Erich Schmidt’s windowless office is down the hall from Goodwill Industries of Southern Arizona’s e-commerce department, where the most valuable donations—the good stuff—are diverted and sold online (recently, a painting that looked like it was run-of-the-mill went for $24,000). It’s around the corner from a warehouse that serves as a busy transit point for the hundreds of thousands of donations that enter and exit Goodwill’s system every year. The fortyish blond expatriate Minnesotan choreographs it all via a fleet of trucks that ride waves of items to and from stores, landfills, recycling plants, and the global market in unwanted stuff.
Schmidt, Goodwill Industries of Southern Arizona’s vice president of operations, grabs his computer mouse and pulls up spreadsheets. One shows the daily totals of stuff accumulated at donation sites. Another shows the routes that Goodwill trucks will drive that day and what they’ll carry or pick up. For example, one truck will be dropping off “product” at a store on Midvale that doesn’t get enough donations, before picking up excess donations at another store in an affluent neighborhood. “People call me up from the stores and say, ‘I need wares!’ ” He laughs. “Oh well, I’ll tell the donors!” But he’s not joking, entirely. Goodwill chooses its store and donation sites in part on where it expects to receive donations that can feed into stores that don’t receive enough. When Schmidt dispatches trucks, he’s bridging social and income inequalities.
We walk out to the warehouse. On the right are stacks of computers and monitors that didn’t sell in the stores or the outlet. Goodwill sends them to Dell for recycling. Just beyond the computers are three coffee tables that look new. “These are from our Youth Restoration Program,” he explains. “The participants fix them up from pieces that were donated but weren’t going to sell and were otherwise landfill-bound.”
The program started in 2014 and focuses on eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds who’ve been through the juvenile justice system or who haven’t had much employment experience or the opportunity to develop “soft skills” (like interacting with co-workers). Schmidt, like everyone else at Goodwill Industries of Southern Arizona, adores the program, and he eagerly introduces me to the coordinator and one of the young men finishing up a beautifully restored table. “This one is going to the home show,” Schmidt says. “They love us there. People show up and ask if we can restore their stuff, too.” He smiles wistfully. “But we’re focused on what comes here.”
Youth Restoration hearkens back to Goodwill’s earliest days, when the mission in Boston employed the city’s indigent in collecting and repairing clothes. But just as that program didn’t put an end to clothing waste, neither can Goodwill Industries of Southern Arizona’s Youth Restoration Program make a dent in the furniture bound for Tucson’s—and America’s—landfills. The program restores around four thousand pounds of furniture per month; Americans tossed out twenty-five billion pounds of furnishings in 2015. Schmidt points to a pile of furniture near the loading dock. Like everyone else at Goodwill, he hates waste—especially because it costs money to landfill. “It’s not bad stuff,” he says sheepishly. “But we just don’t have room.”
“Could you do more restoration?”
He shakes his head. “Our focus is our youth and the mission. Doing more would mean many, many more people, and more space, and more money. This isn’t a business. It’s a youth program. We want to help them get work. A program like this costs money.”
Schmidt isn’t dodging the question or the responsibility. More than anybody I’ve met in secondhand, he’s the most visibly tortured by the flood of stuff. Stationed at the intersection of supply and demand, he’s also the most realistic. And the fact is, even if every Goodwill and Salvation Army in the United States undertook its own version of the Youth Restoration Program and ran it at triple the size of Southern Arizona’s, the collective effort wouldn’t swallow 1 percent of the furniture being tossed out across the United States. It would also lose mountains of money, imperiling the social service missions of both organizations.
As we watch one of the young men work a plane across a stripped table, I tell Schmidt that Ikea’s head of sustainability recently told a conference that consumers in the West have likely satiated their appetite for new home furnishings, a phenomenon he calls “peak curtains.”1
Schmidt scoffs. “If the world has enough home furnishings, what’s all this stuff doing here?”
We walk out to the loading dock where a truck has just arrived from the Irvington Road outlet for unloading: large boxes of unsold clothes, large boxes of unsold wares, large boxes of metal for recycling, large boxes of cardboard and other paper for recycling, and large boxes of plastic bound for the trash. Some boxes are tipped into larger dumpsters. Plastic waste and the unsold wares go into one bound for landfill. I lean over the loading dock, peer into it, and see rolled-up carpets, bowling balls (always, bowling balls), board games, broken plates. Steel is dumped into a dumpster bound for a scrapyard. It contains a tangle of bed frames.
Schmidt stops beside a box containing scrap metal and pulls out a newish frying pan. “If I had a spare guy to sort, I could sell lots of this stuff in the store. People ask about this all of the time—can’t we do it? But it’s a cost-benefit thing. And devoting labor to it doesn’t make sense financially.”
We stand at the edge of the dock and gaze to a fence line where boxes and bales of items bound for the “salvage market,” the term the thrift industry uses for export markets, are stacked and awaiting shipment. There are boxes of shoes, boxes of stuffed animals, and boxes of books. And, in the greatest volume, there are five-hundred-pound bales of used clothing. These looming, multicolored cubes are packed with items donated with the best of intentions. But the best of intentions, alone, can’t sell clothes, and more than half the apparel that arrives at Goodwill is unsold. Schmidt’s address book is filled with Pakistani, Indian, and Nigerian traders who call him regularly in search of product.
“Everything is based on textiles,” Schmidt tells me. “In a good month, we export four hundred thousand pounds.” The benefits are twofold. First, the clothes are used rather than landfilled. Second, exporting to traders who pay for the clothes is cheaper than sending them to the landfill. In recent years, the salvage market was a Goodwill “profit center.” But that’s changing quickly as more and more used clothes flood the global markets, driving down the prices. “Right now, it still costs us less to ship to overseas [because the clothes are sold and generate revenue] than to ship to a landfill.”
That raises a question: “Would you landfill clothes?”
He shakes his head vigorously. “It’ll remain a cost for us, and that’s a mostly good thing. Someone overseas can always use it. For us the big question is where is all this gonna go, because there’s so much of it.”
And it’s growing.
Used Clothing Exports occupies a series of rooms at one end of a generic single-story office building on Tomken Road in Mississauga, Ontario. It’s a few miles from Toronto and oceans away from the billions of emerging-market consumers who rely on secondhand clothes. But it’s here in Mississauga that perhaps as much as one third of the used clothing generated in Canada and the United States is sorted, priced, and shipped by so-called graders. It’s one of the world’s biggest hubs for the purchase and sale of used clothing. Yet outside the secondhand industry, the fewer than twenty companies that constitute it are largely unknown.
Inside the office, Mohammad Faisal Moledina serves me milk tea and samosas at his desk. He’s a handsome man in his midforties, with well-coiffed, carefully tended hair and tired eyes. He wears a shiny gray suit. His mother-in-law is arriving from Dubai later, he tells me, and preparations have been stressful. Seated to his right, at an identical desk and chair, is his father, Abdul Majid Moledina, the princely, portly bearded man who founded the company. These days, father and son have the same title on their business cards: director.
Mohammad takes a call, so Abdul beckons for me to come around his desk to look at his computer screen. He’s scrolling through a website showing images of workers—they look South Asian—sorting through hills of used clothing. “You should go there,” he says. “Panipat.”
It’s a town in northern India that’s home to the world’s largest concentration of clothing recyclers. “Have you been?” I ask.
“We have Pakistani passports.”
“Right,” I say with a cringe. The Moledinas emigrated from Pakistan to Canada decades ago, but historic tensions between Pakistan and India make it difficult citizens from their respective countries from visiting. Despite these awkward facts, the Moledinas are doing just fine. Every year Used Clothing Exports buys sixty million to seventy million pounds of used clothes from charities and companies in North America (Goodwill Industries of Southern Arizona has been a client) and sells them onward to “graders,” who sort, price, and pack them for sale around the world.
Mohammad continues his phone conversation, so Abdul decides to surprise me. He reaches for a pair of jeans on a shelf and places them on a desk. The tag reads, 501 ORIGINAL. QUALITY NEVER GOES OUT OF STYLE. But this apparent pair of Levi’s is actually tagged LIVE’S.
“Do you see it?” Abdul asks.
“Yes.”
“In Pakistan, they refurbish these.”
“Refurbish?”
He picks up a leg and points to the hem. “See how it’s uneven and frayed below the stitch? That was done in a factory. They imported these used from somewhere, washed and dyed them, and then fixed the flaws.” He reaches for a men’s dress shirt in clear plastic wrap and a pair of men’s green khakis. “Same with these,” he says. “Then they export them to dollar stores.” He tells me the name and location of a store in Mississauga that sells garments like these.
“Seriously?”
His laugh is deep and confident. The joke is on me, the naive representative of the developed world’s consumers. And I feel gullible. Pakistan is one of the world’s largest importers of used clothes, home to thousands of secondhand traders and tens of millions of secondhand consumers. Surely there are sharp-eyed entrepreneurs among them who can spot the garments that can be transformed into “new” from the billions that can’t. In fact, it’s far more likely that such entrepreneurs exist in developing countries like Pakistan, where secondhand is a way of life, than in wealthy regions, where the law is likely to view “new” as “fraud.”
Mohammad finishes his phone call and announces that we can go to see a clothing grader. He ushers me out of the office and into his Mercedes-Benz. It smells of cigarettes and is cluttered with stuff that he has to clear off the passenger seat. “I hope you don’t mind, but we’re going to a small plant, maybe fifty employees.”
“What’s a big plant?”
“Three hundred employees and twenty million dollars monthly in turnover. Two hundred thousand pounds per day.”
Officially, around four million tons of used clothes are exported around the world every year. Unofficially, the trade is much larger. In India, where the import of secondhand clothes has been banned for more a decade, imported secondhand clothes are available everywhere, including markets visible from the seats of government in Delhi and Mumbai. In West African cities like Accra, Lomé, and Cotonou, imported secondhand-clothing stores and stalls are typically more common than stores selling new clothes.
Mohammad notices his fuel gauge is low and pulls into a gas station. While fueling, he lights a cigarette and takes a phone call; I watch as he ashes into a trash can next to the pump. Then we’re on our way, and he’s pointing out where the various textile-grading houses are located in Mississauga. “Back there,” he says, gesturing at a warehouse behind a Tim Horton’s. “One of the bigger ones.”
“Why are all these clothing graders in Mississauga?” I ask.
“It’s an immigrant-friendly city.” And for decades, Canada has been an immigrant-friendly country. Toronto, as Canada’s biggest city, attracted many of those immigrants. But when Toronto became too expensive, neighboring Mississauga beckoned. Neither Mohammad nor anyone else with whom I’ve spoken agrees on who the first immigrant with secondhand-clothing experience to settle in the city was. But everyone agrees it was either a Pakistani or an Indian with a decades-old family connection to the business. At some point in the 1970s or early 1980s, that South Asian immigrant trader met an African immigrant keen to export used clothes home.
Mississauga’s long, cold winters also helped, ensuring that the area’s summer clothes are worn briefly, and lightly. As a result, secondhand summer clothes from Canada (and northern Europe) are priced at a premium in the hot countries that are the biggest consumers of secondhand clothes. That price premium gives Canadian clothing graders and traders an advantage when competing for clothes elsewhere. Combine this advantage with large numbers of immigrants looking for low-skilled jobs, and Mississauga becomes an ideal—if unlikely—location for a global recycling hub.
Mohammad lived in Pakistan and Dubai, and he says he prefers Canada. “Life is real here.” In Pakistan and Dubai, he claims, people are too worried about status. “Here, if I wear a Rolex or a nice suit, it’s because I like it.”
That brings to mind a question. “Do you wear secondhand clothes?”
“I don’t. Nothing against it, I just don’t.”
Over the years, critics of the globalized secondhand-clothing trade allege that it undermines textile industries in developing regions, especially in Africa. It’s a potent claim that has intuitive power. Africa is the largest market for secondhand clothes globally, and has been for several decades. Meanwhile, its textile industries have declined precipitously since the 1980s. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, textile production dropped by 83 percent between 1990 and 1996. In Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, a textile industry that employed as many as two hundred thousand in the 1970s has dwindled to almost nothing. In Kenya, home to some of the world’s largest secondhand-clothing markets, a textile industry that employed as many as five hundred thousand people in the 1980s now employs fewer than fifty thousand.
Geographers and other academics have created a small industry to prove the claim. Of these, the most prominent is Garth Frazier, a Canadian academic. In 2008 he analyzed used-clothing trade data compiled by the United Nations and concluded that used-clothing exports explain “roughly 40% of the decline in African apparel production and roughly 50% of the decline in apparel employment.”2 Frazier’s claim has migrated well beyond the academic journals and is now regularly cited in mainstream media, by anti-globalization activists, and, most notably, by the kind of well-meaning sustainable-clothing advocates who’d ordinarily cheer for mass use of secondhand over new products.
There’s no question that secondhand is often a replacement for new (not nearly enough, in my view). But quantifying those replacements is extremely difficult, even in developed countries where tax and trade data allow for analysis. In developing regions like sub-Saharan Africa, where governments struggle to compile reliable data and statistics, it’s almost impossible.3 Countries that are known to be major importers of secondhand clothing—like Benin, Togo, Ghana, Tanzania, and Mozambique—have sporadic trade data of any kind. Most of the data they have is focused on the kinds of goods that attract additional overseas investment and aid (that is, new stuff). And obviously, they don’t have data on the considerable volume of secondhand clothing smuggled between African countries (especially between tiny Benin, a global secondhand smuggling hub, and Nigeria).
Simplistic explanations built on what seem like logical correlations—used must undermine new!—don’t do justice to the complex, very human reasons that individual consumers make specific choices. It’s true that Africa’s textile and new clothing industries underwent a significant decline beginning in the mid-1970s. But that period also encompassed an era in which Africa’s cotton production declined just as precipitously as its textile manufacturing, thanks to land reforms, political frictions, war, and—most recently—climate change. It also encompasses an era of economic liberalization that opened up Africa’s economies to competition from Asia (the same region that undermined the North American and European textile industries). By 2005, exports from fast-growing Asian textile and clothing manufacturers to Africa were growing even more rapidly than they were to Europe and the United States. The resulting competition devastated African manufacturers and lowered incomes across the continent.4
Nonetheless, incomplete trade data alone doesn’t do justice to these phenomena. Instead, the individual seeking out what actually happened to Africa’s textile industry must go there and meet the people who live with it. Since the mid-2000s, Ghana’s labor-union leadership has blamed two related phenomena for the decline of the country’s once-thriving textile industry: pirating of Ghanaian brands and styles by low-cost Chinese firms and the large-scale evasion of Ghanaian custom duties by East Asian exporters.5 They have a point. For example, production of kente cloth, the colorful Ghanaian fabric once exported around Africa and the world, employed thirty thousand people as recently as the 1980s. Since then, Chinese counterfeits have flooded the market and devastated producers (Ghanaian kente manufacturers employ fewer than three thousand today).6 At Ghanaian markets, buyers can expect to pay far more for locally produced, and so naturally opt for low-cost Chinese imports. The situation for Ghanaian kente producers is so dire that a government-sponsored initiative to encourage people to wear traditional Ghanaian clothes on Fridays is widely derided as a jobs program for the Chinese.7
If you view used clothing as an extension of Western colonialism, East Asian entrepreneurialism is a far less satisfying explanation for why Ghana’s textile industry has declined by 80 percent over the last few decades. But it’s a better one.
Of course, given a choice, most Africans—like people everywhere—would prefer new. But all consumers make a rational decision about value and what they can afford. Secondhand, in most cases, wins.
Mohammad Faisal Moledina takes a hard right on Dusty Drive and pulls into the almost-empty parking lot of Maple Textiles’s large yellow warehouse. Next door, Mohammad notes, is another South Asian–owned clothing grader. But we’re here for Maple Textiles, and he walks to the door with the confidence of an important customer. We’re met at the door by Yusuf, a gangly member of the family that owns the company.
Inside, the offices are empty, and the largest room is dim, with just a desk, a few chairs, and two tables. We pass everything quickly, as Yusuf recounts that he’s spent two decades living in Uganda, Angola, and Congo, working in the used-clothing business. According to him, and to Mohammad, those experiences are a competitive advantage. “I know how to choose the clothes that Africans want.”
Yusuf opens a door and we walk into a three-story warehouse and an explosion of colorful textiles that dozens of workers sort and stuff into cardboard barrels and boxes. A black conveyor belt runs through the middle of the space, between the far gray cinderblock wall where hundreds of neatly packed, fifty-five-kilogram bundles of sorted clothing are stacked almost to the ceiling. The fifty-five-kilogram bundle is an industry standard embraced around the world, made in machines that compresses loose clothes into cubes (occasionally leaving a sleeve hanging loose). Thanks to all the fabric, sound is muffled and buffeted. Voices go dead.
The sorting room at Maple Textiles, a medium-sized secondhand clothing trader outside of Toronto. The region is one of the world’s hubs for the secondhand textile trade.
Maple Textiles is a lot of clothes, that’s for sure. It’s also a lot of different kinds of people: South Asians, Sikh men, two Spanish-speaking women, Africans, several women in hijabs. They eye me warily and turn away.
We walk between the barrels and boxes, toward the conveyor belt, which is slowly running clothes delivered in large, loose five-hundred-pound bales. The clothes are pulled and graded into smaller—and finer—categories. “First we sort into boxes,” Yusuf says. “Then our more experienced employees sort into barrels.” He pulls a pinstripe Abercrombie & Fitch dress shirt from a box. “This is B-grade because of the yellow collar, and it needs to be washed. So it’ll go into a B-grade bundle and be sold for less.”
We stare into a barrel of clothes that Yusuf calls “number three.” Most are torn and feel thin and cheap. “That’s sent for rags,” he says. “Wiping rags.”
Mohammad pulls a green velvet evening dress from a box. It looks expensive and as if it has never been worn. “What about this?”
“Tricky,” Yusuf says. “The dress looks great, but it’s too heavy for Africa’s heat. B-grade, too.”
It occurs to me that I’ve seen this before: the grading process is basically a more detailed version of the sorting and pricing that I witnessed in the back of the Goodwill on South Houghton. Only instead of grading for Tucson’s secondhand customers, Mississauga grades and prices for Africa and other developing markets. And Africa’s, it turns out, are more discerning.
We walk over to a stack of neat clothing bales that have been sorted and await shipment. Each bale is covered in cellophane and affixed with a yellow label that displays a bar code and a category: LADIES FASHION T-SHIRT.
“What’s that sell for?” I ask.
“Maybe sixty dollars,” Yusuf says. “And then whoever buys it will sell each of the T-shirts for fifteen, twenty cents. If they’re lucky, there’ll be something in there that they can sell for more and that’ll make the whole bale worth it.” For the next five minutes, Yusuf points at bales and explains the markets. A bundle of baby clothes sells for an extravagant dollar per pound because they’re in high demand but generally aren’t donated to charities. “People hand them down to others, or they’re too soiled.” A bale of hospital uniforms, mostly made up of washed scrubs, goes for fifty to sixty cents per pound. “The low end of the business is getting harder because of China,” he says. “They’re starting to export their old clothes to Africa. Hard to compete with that, and all the new clothes they send, too.”
“China is sending used clothes to Africa?”
“Of course.”
I should have known. China is the world’s biggest consumer of new apparel. If the Chinese start throwing away at the same rate as Americans, the price of secondhand clothes is in trouble. The flood has already started: according to the United Nations’ imperfect data, China is the world’s fifth biggest exporter of used clothes, behind the United States, the U.K., Germany, and South Korea, and ahead of affluent countries like Canada, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Because China’s export data is often flawed, or distorted by smuggling, the numbers could be much higher. Either way, traders around the world complain that growing supplies and shrinking demand are lowering prices.
But China’s rising affluence isn’t the only shift that threatens Mississauga. Back in the car, Mohammad tells me that Canada’s increasing labor costs, partly driven by a law that raises the minimum wage, are pushing the grading businesses to Pakistan. “It’s the difference between three hundred dollars per month for a grader and fifteen hundred dollars per month. If the price of the clothes was rising, it wouldn’t matter. But the price is falling.”
It occurs to me that somebody will have to pay for that shipping; and in the case of less valuable items, it won’t make sense to export them at all. I think of Tucson and Erich Schmidt’s salvage yard. “That’ll mean less reuse, won’t it?”
“Maybe,” Mohammad says slowly.
Wide avenues cross Cotonou, capital of the small West African nation of Benin. Single-story storefronts are obscured by tire tubes, automobile exhaust manifolds, mufflers, automotive wax, and other car accessories devoted to servicing the city’s thriving used-car trade. Bars with outdoor seating serve Pils, a beer made in neighboring Togo, and skewers of meat. And here and there, handful of stores sell new home goods like bedsheets and curtains.
At Maple Textiles, bales of sorted secondhand clothes will soon be loaded into shipping containers and bound for markets in Africa.
Turn off one of the boulevards and the smooth, paved road usually gives way to a dry dirt one and shops and stalls selling or sorting recently imported secondhand goods. The secondhand-clothing businesses grow particularly dense in a section of town known as Missebo, on the west side of the Cotonou Canal, which cuts the city in half. Shirts, dresses, and other garments hang from fences erected around stalls or on storefronts; shoes hang loose, like fish from hooks. All around, bicycles with trailers, trucks with trailers, and men with strong backs carry fifty-five-kilogram bales of clothes down the street.
I am here with Michael Ogbonna, a fortyish Nigerian who makes his living in Cotonou’s enormous used-car markets on the east side of town. By some estimates, more than three hundred thousand used cars from around the world are imported into this dusty port town annually. Some are bought by locals. But the majority are destined for Nigerians who don’t want to pay the high duties on cars (and other secondhand goods) directly imported into Nigeria. So budget-conscious Nigerians travel to Cotonou and pay someone like Michael to help them buy a car and clear it through the porous and corrupt Benin-Nigeria border crossing east of town (on a normal day, someone crossing the border can expect to spend several hours, pay off five or six people—and still come out ahead).
Nobody knows for sure how much commerce moves across the border between Benin and Nigeria. The World Bank estimates that it could exceed $5 billion annually. And secondhand goods are almost certainly the biggest piece, almost entirely due to Nigeria’s harsh restrictions on secondhand imports, including cars, computers, televisions, and clothes. Second place? Most likely counterfeit Chinese textiles worth as much as $2.2 billion annually.8 By most measures, in fact, Cotonou is Nigerian in all but name. Everyone—even those in the government—acknowledges that more than half the population at any given moment is Nigerian and engaged in some aspect of the illegal cross-border trade. Some of Cotonou’s Nigerians are longtime settlers, having fled Nigeria during the country’s civil war in the late 1960s and never returned. And others, like Michael, go back and forth; his wife and children live on the other side.
Thanks to Nigerians on both sides of the border, Cotonou’s export business runs day and night (and the Beninese government, knowing a good thing when it sees it, does little to regulate the trade). But occasionally the Nigerian government will intervene, and the trade will slow for weeks or months. That’s one of the reasons Michael is working with me as a paid translator and fixer; two weeks earlier, Nigeria imposed new restrictions on the movement of used cars, all but halting business at the Cotonou car markets (it would pick up again a few months later). He is a tall man with a round, bald head and eyes that squint as if he’s always scrutinizing a deal. He’s well read on current events and vocally opinionated. Obama, he considers a failure; Trump, a “real man.” And secondhand goods, he insists, are better than new.
As we walk, he pulls at his shirt. “This is secondhand.” He tugs at his pants. “These are secondhand.” He takes out a Samsung phone from Verizon. “Secondhand,” he huffs. “Americans are trained. They’re trained. Something new, they get rid of the old one. Put it out for recycling, don’t even care. Give it away. Maybe a charity makes a little money for the office.”
I glance down at his feet. He’s wearing a pair of new brown suede shoes. Yesterday, he was wearing a pair of old Nike running shoes. In between, I paid him.
“Why do Nigerians want secondhand?” he asks rhetorically. “Because it’s durable. The Chinese things we import? They break, wear out!” He stops and cycles through photos on his phone. “Look,” he orders, and shows me photos of racks of used clothes and shoes—I spot a Goodwill logo on the wall behind them. “They load up containers of this stuff,” he exclaims. “You could make huge money in Nigeria.”
I want to tell him it’s not so easy, that the prices associated with those racks far exceed what can be obtained in Cotonou (the stuff that fails to sell off those racks is another matter). But when he looks around Missebo, his eyes superimpose a Goodwill store where everything is nearly free for the taking.
“Hey! Hey!”
A compact, wiry man is waving to us from his perch on a red plastic chair beside three bales of clothes. Behind him is an open warehouse door revealing dozens more bales.
“Today is Thursday,” Michael reminds me, dismissing him. “Tuesday and Thursday are the days that everyone puts out their bales to market.”
But the man in the door is determined to meet us, and he races over. He is Mr. A (he asks that I not use his name, for fear of trouble with the tax authorities), a secondhand importer, grader, and wholesaler. His smile is toothy and underlined by a mean tuft of a goatee. He assumes I’m a Western exporter of secondhand clothes and speaks to me in English. Michael says something to him in Igbo, the native language of the East Nigerian ethnic group that dominates the secondhand trade across West Africa. Mr. A smiles and invites us to have a seat in front of his shop (later I ask Michael what he said, but he won’t tell me).
As we settle into plastic chairs, Mr. A offers me a bottle of cold water. “I’ve been in this shop five years,” he says by way of introduction. I glance into the warehouse, where two women are carefully examining two bales of clothes amid an inventory of at least two hundred additional bales. Mr. A tells me that he purchases five shipping containers of clothing per week—when the Nigerian currency is strong. “But now less, due to the economy.”
“What kinds of clothes?”
“We are interested in importing durable clothes, not cheap ones. If someone in the West has worn something and it comes here, it’s probably durable.”
“Even if it’s made in China.”
“Not everything from China is bad. Just what the Chinese send to Africa is bad. They save the good things for rich countries.”
It’s a common sentiment among secondhand-goods traders in Africa, and there’s some truth to it. China’s manufacturers long ago mastered techniques for manufacturing similar goods to sell at a profit at different price points. A fashionable shirt, one made to the quality standards expected in the United States and sold for $29.99 there, can be made for much lower quality standards (lower thread counts, for example) and can sell—profitably—for $2.99 in Cotonou. The quality of the fabric and the stitching won’t be nearly as good. But it will be new and fashionable, and for many consumers that matters more than durability.
“What about used Chinese clothes?”
“So much inferior. I don’t import it. This is what I need.” He reaches for a clipboard with two pieces of paper. The top is labeled PROFORMA INVOICE and details a load of 480 bales that he’s just imported, spread over 64 categories. Under HOUSEHOLD ITEMS are 10 bales of bedsheets and 10 bales of curtains; under CHILDREN ITEMS are 18 bales of children’s T-shirts and 2 bales of boys’ track suits; under LADIES ITEMS are 3 bales of ladies’ polyester-silk skirts and 10 of ladies’ cotton skirts. Some categories are even more granular.
“Canadian clothes are good,” he tells me. “But I don’t want the big sizes, and I don’t want winter. What I want you can get at the Salvation Army, the Goodwill. I have a guy in Canada, a Beninese. It’s easy.”
On December 10, 1974, the New York Times published a curious article under the headline DECLINING QUALITY IN CLOTHES: THE MAKERS AND SELLERS TELL WHY. The author, Enid Nemy, opened by noting a now-forgotten mid-1970s grievance:
An increasing number of consumers are complaining about a deterioration in quality—food doesn’t taste the same, automobiles don’t last as long, appliances collapse, the list is endless.
The fashion industry is no exception.
At the time, the United States was the source of most goods consumed by Americans. Hong Kong, then under the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom, made and exported some garments (including, reportedly, garments smuggled from China). But the overall total was too small to impact U.S. manufacturers and consumers. The notion that China, still bogged down by the violent Cultural Revolution, might one day disrupt the global economic order was preposterous.
Nemy didn’t point fingers at others for what she characterized as a plague of “poor fit, inferior fabrics and shoddy workmanship.” Instead, she provided room for four American apparel manufacturing and retailing veterans to explain it. Their conclusion, as summarized by Nemy, was that “quality generally has been declining since World War [II] and that what had been expediency at the time had now become a way of life.”
She reported several factors accounting for the decades-long descent: a lack of product inspectors, “a dwindling supply of skilled labor,” a shift to piecework (making collars only, for example, while another factory makes cuffs) rather than whole-garment manufacturing, and—most notably—the relentless march of fashion. Paul Heller, then president of the Carr Buying Office, a company that purchased goods on behalf of hundreds of shops and department stores around the United States, spoke of the latter in terms that will be familiar to contemporary critics of fast fashion:
HELLER: There’s no question that our poorest quality comes from the hot fashions fad manufacturer. No doubt about it. And yet there is, particularly in young junior areas, an enormous consumer demand for this type of fashion.
Are you saying that a good deal of the fault is due to consumer acceptance of poor quality?
HELLER: No question. She is the final arbiter. And for every garment that is returned there may be 10 others that should have been returned but the customer manages to live with it because she wants that look on her back. She loves the dress.
The global dominance of China’s textile manufacturers didn’t happen for another fifteen years. Arguably, fast fashion wouldn’t happen for another twenty. But viewed from 1974, it’s difficult to argue that China’s “cheap” clothing is a recent phenomenon. Rather, it’s an evolution in customer tolerance that began with the industrial revolution. Thanks to technology, improved logistics, and entrepreneurial know-how, China—and East Asian manufacturing in general—has managed to do it better than anybody else.
Will Africa’s consumers be the first to turn against the deteriorating quality of clothing? Probably not. Chinese textile exports to Africa have been growing for decades, and several African countries, including Rwanda and Ethiopia, are eager hosts to Chinese apparel manufacturers. Secondhand clothes remain dominant, thanks to the sophisticated ability of traders to match garments to African tastes and pricing. But if the history of mass-produced clothing is any guide, that advantage is a temporary one.
Mr. A leads me and Michael down a dirt road surrounded on two sides by shoe vendors and a handful of clothing warehouses packed with bales. Along the way, we pass two men pulling handcarts piled with garbage and watch a garbage truck dump its full load into the middle of the street. “People pay the driver so they can sort through it,” Michael tells me. “Then they have to reload it when they’re done.” At the end of the street is a channel to the ocean, piles of garbage, and more garbage trucks.
Mr. A tells me that his biggest challenge is sorting the containers of clothes that he imports. The graders in North America and Europe do a good job, but he needs to do his own sort for his Nigerian customers. “A full container, I can sort it in a day and a half or two days.”
At that, he leads us to a two-story warehouse with five truck-sized doors. Two are open, though they’re barred by individual locked gates. On the front of the building is a small sign: STE LEXCO ANNEXE. Mr. A speaks softly to someone on the other side of one gate, who nods and unlocks it for us.
Inside, it’s dark and stifling. The only light comes from windows high above us, its beams falling through clothing fibers onto five-hundred-kilogram bales of used clothes imported from around the world. There are perhaps fifty men here; most are shirtless, and their faces are obscured by pantyhose wrapped around their noses to filter out the textile fibers thick in the air. They are muscular men glistening with sweat, their shoulders and arms toned from the exhausting act of digging through the weight of giant bales of clothes. As my eyes adjust, the room appears mostly black and blue, thanks to the volume of denim.
Jeans are stacked up to the high windows, and workers sort them into smaller piles. I watch one man sorting; branded Levi’s get piled atop the edge of a cardboard refrigerator box. He has two other piles, but I can’t tell what the distinction is. He dips his hands into the pockets of jeans as he sorts, pulling out whatever he finds. As I’m about to walk deeper into the warehouse, I see him pull a small container of dental floss from a pocket. He turns it around in his hand, examining it, then drops it into a box of other pocket detritus.
One thing is immediately obvious to me: this warehouse in Missebo is in the same business as those in Mississauga, and in Goodwill’s back-of-the-store sorting areas. Working conditions are far worse, of course. But the knowledge necessary to work here is much greater. There are no signs on the walls telling people what brands are worth sorting into which pile. Instead, the Nigerian men who toil in Ste Lexco Annexe must have a combination of instinct and base knowledge for what makes a marketable garment in the cities, towns, and villages of West Africa.
Mr. A gestures for me to leave. The warehouse manager is visibly uncomfortable with my presence. As we step outside, the daylight and the unpolluted air make me light-headed. “Is that typical?” I ask Mr. A.
He nods. “More than one hundred sorting and grading warehouses in Cotonou.”
“People don’t mind it?”
A typical sorting warehouse in Cotonou, Benin, staffed by Nigerian day labor familiar with the secondhand clothing market back home.
“Why should they? Most of the warehouses employ one hundred and fifty to two hundred men. When a container arrives in Cotonou, word gets out through our social networks, and people come to work.” By “social network,” he doesn’t mean Facebook, but rather physical social networks that have been accelerated by text messages sent via the cheap feature phones everyone in Cotonou seems to carry. Hours are fairly standard: seven or eight A.M. until noon, and then one thirty P.M. until five or six. A day’s pay is around ten thousand Central African francs, or sixteen dollars. It’s good money.
“I started as a sorter,” he says. “Many years ago.”
I look him up and down. His compact physique is quite different from the long, strong bodies I saw inside. But surely, if you are going to be a trader in secondhand clothes, it helps to have spent hours sorting through the clothes that arrive on Benin’s shores.
“We are picky in Africa,” he says. “We don’t want garbage. We want fashion. We want quality. Not your garbage.”
“Do people send garbage?”
His mouth stretches into a mean, toothy smile. “Not if they want to be paid. They learn what we will take. We are not a dump.”
That’s an opinion at odds with fashionable Western perceptions and critiques of the secondhand-clothing trade. Instead of viewing it as an exchange of goods driven by African demand, Western critics tend to view it as an exchange between the savvy and the ignorant. Take, for example, Whitney Mallett, a documentary filmmaker who wrote about the secondhand-clothing trade for the New Republic in 2015.9 She describes visiting a New Jersey grading plant with Michael Zweig, the plant’s manager:
By far, the most common labels here that I see are Forever 21 and H&M, fated for the cheap pile. “Nobody is stupid enough to buy Forever 21 second-hand,” notes Zweig. No one in the developed world, anyway.
Mallett’s “no one in the developed world” isn’t just bigoted. It’s blind to how much value is created when less affluent people are given the opportunity to parse the goods of the wasteful affluent. The grading warehouses of Cotonou exist because sorters and graders in New Jersey (or Mississauga) don’t know enough about Nigeria and the tastes of its consumers to sort clothes for them. That doesn’t make New Jersey’s clothing graders stupid. It just means they’re underinformed compared with their developing-world counterparts. In Cotonou, a clothing buyer doesn’t need to see a Forever 21 tag to know it’s cheap; a simple pinch of the fabric will send it to the heavily discounted pile. Somebody might, in fact, buy it; but nobody will overpay.
Just ask Mr. A. He’s standing in the back room of another sorting warehouse. This one belongs to him. It’s roughly the same size as the one we visited earlier, but brighter and largely empty. A few fifty-five-kilogram bales are pressed against the far wall beneath a sign that says TINIES, and—higher up—a U.S. flag that hangs upside down. On the opposite wall, under the sign TROUSERS, are a dozen to-be-sorted bales; and next to it is the sign B/W, with two graders working through piles of women’s blouses recently released from imported bales. “They separate the lighter ones from the heavier ones,” explains Mr. A. “The prices are different.”
“How do you tell?”
“Feel!”
He gestures for me and Michael to follow him into a room behind the six-foot-tall baling machine. It’s filled to the ceiling with heavy-duty plastic bags of clothes. He pulls a clear one filled with bras toward us. “It only has forty-eight kilos in it,” he says. “We’re waiting for more so we can make a fifty-five-kilo bale.” He pulls out a very modest-size red lace bra of no particular distinction (to my eyes, at least). “This won’t sell. In Africa, we have fashion,” Mr. A spits. “No African woman will wear this.” He pulls out a silky pink negligee and sneers. “In Europe, they might wear this. But here? No way.”
Five Star Rags is housed in a brown brick building beneath a flight path into Toronto Pearson International Airport in Mississauga. It’s in an industrial neighborhood, with buildings that could cover city blocks, parking lots that could house neighborhoods, and at least one strip club, located just around the corner. As I step out of my rental car, a jet roars overhead; the rumble makes me feel like I’m experiencing a low-grade earthquake.
I pull open the glass front door and walk into the stripped-down reception area that I’ve come to associate with Mississauga’s low-profile clothing graders. Amid the dim light and empty room, there’s an unexpected flash: a receptionist in a bright blue sari. “Ashif will be with you in a minute. Excuse me,” she says and picks up the phone. “Five Star Rags.” Pause. “What country are you calling from? Zambia? Your name?”
Like most of Mississauga’s South Asian clothing graders, Five Star Rags has a decades-long, globe-spanning, and family-connected history. This plant opened in the 1990s and is run by the brother of the owner of a Five Star Rags in India’s Gujarat state. Family members work in East Africa, home to the company’s biggest markets, as well as India and Canada.
One of them, a portly, fortyish man, emerges from the office beside the receptionist’s desk. He has a firm handshake, a friendly presence, and the slow walk of someone who has seen more trouble than Five Star Rags can ever present to him. “I’m Ashif Dhalwani,” he says. There’s not much in the way of small talk. He simply leads me through an adjoining door and into the sorting warehouse. It’s a big one, perhaps two and a half times the size of the Maple Textiles warehouse. “I started working here in 1998,” he says. “Before that, I went to college and lived in Mombasa.”
“Were you born there?”
“Uganda. That’s where I learned the business.” He waves his hand over the colorful scene spread out before us. “You’ve seen this kind of thing before.” True, but Five Star Rags is far bigger than anyplace else I’ve visited. Multiple conveyors move clothes from one type of bale to another and into bins, where the various garments are sorted. In this bigger warehouse, sorted clothes are dumped into large bays to await shipment. According to Ashif, Five Star Rags sorts 120,000 to 150,000 pounds of clothing per day. He reaches into a box and pulls out a flannel shirt. “This is polyester, and grade B because there’s a flaw somewhere, a hole probably. It’s dumped.”
“Dumped?”
“You can’t recycle poly, and nobody wants to buy it for use as a rag.” He shrugs. “We have to dump it.” The destination isn’t in Africa or another developing country. Instead, it’s the far cheaper option: a local landfill or incinerator.
Ashif leads me to two boxes filled with children’s clothes. “Light children’s clothing,” he says, and points to the other. “Medium children’s clothing.” Next to them is a barrel of fleece pullovers. “They won’t get used in Africa,” he says. “But they’ll get used. Maybe as rags for the auto industry. Or as stuffing for furniture. We sell to both.”
A pile of blue jeans runs six feet high against a far wall. “No market for old jeans.”
“They aren’t Levi’s?”
“No.”
“What are they?”
“Cheap stuff from Costco. Frayed and not fashionable. The fabric is too rough, and nobody can use them as rags or anything else. There was a company that invented a process for recycling them. They went under. So these get dumped.”
In my experience, nobody in the secondhand-clothing industry likes to talk about the end of clothes. But there is an end. The only question is when. The lives of some garments can be extended as wiping rags or as furniture stuffing. But an oily rag at the oil-change service center will eventually land in a disposal bin. For now, at least, the recycling of textiles is expensive and at the edge of the technologically feasible. “We need more textile recycling,” Ashif says to me. “Long term, reuse is dead. China is undercutting us.”
Ashif says that even the good-quality textiles sometimes fail to find a market these days. That makes him work harder. For example, Levi’s that once had a vintage market are now shipped to Bangkok, where workers cut away the buttons and zippers to be sold to the makers of fake Levi’s.
And nobody is dumb enough to overpay for secondhand Forever 21. “Africa is not a dump yard anymore,” he tells me. “It used to be you could take the good stuff and send it to South America and the rest to Africa. But that’s back when the markets were in the villages. Now it’s in the cities, and thanks to urbanization and social media, people know quality.”
We wander out of the warehouse and into his office. A large map of the world hangs on the wall his desk is pressed against. In recent weeks, the seven countries of the East African Community, collectively the largest secondhand-clothing market in the world, have been touting a planned ban on the import of secondhand clothes. Ashif smiles when I bring it up. “There is no way that Africans will stop buying used clothing unless they start walking around naked.”
“But if governments start blocking—”
He shakes his head. “There’s always a way.”
Later, as I drive away, it occurs to me that even if Ashif’s customers find “a way”—like a porous border crossing—what’s ultimately in store for secondhand clothing is a dump, and perhaps a recycling technology yet to be invented. Eventually, this most sustainable of industries will be out of fashion.