Clothing Recycling: What Really Happens to the Clothes We Donate

Shirts, trousers, socks, shoes, coats, bags. And more shirts. Anyone who has walked past a clothing donation point or a charity shop lately has probably seen the familiar sight: piles of bags and loose clothes on the pavement, collecting mud and dust.

Donating clothes and making sure they get a second life is an important environmental and social act. But how we donate decides whether a garment reaches someone who needs it — or the bin.

When clothes reach a charity that collects, sorts and sells used clothing — such as WIZO's Bigudit second-hand chain in Israel — they are sorted, and the good items are sold in its second-hand shops. Those sales fund the charity's work, and second-hand trade is a significant share of its income. Around Passover, for example, sales bring in about 30% of such charities' annual income.

So your garment does two good things: it goes back into the community for someone else to wear, and it raises money for the charity on the way.

A bag left outside a closed shop is never sorted. Uncollected piles of used clothing cause environmental damage, mess and a nuisance in the neighbourhood, so the municipality clears them — into the bin, or to companies that trade in used clothing and export it abroad. Even if the bag held good items, the charity never knows and never benefits.

A considerable amount of these clothes ends up in landfill, where they take many years to break down and cause pollution in the meantime. Global textile waste has already been recognised as an environmental problem that demands urgent action: some is buried in the ground, and some is released into rivers and oceans.

Clothes left on a street bench in the hope that a passer-by will take them are not a good solution either: most will never find a new home, and will reach the same landfill.

Bring clothes when the shop or collection point is open and accepting donations. If the charity asks people not to bring items right now, keep the bag at home and bring it later. The bag can wait; the pile on the street cannot.

Don't leave bags by a locked door or on a bench. A garment that is never sorted almost always ends up in the bin.

Yes, clearing clothes out of the house is satisfying. But it is far more satisfying to know they reached someone who needs them, and not the rubbish.

Reusing clothes, which avoids buying new items whose production consumes many resources, is usually the best solution. A study by the UK organisation WRAP found that if consumers extended the life of their clothes by just nine months of use, the UK would save about £5 billion — in resources, transport, laundry and waste handling.

So before looking for a clothing recycling bin, it is worth asking: can I wear this another season? Mend it? Pass it on to a friend? Every extra month in our wardrobe is a month in which no new garment is made.