Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Recycled Clothing


Most people who drop off a big bag of cloths at Goodwill are simply trying to clean out their closets. But did you know that only 10% of clothing donations are sold in those stores. There's is an entire international industry of used clothing coming from America. The charities sort through your pile and find the best pieces to sell. Then poor people, bargain hunters and funky thrift store fashionistas buy the cloths. The profits from these transactions do aid the organizations, however, most of your donation comes from the sale of the other clothes you dropped off.

The remaining 90% of your donated cloths are sold by Goodwill (or which ever charity) to companies like Secondary Recycled Textiles Association. In fact, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cloths each year. The recycler sorts the cloths again to find fabrics suitable for things like cleaning cloths and other industrial items that can be made. But again, most of the cloths don't end up as rags or transformed into a different product, they are bundled up into units, 100 pairs of jeans for example, and then sold in bulk to an international clothing ring for a great price, around $1.30 per pair of jeans. Then they are shipped in bulk to the developing world where they are sorted and distributed in the "bend over" market (imagine people browsing stands when the clothes are laid out on the ground). Now the pair of jeans can be worth up to $6.60. That's a huge profit!!

Some may be offended by this process and feel like the donation was intended to help the poor here, not some entrepreneur in the developing world. But I don't mind, Goodwill is helping a lot of people. The clothes are being used and frankly, that type of profit is what the original brand who made the product from scratch enjoyed when they sold the clothes new. So when you travel to Africa, don't be surprised to see a T-shirt with an American wrestler on it... it's part of our global economy.

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