The secondhand market is imploding. Who is responsible?

The scenes are daunting: tangled webs of clothing waste clogging sewer systems and polluting ecosystems in communities around the world, from Ghana to Kenya to Chile — all of which import shipments of secondhand clothing from countries with high rates of fashion consumption largely in the Global North. Concern has been mounting about the global secondhand market, as stories continue to emerge about unwanted or unsellable clothes choking communities and clogging waterways around the world. “People are finally seeing that this is a big, exploitative industry,” says Bobby Kolade, a designer based in Kampala, Uganda, who upcycles used clothes for his label Buzigahill, which has stockists in Belgium, Japan and elsewhere. “It’s a business model for exporters to smuggle in waste.” In recent years, varying estimates have circulated around the world for how much of the secondhand clothing imported into countries in the Global South is not fit for reuse or resale — ranging from 1 to 40 per cent. The higher estimates are contested by export companies and trade associations. Steven Bethell, president of Bank & Vogue [no connection to Vogue], a Canadian broker of used clothing and other goods, says it’s more in the window of 2 to 5 per cent. (He also avoids using the word “waste”, saying “the W word” instead.) He points to studies done by importers indicating those lower percentages; one from the Ghana Used Clothing Dealers Association, for example, claims that less than 5 per cent of clothing imports into the country are waste. “We have been spun a lie about the quantities of waste entering Africa,” says Alan Wheeler, CEO of the UK-based Textile Recycling Association (TRA). Pressed to explain this viewpoint, Wheeler cites anecdotes, industry reports and small-scale surveys. He says he believes the waste in the Atacama Desert in Chile “has been cleaned up”, having not visited the illegal dumpsite that is visible from space, and denies the claims about waste on the beach and at dumpsites that have emerged from Ghana in particular, which he also has not visited. While stakeholders remain at an impasse over the volumes of waste contained in clothing imports, the true figure is, in a way, irrelevant, some say, as virtually all clothes eventually become waste. And the inability to agree on the matter is delaying progress — despite legislative efforts to address fashion’s waste problem — and crowding out efforts to focus on the underlying issue of overproduction. What’s undeniable is that import markets have become oversaturated, or closed off for political reasons (Russia was a major one until its invasion of Ukraine, traders say). Soex, a German company that operates clothing take-back programmes (under its branded programme name I:CO) for brands including H&M and Levi’s, filed for insolvency last month. Euric (European Recycling Industries’ Confederation) issued a statement saying Europe’s textile sorting and recycling industry is “currently experiencing an unprecedented crisis”; and the TRA said in May that it was “sounding the alarm about the imminent collapse of the textile recycling sector”. The problem is that textile recycling, in this context, is regarded by experts as a misnomer. What these companies and organisations more accurately do is sort and export used textiles. And what’s really at risk of failing, say experts, is the business model that the export sector has depended on for decades: sell en masse to countries with thriving secondhand markets, where buyers purchase clothing bales sight unseen, and hope that what is inside will generate them a profit. For many, that model seemed to work for a long time, but that time may be up. Export companies are issuing warnings, experts say, because they feel threatened by the growing negative publicity around the waste that critics say the secondhand trade is responsible for in the Global South — and because they’re worried about the implications of legislation that is coming down the pike, including extended producer responsibility (EPR). Researchers and analysts say that by maintaining a narrative that textile resale and recycling are in crisis, the secondhand clothing industry is keeping attention off the real problem: overproduction, and the fact that nearly limitless volumes of low-quality clothes cannot be repurposed on a planet with limited places to put them and limited people to wear them. The secondhand market has always operated with an inevitably unpredictable supply, and has been able to identify or generate demand for that supply. That balance is getting tricker to strike, says Francois Souchet, managing director of advisory firm Swanstant and former lead of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Make Fashion Circular initiative. “The global secondhand market for clothing relies on a very precarious balance where dramatic changes, such as bans or significant increases in low-value volume could jeopardise the viability of numerous players. They are maintaining the status quo to protect their members’ businesses.” Speaking from experience with his own brand, Kolade says that businesses may rely on secondhand textile imports, but there’s always a component of waste — it’s not if, but how much. Interviews with traders in other markets show the same: secondhand clothing imports are an important source of income and have come to play a crucial role in the economy. At the same time, the quality has dwindled. This leaves local communities paying the price — suffering from the waste, even while they’re earning a living from it. “It has changed dramatically. They used to come [as] very high-quality, nice clothes,” says Sam Mburu, founder of Dandora Green Recyclers in Nairobi, Kenya, who used to buy and sell secondhand clothes himself. “Now, there’s been a shift. Those [quality] bales are not coming anymore.” Yet the export associations have ramped up efforts to undo the perception that exports contain any waste at all. This was a major focal point at the Bureau of International Recycling conference in Brussels in September, and a Secondary Materials and Recycled Textiles Association conference in the US last week. Both events cited research conducted by importers in the impacted markets — which critics say is a deliberate tactic, because it helps to substantiate claims that the organisations overseas are making. But importers have different interests to secondhand retailers within the local markets, says Kolade. “They are still making their cut, regardless of what is inside the bale,” he says. Where to go from here is tricky, because no one wants to see the resale market disappear, but the people most impacted by its downsides want to see it cleaned up. Tackling the root cause Instead of disputing what communities say about the waste they are dealing with, advocates would like to see secondhand exporters recognise that two things can be true at the same time: communities around the world (not just the Global South) want to be able to buy secondhand clothes, and they don’t want to be burdened with the waste resulting from fashion’s unsustainable production volumes. “The people who are dealing with the excess — they are not the problem. The problem is the corporations that are knowingly overproducing every single year, and are setting the targets of perpetual, infinite growth, which is a physical impossibility on this planet,” says Anna Sacks, legislative chair at the Manhattan Solid Waste Advisory Board, who also posts dumpster-dive hauls on social media. “To me, there is a missed opportunity. Don’t punch down, punch up. Everybody should be punching up towards the fast fashion companies and be united in our power against them. That’s how you build real change, not through pointing fingers at people who are living in poverty.” Wheeler and Bethell both say they have no leverage with fast fashion companies. “It’s kind of difficult. They’re so much bigger than we are. We’re just minnows,” says Wheeler. “We’re collectors and sorters of used clothing, used textiles. We’re not part of the fashion industry.” Bethell agrees that the “world has a stuff problem” — but his job is to manage it, not to try to control it. “It’s my job as an innovator to say, what do I do with all this material?” he says. “In North America, I’m the guy who goes and picks up all the beer bottles after a party. My job is to pick up the beer bottles and beer cans, not to moralise how much they drink. I’m not sure it’s fair to ask us, is there too much clothing?” It’s increasingly clear that no one’s problems, at any stage of the value chain, are going to be solved without addressing overproduction. There will never be enough resale or even textile recycling capacity for collectors and sorters — whether they are in the UK or Ghana — to be able to handle the volumes that they are seeing today and that are only continuing to grow. “We have produced enough clothing for the next six generations. What we have produced so far is an enormous waste problem. Of course we need better solutions for dealing with the waste we’ve already created, and equally as much, we need to deal with the continued overproduction,” says Anja Bakken Riise, director of Future in our Hands, a Norwegian organisation focused on the fair distribution of world resources. “We’re just not enough people to wear all of these clothes.” A waste problem, or a waste management problem? Wheeler denies that the problem of low-quality clothing is harming communities on the receiving end of the export market. “The poor quality is not felt really in Africa. It’s felt by people doing the sorting in Europe,” he says. He makes an increasingly common argument that governments in import countries need support to develop their infrastructure, not a reduction in the clothes coming in. Other organisations have taken the same stance. In May, non-profit Humana People to People published a report, based on research conducted by Oxford Economics, arguing that the secondhand market is a prolific source of job creation. For the “small” amount of waste that it said is part of the clothing stream, the authors’ suggestion was to support governments in expanding and strengthening their waste management systems. Kolade questions why the onus is on African and other governments to improve their waste management systems to deal with textile waste, rather than on the governments in countries where the clothes are first consumed and then exported. Pending legislation Meanwhile, a wave of incoming legislation is likely to have major implications for the secondhand market. Policymakers around the world, and in Europe in particular, are writing and passing regulations expected to touch every aspect of the fashion industry, from agriculture to consumer marketing claims, with the potential — and the intent — to incentivise better practices. But while the implications of a green directive might be relatively clear for a cotton grower, and for brands buying cotton products — to reduce pesticide use or avoid soil tilling, for example — the end-of-life question for clothing is far more complicated. Will brands be responsible for the fate of their clothes past the point of sale? If they are, where will clothes be collected and how will they be processed? Will brands need to pay into an EPR framework? How much would they pay, and where would those funds go? What practices would it encourage or discourage? And what will all of that mean for the current secondhand trade — which as it stands relies on clothes that are passed from the consumer into the resale or donation abyss, clothes that have little value attached to them aside from what an end user is willing to pay for it, and that have no blueprint to follow as to where they should end up. There is no ideal destination in the current market. But, with legislation, that could start to change. Most of the legislation on the horizon, however, is still only policy frameworks and proposals — not specific policies, and it’s the details that will determine how exactly this will all play out. “There will be some sort of EPR system in Europe, we just don’t know exactly what it’ll look like,” says Riise. There’s little doubt that EPR will change how clothing is collected, sorted and allocated after sorting. “The big question that everyone is asking is what we will do with it, where will it go? No one really seems to have an answer for that.” Companies are bracing for what new policy frameworks will mean, but they don’t need to be scary, argues Sacks. Business models can adjust, and it’s time for them to do so. “When we talk about corporations and regulations, then all of a sudden it’s like they can’t adjust or innovate. Meanwhile, that’s one of the fundamental principles of having corporations — [to serve] needs, and adjust to market conditions and consumer demands,” she says. “I never see that applied to anything else about companies — you would never say that corporations can’t innovate or they can’t pivot.” The question is whether it happens in time. “I don’t know how this story ends. To me it’s inevitable that the system has to change if we want a living planet, but I don’t know what the timeline is,” she says. Sign up to receive the Vogue Business newsletter for the latest luxury news and insights, plus exclusive membership discounts. Comments, questions or feedback? 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