the sea isn’t free.)
Ah-- the story was “How Susie Bayer’s T-Shirt Ended Up on Yusuf Mama’s Back” By George Packer in the NY Times. It’s visible in their archive for a fee.
Just found it reprinted as “The Adventures of and Old Shirt” (sic) on this page:
Yeah, your guy’s old clothes end up on my neighbors’ backs, which is endlessly amusing because so often the clothes (especially “sayings” tee shirts) are spectacularly inappropriate for the person who ends up wearing them.
I don’t know. But sometimes I donate some very nice things to the charity people to pick up (like a nice Mitsubishi 27" and flavorwave oven, etc.) and I sometimes wonder if the loaders don’t just help themselves to what they like and drop the other stuff off at the store. Or, too, I wonder if those folks running the store see the really nice stuff come in and then put a two-cent price tag on it and sell it to themselves.
I guess I’ve seen a lot of crummy people during my life do crummy things, hence I’m a little cynical these days. But, just the same, I don’t let it keep me from doing what I feel is right.
A lot of the people working at GoodWill and Salvation Army are actually poor themselves and are getting training in retail. Quite a few of the loaders are working off court ordered community service requirements. Some just got out jail and are trying anything to get back on thier feet. And yes, I have seen the guy at the checkout wearing a very nice Polo shirt that I wish I had gotten to first, but I don’t really mind because it did go to someone who actually was by definition “poor” compared to myself.
Si Amigo, you make a good point.
As I understand it, thrift store employees frequently get “first pick” of donated items, but they have to pay the regular thrift-store price for them. Putting a super-cheap price tag on a really nice item so that you can sell it to yourself for almost nothing counts as stealing from the store, and is not smiled upon by the thrift store management.
I’m not saying that no thrift store employee ever does steal from their employer, mind you, but if/when they do, they can’t make it legit just by faking an unwarrantably cheap price for the item they’re stealing.