The ugly side of fashion’s take-back programmes

This is the latest in our Earth Month series. Throughout the month of April, we are reporting on the quest for more sustainable alternatives and some of the other most pressing and overlooked problems within the industry. Fashion take-back programmes, collecting used clothing to resell and repair what they can and recycle or donate the rest, are often lauded for encouraging circularity. The goal is for fewer garments to end up as waste in landfills. Often garments still end up as waste, particularly in the Global South where local industry leaders say they don’t have the desire or capacity to manage it. Clothing manufacturing has soared in recent decades, on track to surpass 100 million tonnes annually by some estimates, driven in part by the rise and ongoing momentum of fast fashion. At the same time, companies are collecting more garments for repair, resale and recycling. Higher-quality clothes are being kept for resale or repair, meaning what ends up on the multibillion-dollar global secondhand market is of lower quality, less durable and less likely to be worn. In Ghana, one of the world’s biggest secondhand markets, researchers have estimated that 40 per cent of imported secondhand clothing is sent directly to a landfill or waste dump without ever being sold or worn again. “It used to be that the clothes you would buy would last you three or five years. Now, it’s a couple of months,” says designer Waithira Kibuchi, based in Kenya. Thrift stores in wealthy countries can’t sell most of the clothing donated to them; those garments end up in bales that have long fueled the secondhand trade market. Now, take-back programmes are driving up volumes further. H&M Group collected more than 29,000 tonnes of garments in 2019, up 40 per cent from the previous year and from nearly 16,000 tonnes in 2016, according to its annual sustainability report. Up to 60 per cent of what H&M collected in the last two years was sorted for rewear or reuse, which includes charitable donations. (The company does not specify how much of this clothing ends up as charity and how much is repurposed or sold on a resale platform. H&M declined to be interviewed for this story.) H&M wrote in its sustainability report that it will never send textiles to landfill. Yellow Octopus, the recycling partner for Primark, which launched in-store recycling in July 2020, also has a no-landfill policy. A crop of new companies that collect, reuse and recycle have launched or expanded to help brands and retailers manage their take-back programmes. While they recognise waste management is a work in progress, they only send clothing to countries with demand, they say. But critics argue that as volumes of used clothing rise and quality declines, clothing increasingly fills dumpsites, clogs waterways, causes fires in landfills and devastates the coastlines. Local designers are also feeling the effects. “If you’re going to help someone, helping is an act of kindness. You don’t give someone something you don’t want. That isn’t helping; that is an insult,” says Samuel Oteng, a designer in Accra, Ghana. Good intentions, mixed results Circular models are changing the shape of the secondhand market. I:CO, a garment collection, reuse and recycling company that works with H&M and others, has established collection points in countries that also receive secondhand clothing, including South Africa and Kenya, and is looking to expand to other African countries, says managing director Paul Doertenbach. Clothes from those collection streams that are not wearable, he says, get recycled into things like insulation materials; they’re also working toward fibre-to-fibre recycling, and full circularity has always been a part of the company’s goal, but it’s not a perfect system yet. “That’s exactly the point that we need to improve on,” he says. “In the end, we need to make sure that we’re creating a flow of materials and that we stop wasting, wherever it is in the world. That was always our mission — because otherwise, the system doesn’t work.” Doertenbach says up to 60 per cent of the clothes I:CO collects are reusable (of the rest, most is recyclable and 10 per cent is incinerated), but he says they don’t have figures for how much of that goes to which markets. I:CO’s goal is to extend the life of clothes and keep them out of landfills, Doertenbach says. Dealing with waste There’s little visibility into where excess clothing does end up, however. Some in Accra believe a landfill would be the more responsible option, saying that they’re dealing with waste that others created but without the containment or oversight that landfilling provides. In Accra, clothes litter streets and market floors, says Oteng; during the rainy season, they get washed away and end up on beaches and in the ocean. They snag the motors on boats routinely, adds Oteng, who is a project coordinator with The OR Foundation. Solomon Noi, Accra Metropolitan Assembly’s head of waste management, said in a video released last year by The OR Foundation that the region’s one official landfill filled up so fast that the city couldn’t maintain it properly and it exploded in fire because of gas and leachate buildup, and the fire burned for months. The OR Foundation researches the secondhand market in Ghana and is working with communities to identify recycling solutions. Doertenbach disputed the notion that the quality of what I:CO sends to export markets like Ghana is subpar — “A T-shirt is a T-shirt,” he says. “We’re shipping where we have demand. We’re not just flooding goods anywhere in the world,” he says. “[The waste] is probably a challenge, but I think if those markets don’t need the goods anymore, they will come up with a ban on importing those goods going forward.” He would not share the financial arrangements that I:CO has with brand partners. “We are collecting discarded clothing and through our sorting process, we are creating value to these discarded products,” he says. Leaving markets like Accra to deal with the excess clothing until foreign companies figure out a full solution for it is troublesome for Liz Ricketts, co-founder and director of The OR Foundation. “The narrative around circularity is like, ‘Well, when we figure it out in the Global North, we’ll stop sending stuff [to Africa].’ Do you know how white supremacist that is?” Ricketts says. Vogue Business reached out to a number of mass-market brands for this story that secondhand shoppers and researchers in Ghana and Kenya say they see the most often in their local markets or strewn as waste, and which critics say are most implicated in the problem of excessive waste and some of which operate clothing take-back programmes. Zara parent Inditex declined to comment, as did H&M, which said its experience with secondhand is limited. Asos said it makes clothes that are designed to last and has recently trained its designers on circular design principles, and that donation is one of the most effective and responsible ways to ensure clothes remain in use for as long as possible. The company also said it expects its charity partners to mitigate any potential problems caused by resale of clothing overseas, and that it has been reassured by those partners that clothing is only exported overseas when there is a genuine demand for those items. Primark said that its products go through robust quality assurance, and that its recycling and donation programmes are designed to prolong the use of products and to combat clothing waste. “We are very selective about who we will work with and only work with partners who share our environmental values and are committed to responsibly recycling products and minimising waste,” a spokesperson said. Looking for solutions Solutions, for now, are elusive. Accra Metropolitan Assembly’s Noi would like to see regulations placed on the industry, including standards for quality on what can be imported into Ghana. “We are a middle-income country; we don’t have the needed infrastructure to be able to take care of such waste,” he said in the video released by The OR Foundation. Some countries have moved to limit or ban the import of secondhand clothing, with mixed results and sometimes inviting trade tensions in the process — but even where they succeed in stemming the flow of clothing, critics say that without restrictions placed on exporting countries, the problem will only shift from countries that ban imports to those that don’t. Yvonne Ntiamoah, a research fellow at Bristol+Bath Creative R+D in London and chair of the Board of Fashion Ghana, is planning an effort to lobby European regulators on the issue. UK-based Sharewear Clothing Scheme is one charity that Ricketts lauds because it ensures that its donated clothes get to specific people who need and will wear it. There are likely others around the world who operate with a similar model, but she says they do not add up to a solution for the larger problem. “There’s too much clothing and there’s nowhere good for it to go.” Oteng, who uses clothes from the secondhand market in his designs, says that’s gotten harder to do because it takes longer to sort through pieces, and the quality has declined. The ideological implications might take the biggest toll. Much of the world views clothing as disposable, and that’s spreading now to communities like his. “There’s no attachment. There’s no sentiment. You buy something, wear it for a day or two and then throw it away and buy something else,” he says. Kibuchi adds local designers can’t afford to maintain certain standards of quality and also compete with the pricing of the secondhand market, which has changed customer expectations. “It’s taking that Indigenous sustainability logic and it’s slowly eroding it, because we’re dumping so much here that it’s teaching people that clothing is disposable,” says Ricketts. To become a Vogue Business Member and receive the Sustainability Edit newsletter, click here. Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com. More from this author: What fashion can learn from La Réunion, an upcycling startup Want to be sustainable? Try going small Solving fashion’s biggest issues: Overproduction and overconsumption

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