May 8

May 8 What to do with the clothes you no longer want. How each of us can do our bit to cut down on fashion waste

It’s been two years since I wrote about why as a society we all need to be trying to consume less, and how, particularly the amount of clothes we buy and then later discard - in all manner of ways - is contributing to the shocking impact that the fashion industry as a whole is having on the pollution of our precious planet. I do wish I could say things are better now than they were then. But sadly I can’t.

In THAT BLOG I focused on the then relatively new campaign encouraging us to only buy five new items a year and how to do that. Now, prompted by THIS disturbing piece in The Guardian newspaper, which highlights the economic, environmental and human impact of the amount of clothing we buy and what happens to the things we get rid of, either by donating to charity, putting items in textile recycling bins or simply throwing them away (I didn’t know that so much of our textile waste is shipped abroad, or that there’s a clothing dump in the Atacama Desert that’s so vast you can see it from space), I thought it could be useful to pass on some of the ways each of us can do our bit to cut down on fashion waste. Because, as insignificant as our individual actions can feel, it truly is the case that every little really does count if enough of us do it.

Charity still matters

Charity shops welcome good quality donations

The first thing I would say is that good quality clothes that are, crucially, clean and not damaged, are very much welcomed by charity shops which, in turn, bring in much needed revenue for the charities, especially when the economic situation is as challenging it is now and donations are down across the board as a result. You’d be amazed, though, how much of what people donate doesn’t fit those criteria. What happens to those items the shops can’t sell is upsettingly explained in The Guardian piece.

Give directly

You can donate your unwanted clothes directly to the people who need them

Another way to ensure that the clothes you no longer want are not only kept out of landfill but given to people who really need them, is to find a way to donate them directly. If, for example, you want to give your - again good quality - pre-loved items to refugees, you could do that via THIS website, which enables you to upload your items which can then be ‘shopped’ by people in clothes poverty for free. It’s a brilliant idea.

You could also donate your items to a charity like the one I work for.

Smart Works helps women to get into employment by providing them with an individually styled outfit to wear to their interview and coaching to help them succeed at getting the job they want. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, it’s vital that you only donate clothes that are suitable for the work of the charity. We’re never, for example, going to send a woman to a job interview in a sparkly party dress. And we’re also never going to dress a client in something that isn’t pristine and professional looking. So there’s no point in sending us anything that we can’t use. I can’t tell you how much time and effort it takes sorting through the donations we get in order to make sure we’re only making the appropriate clothes available to our clients. Or how much we sadly reject in the process.

Sell them on

There are many different ways to sell your pre-loved clothes online

There are so many different places you can sell your pre-loved clothes online. These are just a few:

Vinted is best for high street clothes and some designer finds. It’s free to list and sell (take lots of clear pics and give as much description as you can) and you can either use the money you accumulate to buy other items, or transfer it to your bank account. Buyers are charged a small fee, between 3 and 8% of the purchase price for items under £500

eBay is pretty good for clothes across the board and now has an authentication team so you can be reassured when selling and buying designer pieces. It’s free to buy and sell on the site and you can list up to 300 items for free each month.

Etsy is great for selling vintage pieces and anything you’ve made yourself. They charge 16p per listing and 6.5% per transaction. You also pay 4% plus 20p per transaction in payment processing fees.

Facebook Marketplace has no fees for buying or selling. Tends to work best for clothing bundles.

Thrift+ is different in that you don't actually earn any money. Their aim is to end fashion waste through donating unwanted clothes. You fill one of their bags with your unwanted items, send it to them and they're recirculate your clothes. For each of your items that Thrift+ sells you earn points to spend on the items in their preloved selection.

Host a swap

Another great way to give the clothes you’ve tired of, but that aren’t too tired to be worn, a new lease of life (and your wardrobe a refresh at the same time) is to get together with a group of friends and have a clothes swap.

How you run the swap is up to you, but the more specific you are about how it works, the more successful it’s likely to be. So give clear guidelines about the sort of items people can bring (and whether there’s a limit on the number), if it’s a one-in-one-out swap (so you can only take away the same number of items you bring) and what happens to the items that aren’t taken at the end of the swap.

All of those suggestions work for clothes that are still in a good enough state to be worn. When something is worn out, damaged or stained, that’s a whole other ball game. THIS post on the excellent sustainability website Moral Fibres, has a variety of ideas for what to do with those, although the final suggestion isn’t recommended for reasons explained in that Guardian article which was the prompt for this in the first place. And which also has a more radical suggestion for a way to use your unusable clothing to make brands re-consider their production and waste, through what the writer describes as “an empowering action…..[that] wrest[s] back a bit of control as a consumer.