ABC News
The Truth About Where Your Donated Clothes End Up
Think Charity Means Giving Someone Less Fortunate Your Old Shirt for
Christmas? Think Again
By MIKE LEE
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/print?id=2743456
ACCRA, GHANA, Dec. 21, 2006- - Christmas is one of those times of the year
when many Americans clean out our closets and donate some of our used
clothing to a charity. Perhaps we hope that Santa Clause will replace them
with shiny new shirts, jeans, blouses and shoes. Or maybe we just want to do
some good.
In New York City, AnnMarie Resnick told ABC News why her family donates
clothing at Christmas time. By the time my kids grow out of it, she said,
it is generally in good condition, and I want someone else to get good use
out of it. And who does she think is benefiting? We hope, and we think we
know, it is people in our neighborhood who just aren't as fortunate as us.
And who need it.
And the same sentiment from Marc Kaplowictz, who told ABC News: I am
assuming that is helping people who need it more than we do.
But do most Americans really know what they're doing when they donate
clothing? For instance, do you think you are giving your beloved but worn
jeans to someone with no money to buy their own? Perhaps some poor person in
your hometown, or even far away in Africa?
Wake up and smell the money. Your used clothes are usually sold, not given
away.
According to various estimates, here's what happens to your clothing
giveaways. In most cases, a small amount of the items, the best quality
castoffs -- less than 10 percent of donations -- are kept by the charitable
institutions and sold in their thrift shops to other Americans looking for a
bargain. These buyers could be people who are hard up, or they could be
folks who like the idea of a good deal on a stylish old item that no longer
can be found in regular stores.
The remaining 90 percent or more of what you give away is sold by the
charitable institution to textile recycling firms. Bernard Brill, of the
Secondary Recycled Textiles Association, told ABC News: Our industry buys
from charitable institutions, hundred of millions of dollars worth of
clothing every year.
So, at this point, the charity you have donated clothes to has earned money
off of them in two ways -- in their shops and by selling to recyclers. Then
the recycler kicks into high gear. Most of the clothes are recycled into
cleaning cloths and other industrial items, for which the recyclers say they
make a modest profit.
Twenty-five percent, however, of what the recycling companies purchase from
charities is used not as rags, but as a commodity in an international
trading economy that many American may not even know about. Brill, from the
textile association, picked up the story. This clothing is processed,
sorted and distributed around the world to developing countries, he said.
Take that pair of bluejeans you may have recently donated. Your jeans are
stuffed with others into tightly sealed plastic bales weighing about 120
pounds and containing about 100 pairs of jeans.
The bales are loaded into huge containers and sold to international shippers
who put them on ships bound for Africa and other developing regions. Again,
the price of your old jeans has increased a bit because the shipper had to
buy them.
By the time the bale of jeans is unloaded from a container here in Accra,
Ghana, it is worth around $144. That's $1.30 per pair of jeans. But when the
bale is opened up and the jeans are laid out for sale in the so-called bend
over markets, customers bend over and select their purchases from the
ground for an average price of $6.66 per pair of jeans. That's a 500 percent
increase in value just by opening up the bale of clothes.
So now you know that about 70 percent of your old donated jeans are being
used as cloths to wipe oil off of engine parts and the remaining 20 to 25
percent of pants that left your closet with no value are ultimately sold in
Africa, where American clothes are extremely popular, for an average price
of about $7 per pair. That's a bargain for African shoppers -- most of them
are low-income earners who cannot afford to buy newly made U.S. clothes.
And jeans are by no means the only American charity clothing items on sale
here. I saw everything from T-shirts with U.S. logos like General Motors
to major league baseball caps, name brand dresses, sports shoes and even
underwear. All of them used.
There are two ways to look at all this. One view is that it is wrong for
entrepreneurs to profit from what you give away to charity, and that by
dumping huge amounts of cheap U.S. clothing on the streets here, African
textile industries are closing their factories and laying people off because
they cannot make clothes as cheaply as those American items found in the
bend over markets.
Bama Athreya, deputy director of the International Labor Rights Fund in
Washingtron D.C., told ABC News: Many of these countries in Africa used to
have a fairly well-developed
