Every year, we in the UK send a shocking 711,000 tonnes of textiles to landfill or incineration as people mistakenly put clothes in the general rubbish bin. Others do use collection points or charities – and personally there’s nothing I love more than a good rummage through a charity shop. But with limited capacity to absorb the sheer rising tide of second-hand clothes, demand for top quality bargains & competition from very low-price new clothes, 60% are exported to second-hand markets. So, what happens next?
I went to follow the trail of those clothes to Kenya with colleagues from the Charity Retail Association and the British Heart Foundation (both members of WRAP’s Textiles 2030 voluntary agreement). For them, second hand clothes are a vital source of income. For their values, and to keep public confidence, they want to be sure that clothes exported are not problems exported but are rather providing solutions.
Of what we give to charity shops, roughly 50% gets snapped up as we search for treasures among the preloved rails. Giving clothes to charity shops is a great way to clear out your groaning wardrobe - the average UK adult has 118 items of clothing in their wardrobes, of which one quarter - 31 items - go unworn for at least a year. Making sure your give-aways are top quality will really help those charities. After a while, if no luck selling, charity shops sell the remaining 70% to traders and on to sorters in UK, Eastern Europe, UAE, or Pakistan. Sorters recycle what they can, take out the waste, and bale usable clothes for shipping to countries including Kenya. Based on UN COMTRADE data, in 2022 Europe exported USD 577 million worth of used clothing to Sub Saharan Africa in particular to Ghana, Cameroon, Kenya and Uganda. That’s only 3% of the total textiles market in Europe, but still plenty big enough.
In Kenya, importers and traders also specialise, selling from dawn, in Nairobi’s bustling, crowded, Gikomba open-air market covering 16 acres. 65,000 traders are hustling and bustling, shouting out their wares ‘Jeans, jeans’; ‘shirts, shirts’ or yelling ‘Camera, camera’ (meaning top quality) or cut-price: ‘Just 20 bob!’ All the clothes keep on moving; and fast. A trader will open a bale at daybreak, sell the good stuff within a couple of hours, then seek to shift the second and third grade materials – often to traders who go to markets in the rural areas. They are canny dealers, with a sharp eye for fading, stretched necks, fraying or bobbling. Some clothes are just too big or don’t meet Kenya’s fashion standards, so the market is crammed with tiny stalls where under corrugated iron rooves women sew and repair at high speed, while down a dim smoky alleyway filled with the acrid smell of dye, men are adding stamps and designs to old jeans or sweatshirts – including big Gucci logos on your cheap and cheerful jeans.
Reportedly, two million people in Kenya have jobs or livelihoods in the ‘mitumba’ or second-hand clothes market. So many people said: ‘I went to school on mitumba and now my children are going to school thanks to mitumba’. This is in a country with millions living below the poverty line and mitumba offers jobs and livelihoods. What’s more, the import tax on clothes contributes to the Government’s resources. The trade is also popular with 8 out of 10 Kenyans wearing mitumba – those watching every penny and young people keen to catch the latest trends.
The East African Community and Kenya considered a ban on second hand imports, but there was such an outcry in the country and from the USA, that only Rwanda went ahead. People repeatedly argued that mitumba is enabling Kenyans to earn a living and the traders are successful businesspeople who would not import bad quality or waste clothes that wouldn’t sell. Anything wearable is sold; the lowest quality is cut up into strips for mops, sofa or cushion stuffing or industry wipes. Only an estimated 2% of the clothing imported is waste.
But no question, there is a major waste problem in the city; the country has limited collection and recycling capacity; the Nairobi River is a dump with textiles scraps (offcuts from the tailors) in the muddy mix; and conditions in the Gikomba market would not pass UK Health & Safety. Kenya does not have the waste facilities to cope with their rubbish, including the relatively small amount of textiles waste. In Ghana the situation is worse it would seem. But even campaigners like the Or Foundation are not calling for the trade to be banned. Rather, they are calling for regulation to ensure that the fashion and textiles industry takes responsibility for its waste – and invests in the infrastructure in Kenya and Ghana to cope with the volumes.
For the Or Foundation, they are calling it a ‘solidarity’ levy to the Textiles Extended Producer Responsibility regulations under debate. The Charity Retail Association are in the very early stages of investigating whether UK charities could and would show the way with a voluntary levy to invest in for example, improving conditions in the markets or tackling dumping hotspots. These are new ideas being hammered out alongside other options including increased capacities to recycle, both in Europe and Africa; better quality standardization; upskilling of tailors’ workforces; data transparency and, crucially for all options, listening to African partners.
Textiles EPR regulations in some European countries finance the costs of waste collection and recycling on a national level. But they do not assign portions of fees to countries in the global south that will inevitably receive some exported waste to help them manage that waste. That is why some are saying solutions must also take account of the waste that is not managed in-country. The intention behind cross-border EPR is to cover the cost of dealing with the eventual, inevitable waste at the end of the second use of clothing.
What is for sure, as a nation we need to buy fewer new clothes, keep our pre-loved clothes out the bin, selling them online, donating to charities or swapping with friends and family and get the buzz of finding new items there too. To support this shift in our shopping behaviours we need brands and retailers to create products with durability and longevity in mind and commit to reducing the ever increasing production volumes, to slow down the volume of low-quality items flooding second hand markets. And finally, we need to invest in supporting developing nations who are at the end of the clothing line.
Originally published in Drapers 25th July 2024.