Clothes still become waste

After years of speculation about the efficacy of fashion’s takeback schemes, the Changing Markets Foundation set out to gather hard evidence and dropped off 21 items of clothing at a variety of takeback collection points across Europe, each garment furnished with a concealed airtag tracker. It targeted 10 brands that operate takeback schemes: H&M, Zara, C&A, Primark, Nike, Boohoo, New Look, The North Face, Uniqlo, and M&S. Items were all of good quality, bought from second hand stores. Some still had the original tags attached.

Within the marketing for their takeback schemes, brands often point to their sorting process and emphasise that good quality clothes will be carefully sorted and reused. Zara talks about local organisations that classify garments according to condition and quality, while Uniqlo says it classifies clothes into 18 detailed categories. Despite this supposed selectiveness, the tracking undertaken by Changing Markets showed that three items were downcycled, one was “downcycled or destroyed”, two got stuck in a warehouse then didn’t move again, one was shredded, one was burnt for fuel, two never moved from their original tracking points, one was left on a vacant lot in Mali, and one was dumped in a skip. That’s 12 of 21 items of resalable quality that were either downcycled into products like stuffing and insulation, destroyed, or left to languish. 

“In one case, a pair of new trousers from Zara, deposited in C&A’s collection bin in Paris, was within a week transported to the SOEX processing plant in Bitterfeld-Wolfen. Despite being in excellent condition with a clothing tag still attached, the tracker went off at this facility, indicating that within a month of drop-off, the trousers were destroyed, likely shredded, rather than being diverted for direct reuse or resale,” the supporting report Take-back Trickery, reads.

Changing Markets shared its methodology with Swedish paper Aftonbladet, which conducted a similar investigation, focusing on only H&M and using clothes bought from secondhand shops in a Stockholm mall. One hoodie which was “recently considered attractive enough to hang in front of a mall” was sent to a facility in Poland where clothing waste is ground down, while a grey zip-up shirt, “which looks like it has never been worn” ended up at a facility in Germany where clothes are ground down too. 

In downcycling rather than reusing, brands defy a leading principle of the circular economy: circulate products and materials at their highest value. This is vital not only to extend the active use of clothes but also for getting the highest environmental benefit as reuse is more environmentally beneficial than either recycling or downcycling. 

While brands do tend to inform customers that their donated clothing may be downcycled, they claim it only happens when a garment is too worn or damaged to be resold or reused as is. In downcycling – and even destroying – perfectly good clothes, brands are breaking a central promise that encourages their customers to contribute to these schemes. And adding insult to injury is the fact that the clothes often travel hundreds or thousands of miles before they are shredded, burned or landfilled, adding unnecessary miles and carbon emissions to their journey. For a solution that claims to prevent waste, fashion takeback schemes appear to generate waste at nearly every turn. 

Takeback schemes contribute to waste colonialism

Of the clothes that Changing Markets tracked that weren’t downcycled or turned to waste, seven were sent to other countries to be resold. There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with sending clothes to be sold on the secondhand market if the recipient country wants those clothes and has both a willing customer base and the necessary infrastructure. The small number of clothes sent to, and sold within, Europe appeared to have been resold fairly quickly. Brilliant, they get a second life and are recirculated at their highest value. But it’s important to pay attention to the country they are being sent to because they are not always so welcome.

One garment tracked was sent to Ukraine, which has been subject to very high volumes of clothing donations since the Russian invasion. There’s a thriving secondhand scene in Ukraine, but an increase in imports often means an increase in lower quality garments. One coordinator in an aid distribution centre in Lviv says that “some of the donations are junk” and must be thrown away or sent to a dog shelter to be used as bedding. Add to this an influx of clothing from secondhand dealers who are reportedly exploiting loopholes to import clothing under the guise of humanitarian aid when it’s actually destined for shops and boutiques, and you end up with a country flooded with secondhand clothing it cannot process.

This has been happening in countries throughout Africa for decades. Four of the items Changing Markets tracked were sent to African countries, and Aftonbladet even went as far as travelling to Benin to track a black and white jacket that made its way there through the global secondhand market. One seller the journalists met at the market said he has to throw away half of each bale of clothing he buys. “The supply is huge, the buyers nowhere. The stress grows in the gap,” the article reads. This pattern is echoed across Africa. At Kantamanto Market in Ghana, which receives approximately 15 million secondhand garments per week, around 40% of what’s imported is discarded as waste, often illegally burned or dumped at unofficial landfills because the required infrastructure doesn’t exist. In Kenya, one in three of the 900 million items that are imported annually become waste immediately. 

In 2016, the East African Community (Democratic Republic of the Congo, the United Republic of Tanzania, the Republics of Kenya, Burundi, Rwanda, South Sudan, and Uganda) agreed to a complete ban on imports by 2019 because the low prices of the items were holding back local development, but the US (one of the world’s leading exporters of used clothing) threw its weight behind challenging it, threatening penalties such as suspending Rwanda from being able to sell clothes to America duty-free as part of the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act. 

Sending clothing to a country in such high volumes that it decimates local textile markets, becomes waste, and pollutes the environment is the epitome of waste colonialism. The Global North creates the waste, the Global South must deal with it. Brands sending clothes to already over inundated nations are not closing the loop, they are relocating waste.

It doesn't tackle the real problem: overconsumption

In a 2022 report, Inditex stated that it collected 17,015 tonnes of clothes through its garment collection programme. That sounds like quite a lot, but the same year it placed 621,244 tonnes of new garments on the market. It collected roughly two percent of what it produced and, as we now know, much of that two percent will have been downcycled, destroyed or sent into the damaging waste colonialism ecosystem. The takeback scheme barely makes a dent in its enormous material impact.

A paper from the Journal of Cleaner Production states that “most [environmental] benefits come from avoided production”, while a study commissioned by EuRIC in 2023 revealed that clothing reuse may have an environmental impact 70 times lower than that of producing new clothing (although the specific boundaries and methodology have not been shared, so that figure may change depending on different use cases and scenarios). 

Additionally, in its call for a harmonised, globally accountable Extended Producer Responsibility policy, The Or Foundation called for reduction targets of at least 40% over five years. Given that this information comes from an organisation that grew out of Kantamanto Market, a place that has come to symbolise the fashion industry’s rampant overproduction, it’s worth heeding. Yet in their promises to clean up and avoid waste by running takeback schemes, fashion brands never make any mention of reducing production. In fact, most brands don’t even disclose how much they make. Per the 2023 Fashion Revolution Transparency Index, just 12% of brands disclose data on the quantity of products made annually. According to the index, Adidas made 482 million units, Sainsbury’s made 107,000,000 Tu Clothing products, United Colours of Benetton made 54 million garments, and VF Corporation sourced approximately 410 million units of apparel, footwear, and accessories. 

Fashion giants are producing in almost unbelievable volumes – making around 100 billion items each year collectively - and, according to Fashion Revolution, 99% of them “do not disclose a commitment to reduce the number of new items they produce”. In fact, rather than making a commitment to reduce production, many brands use their takeback schemes as an opportunity to sell yet more product, offering discounts and money-off vouchers to customers who drop off at their collection points. This coupling of circularity and consumption is counterintuitive to brands’ claims of reducing waste, and further fuels the environmentally and socially damaging cycle of overproduction and overconsumption that the global fashion system is now built on.

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