Much of the bag never reaches a local charity-shop rail
You fill a bag, drop it in the bin on the corner, and picture it on a charity-shop rail or on the back of someone who needs a coat. Some of it ends up there. Much of it does not.
Nobody counts the local share the same way, but where it has been counted it is smaller than people expect. In 2024 the head of WRAP, a UK charity that works on waste, wrote in a blog post that about half of what people give to charity shops sells there, and that 60% of the clothes the UK collects for second-hand use are exported. The post does not make clear exactly what that 60% is a share of. In Dublin, a charity took over the city's clothes banks, as the street bins are called there, and in April 2026 said it expected to resell around 15% of what it collects in its own shops. The rest is sorted for reuse or recycling, and the part its shops cannot use goes to a recycler that supplies markets in Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe.
None of these figures is a rate for every bin, and a coat that is not sold nearby has not necessarily gone to waste. Many exported clothes are bought and worn by someone else. Others become rags or filling, and some are thrown away. The bin itself cannot tell you which of these will happen to yours.
Not every bin belongs to a charity either. For years most of Dublin's clothes banks were run by a private company, Textile Recycling Limited, under the name Clothes Pod.
Your old coat is sold by weight, not by the piece
Once clothes leave the bin, they are counted by weight. According to the European Environment Agency (EEA), collectors, whether charities or companies, usually go through the bags first and take out the best pieces, which the trade calls "cream", to sell in their own shops. The rest is sold on by the tonne. Some is sorted by hand into grades and pressed into bales. A large amount leaves Europe unsorted, as so-called "originals" in which wearable and unwearable clothes are still mixed together.
At the bottom of the scale, what nobody will wear is cut into industrial rags or shredded into filling. Across the trade the price is low. The EEA puts the average value of the EU's used-textile exports in 2019 at about €0.57 per kilogram.
The price abroad has long helped pay for the bin on your street
Collecting clothes costs money. Someone has to drive the van, rent the warehouse and pay the sorters, and the EEA notes that sorting is mostly done by hand, which is why it moves to countries where labour is cheaper. For a long time selling the bales covered much of this, and in many places the bin stood on the street because what came out of it could be sold. Sales were not the only source of income everywhere, though. In France, Refashion, the body that hands out money for textile collection, pays collectors by the tonne.
That price has been falling for years. WRAP's 2024 market report found that a tonne of textiles donated to UK clothing banks was worth £406 in 2013 and £172.50 in 2023. In Dublin the old operator ran the banks under a deal in which it paid the council per tonne. In 2025, TheJournal reported, a report to the city's councillors called that arrangement "increasingly unsustainable" and said future contracts would require councils to pay the operator instead.
- EEA : Management of used and waste textiles in Europe's circular economy
- WRAP : The price of our addiction to cheap fast fashion
- WRAP : Textiles market situation report 2024
- TheJournal : Dublin City Council clothes banks and textile recycling
- L'info durable : Les bornes de collecte Le Relais vont rouvrir
What happened when used clothes sold for less than it cost to sort them
In October 2024 two European associations, EuRIC for the recycling industry and Municipal Waste Europe for local authorities, warned that "since spring 2024, the prices for sorted second-hand garments no longer cover processing costs". They said warehouses were filling up and that more clothes risked being burned. That same month Soex, a Berlin-based collector and recycler, filed for insolvency. In July 2025 two German subsidiaries of the Swiss group Texaid followed. One of them runs collection containers across Germany and 50 second-hand shops.
In Dublin, the operator of most of the city's clothing banks suspended collections on 27 January 2025. Its warehouses were full because, as a later report put it, "many international textile markets are currently inaccessible".
In France, Le Relais, a social enterprise that runs collection containers across the country, stopped collecting from them on 15 July 2025. Refashion had been paying it €156 per tonne. Le Relais asked for €304, and Refashion offered €192 as emergency aid. Refashion put the crisis down to a sharp drop in export prices for sorted used textiles, mainly in Africa. After the government announced a support plan worth €223 per tonne for 2025, collection resumed on 24 July, nine days after it stopped.
- Municipal Waste Europe : Crisis in Europe's textiles sorting and recycling sector could trigger a domino effect
- letsrecycle.com : EuRIC says used textiles industry on brink of collapse
- Innovation in Textiles : Texaid Deutschland files for insolvency
- TheJournal : Dublin City Council clothes banks and textile recycling
- L'info durable : Les bornes de collecte Le Relais vont rouvrir
Where the bales go
Most of what Europe exports goes to two continents. The EEA counts more than 1.44 million tonnes of used textiles exported from the EU in 2025, or 3.2 kg per person. The volume has stayed around 1.4 million tonnes a year since 2015, nearly double the 2005 level. In 2025, 48% went to Asia and 43% to Africa. These are EU trade figures, which leave out the UK from 2020, and the EEA cautions that trade records say little about the quality of what is shipped or where it finally ends up.
The two routes do different jobs. In Africa the clothes are mostly sold to be worn again. In Asia they mostly go to sorting hubs, where they are recycled or shipped on to other countries, including back to Africa. On both routes, the EEA notes, some end up in dumps or are burned in the open. Le Relais says that 25 to 30% of what it recovers goes to countries such as Senegal, Madagascar and Burkina Faso.
How much of an exported bale becomes waste depends on which market you count
Kantamanto in Accra, Ghana, is one of the largest second-hand clothing markets in West Africa. TIME reported in 2025 that it receives 15 million garments a week. Traders buy the bales without seeing what is inside. One told TIME that sometimes 90% of a bale sells and sometimes only 30%, and that a bale cannot be returned once bought. Traders estimate that 30 to 40% of bales cannot be sold, and the Or Foundation, a charity working in the market, puts the share that leaves as waste at 40%. That figure is disputed. The Ghana Used Clothing Dealers Association has called it exaggerated and unrepresentative, while the market's leadership has defended it.
In Kenya, WRAP's chief executive wrote after a 2024 visit that an estimated 2% of imported clothing is waste, without saying who made the estimate. These two figures come from different markets and are measured in different ways. Neither one describes all the clothing that is exported.
Importing countries weigh the trade differently. In April 2026 Ugandan media reported that parliament had approved a 30% environmental levy on imported second-hand clothes, on top of a 35% import duty. The levy was proposed in the External Trade (Amendment) Bill, 2026, and when it takes effect is not settled in the reports cited here. In Kenya, a tax on second-hand clothes was proposed in the 2026 Finance Bill and removed by the National Assembly. The finance minister said he would try to bring it back through amendments, but no report cited here shows that he has.
- TIME : Ghana, Africa, fast fashion waste and pollution
- MyJoyOnline : Or Foundation's textile waste claim angers Ghana Used Clothing Dealers Association
- WRAP : The end of the clothing line
- Daily Monitor : New tax on used clothes hits importers
- Uganda Online : Parliament approves 30% levy on mivumba
- Parliament of Uganda : Government tables tax bills for FY2026/27
- Citizen Digital : Treasury to bring back second-hand clothes tax through amendments, Mbadi says
Europe is moving part of the bill from the bales to the brands
Since 2025, EU countries have had to collect textiles separately from other rubbish. The EEA warns that collecting more will also bring in clothes of lower quality, and that unless sorting and recycling capacity grows, more of it could be burned, buried or exported.
The next change is about who pays. Under a revised EU law that took effect on 16 October 2025, every member state has 30 months, until about April 2028, to set up a scheme in which clothing and footwear brands pay a fee on each product they sell. That fee will fund collection and what happens to the clothes afterwards. Clothes collected separately must be sorted before they are shipped anywhere, so that waste cannot leave labelled as reusable. The law also treats such clothes as waste until they are sorted and leaves room for social enterprises that collect second-hand clothes to keep their own collection, though how these rules apply in practice will depend on how each country writes them into its own law.
So the bin on the corner is the front door of a worldwide trade, and for years the bales have helped pay for it. When the price of a kilo of used clothes fell below the cost of sorting, collections stopped in several places. What leaves in the bales is often worn again by someone far away, and some of it becomes waste. Europe's new rules move part of the cost of collecting it onto the companies that sell the clothes new.
