Where donated clothes actually go

Drop a bag of clothes at a charity shop and the mental picture is straightforward: someone local buys your old jumper, the charity keeps the money. For most of the bag, that is not what happens. Britain's roughly 10,000 charity shops, represented by the Charity Retail Association, can only sell a fraction of what comes through the door — commonly estimated at somewhere between a tenth and a third of donations, depending on the shop and the season. The rest is too worn, too dated, out of season, or simply arrives faster than any rail can absorb it. That surplus does not go in the bin. It goes on the scales.

Charity retail sits on top of a commercial rag trade that long predates it. Unsold stock is sold by the kilo to textile merchants — the firms grouped under the Textile Recycling Association — who collect it in cages and bales, truck it to grading warehouses, and sort it into dozens of categories: premium "cream" items for vintage resale, tropical-weight mixes for West Africa, winterwear for Eastern Europe, damaged cotton for industrial wiping cloths, and the genuinely dead stock for shredding into "shoddy" fibre, much of it processed around Panipat in northern India for mattress filling and insulation. The charity is paid per tonne, which is real income and part of why the model works at all. But the point at which your jumper stops being a gift and becomes a commodity comes early, usually within days.

Exports are where most of it ends up. The UK is one of the world's largest exporters of used clothing, shipping on the order of 300,000 to 400,000 tonnes a year, with major flows to Ghana, Poland, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates and Kenya. In East Africa the trade is called mitumba; in Ghana the imported bales are known as obroni wawu — "dead white man's clothes", on the once-reasonable assumption that no living person would give away garments this good. That assumption has aged badly, and the reason is fast fashion. As garment volumes exploded and quality fell — most new clothing is now predominantly polyester — the average bale contains more unwearable, unrepairable stock than it did a generation ago, and the per-kilo price merchants will pay has slumped, in places below the cost of collection.

The end of the line: Accra and the Atacama

Kantamanto market in Accra is the largest second-hand clothing market in West Africa, importing an estimated 15 million garments a week. Retailers there buy bales unseen, a gamble on what is inside, and the Ghanaian research group the OR Foundation estimates that around 40 per cent of a typical bale leaves the market as waste — a figure importers dispute, but nobody disputes the physical evidence. Accra's Kpone landfill filled years ahead of schedule; textile tangles clog the Korle Lagoon; ropes of compacted clothing wash out of the ground on Accra's beaches. Chile tells the same story by a different route: the duty-free zone at Iquique imports tens of thousands of tonnes of used clothing a year, largely from the US and Europe, and the unsold residue has been dumped and periodically burned in the Atacama desert near Alto Hospicio — piles visible in satellite imagery, made of exactly the kind of clothing that started life in a donation bag.

Some importing countries have tried to shut the tap. The East African Community moved to ban used-clothing imports in 2016 to protect domestic textile industries; the plan largely collapsed after the United States threatened members' trade preferences, though Rwanda held out and accepted the penalty. The EU has been tightening waste-shipment rules to stop unsorted textile waste travelling under the label of reusable clothing, and from 2025 EU states must collect textiles separately — pressure the UK trade feels through shared markets even outside those rules.

What donating actually buys

None of this means charity shops are a con. They fund real work, keep wearable clothes in use, and the export trade genuinely clothes millions of people cheaply while supporting hundreds of thousands of traders' livelihoods in markets like Kantamanto. The problem is arithmetic: donation is a sorting mechanism, not a disposal one, and it was never built to absorb the output of a fashion industry producing over 100 billion garments a year. A donated item that nobody anywhere wants to wear does not vanish; it travels, at someone else's expense, to a landfill with weaker environmental controls than the one down the road. The honest hierarchy is unchanged — buy less, buy better, repair, and donate only what you would hand to a friend. What the bag conceals is that "away", for British clothing, frequently has a postcode in Accra or a grid reference in the Atacama.