Ever wondered who’s wearing your cast-offs?

13 December 2008

Katrina Manson explores Africa’s extraordinary multimillion-pound trade in secondhand clothing, much of it imported from Britain and the United States

Rejects are big business. Worldwide, the market in secondhand clothes rakes in $1 billion a year, ten times more than in 1990. Such is their lure that fake collectors go door to door pretending to gather up bounty for charity. Our cast off cast-offs — 250,000 tonnes of them — rack up £40 million for the UK’s 7,500 charity shops each year.

Some never leave our shores. Whereas once being an ‘Oxfam kid’ was a dreaded playground insult, today the charity has ‘boutiques’ that sell vintage items back to nifty shoppers at keen prices. Some set the bar so high, you’re lucky if they’ll even take your freebies. But whether flogging spangly 1980s fashion faux-pas, or last season’s shapeless jumper, only a third is sold back to UK shoppers. The rest — the rejected rejects of the bunch, including my kilts — is sorted into up to 400 categories, from sexy tops to kids’ wear, and pressed into bales.

Since 90 per cent of the value of any bale tends to come from the 10 per cent deemed most desirable, picking out high-worth gems is crucial, and provides jobs for many a small rag house across Europe — where 250,000 people work in the industry — and the US. The worst of it is shredded or cut up, ending up as carpet underlay, insulation and factory wiping rags. But a great deal is sold on to rag-and-bone men who ship the stuff to needy places. Oxfam alone earns £4.5 million a year from its Wastesaver operation in Huddersfield, which sorts and sells what doesn’t fly off the shelves of its 730 shops.

It means some of the poorest people in the world have to fork out a small fortune for clothes we liked so little that we discarded them. ‘Oh, bloody hell,’ said my cabbie, aghast to hear that someone somewhere in Africa might end up having to pay for his wife’s bin-linered good deeds.