A blue Honda CX-7 is next in line at the Goodwill donation door at South Houghton and East Golf Links Roads. A fortyish brunette in black yoga pants and a baggy yellow T-shirt emerges slowly, iPhone to her ear. Three cars and two pickups are lined up behind her, but she’s in no rush. “Put the frozen dinner in the microwave for two minutes,” she says as she saunters from the driver’s seat to the rear passenger door on the opposite side. “Yes, two minutes,” she repeats as she slowly opens the door.
Standing nearby is Mike Mellors, a fifty-seven-year-old attendant. He stoops over the back seat, pulls out a white garbage bag bursting with what appears to be clothing, and places it on the top shelf of a two-level gray cart. He stoops farther and pulls out an ironing board and a pair of plastic deer antlers. “Thank you for your donation,” he says.
The woman lowers her phone and voice. “There’s a community yard sale at Sierra Morado,” she says with a knowing smile, as if providing a hot tip. “It’s getting hot, and people are saying, ‘Screw it—I’m done.’ So that’s why people are coming.” With that, she gets into her car and drives away.
It’s eleven A.M., Saturday, and the Tucson heat is drenching Mellors’s six-foot frame. But there’s no time to retreat into the air-conditioned warehouse on the other side of the donation door. The donors are lining up. A Kia Sorento is next, its back seat piled with garbage bags. The youthful woman in the driver’s seat lowers the windows and unlocks the doors, but she doesn’t get out.
“Yard sale?” Mike asks as he opens the door and starts tossing the bags on a cart.
“Over at Sierra Morado.”
“Nice.” He hauls out six bags of clothes, an Ogio golf club bag holding two putters, a stack of 2014 World Cup commemorative cups, a ceramic drinking horn roughly the size of a trumpet, a beat-up Braun coffeemaker, four frying pans, and at least ten bags of party favors priced at twenty-five cents each, according to the bright pink tags. Mike pauses at the drinking horn, turning it in his hands. “Thanks for your donation!” he says and closes the door.
Three hours ago, just before the store opened, he told me that Goodwill is where Tucson’s garage salers unload the things they can’t sell and don’t want to keep. It’s a weekly phenomenon, boosted by the comings and goings of Tucson’s military families and retirees. When they arrive, they need things; later, they realize they can’t take it all with them.
The Sorento pulls away, and a large black Ford pickup carrying a ratty sofa takes its place. I walk through the donation door and into the wide warehouse. It’s busy with employees who’ve arrived to process the rush of donations. Four women sort through boxes of clothes at the far end, and two young men sort through stacks of electronics not far from the donation door. A supervisor strides over from the clothing area to encourage Mellors to work faster.
Between 1967 and 2017, the money that Americans spent annually on stuff—from sofas to cell phones—increased almost twentyfold. Some of that stuff will become treasured heirlooms worthy of future generations. Some will be buried in landfills, turned to ash by incinerators, or—in rare cases—recycled into new goods and heirlooms. And some will persist, packed in basements, closets, attics, garages, and storage units. The precise breakdown is unknown, but there are hints. For example, one 2006 study of Los Angeles middle-class homes found that 90 percent of garage space is now used to store stuff, not automobiles.1
Americans aren’t alone in their love of stuff. But they are unique in having so much space to store it. That’s a luxury other people would love to have. For example, the Japanese are just as shopping-mad as any CX-7-driving Tucsonan. But their homes are much smaller. So, to make room for new, many Japanese purge. There’s nothing particularly unique in their approach, but millions of Americans—keen to bring order to their homes—have embraced what Marie Kondo, the entrepreneurial Japanese organizing consultant with bestsellers and a hit television series, calls the KonMari Method. It’s an enticing system: keep only what sparks joy; toss everything else. It also leaves open an essential and pressing question: What happens to all that stuff after it’s been KonMari’d?
I pondered the question for the first time in 2014, shortly after I published my first book, Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade. In it, I followed U.S. recyclables like cardboard, shredded automobiles, and Christmas lights around the world, primarily to China, and argued that “if what you toss into your recycling bin can be used in some way, the international scrap recycling business will manage to deliver it to the person or company who can do so most profitably.”
Readers soon contacted me to share how they recycle. Some wrote with descriptions and pictures of art projects that incorporate junked electronics like circuit boards and overhead-projector lenses; others offered detailed accounts of furniture and home restorations; I received notes from folks informing me that they were writing on computers and phones they’d repaired at home; and I was the lucky recipient of many, many invitations to visit flea markets, thrift shops, and antique stores.
As the descriptions and invitations accumulated, I felt torn. It’s good to have one’s work appreciated. But my readers weren’t writing to tell me about the sorts of things I described in Junkyard Planet—like giant, multistory automobile shredders. They weren’t even writing to tell me about small-time junkyard dealers like my immigrant great-grandfather—dealers who made a living by collecting and purchasing the waste of their neighbors and selling it to bigger industrial recyclers. Despite my best efforts, the most enthusiastic readers of my book (judging from the notes they send to me) understand “recycle” as shorthand for “reuse.”
That’s understandable. For most people in affluent countries, the process of recycling ends at the point they sort their trash into a recycle bin. The highly industrialized processes that follow belong to faceless others. In contrast, the buying and selling of used stuff is intensely personal. Anyone can hold a garage sale, purge their closets on eBay, or visit a flea market. Reuse and resale give consumers a rare, tangible connection to the afterlife of their stuff.
Two weeks after Junkyard Planet was published, my mother passed away unexpectedly. Like so many Americans with parents who accumulated stuff over a lifetime, my sister and I were left with an uneasy question: What do we do with her stuff? From a sentimental standpoint, it was hard to let go of anything for fear it meant something to her. From a practical perspective, neither of us had the space to keep much. My sister and her family live in a two-bedroom New York City co-op; at the time, my wife and I rented a one-bedroom Shanghai apartment.
Our problem wasn’t unique. Around the world, questions about what to do with the material leftovers of a life are becoming as much a part of the mourning process as the funeral. There’s so much, and the children all live somewhere else. Who’s to clean it out?
Much of my mother’s modest estate wound up at Goodwill. I concede I have no idea what happened to her china after I handed it to a donation door attendant. But I had faith that—like the recycled metal that I wrote about in Junkyard Planet—my mother’s secondhand items would be used in some way—not landfilled, incinerated, or recycled. In part, I started this book to reassure myself that my instincts were correct.
That turned out to be harder than I expected. As a business journalist, I am accustomed to confirming my suspicions and assumptions by double-checking them with the data collected by governments, businesses, and trade associations. Want to know the weight of all Christmas-tree lights exported from China to Luxembourg over the last decade? That number exists. Similarly, thanks to a growing and professionalized environmental movement, volumes of data are available on what’s trashed and recycled in wealthy countries. Want a graph showing how much furniture Americans heaved between 2003 and 2013? It can be plotted.
I looked into whether similar data exists for secondhand goods. Data on used cars is plentiful and accurate—so long as you aren’t looking for how many move between international borders in the developing world (at which point many seem to disappear). But beyond cars, the numbers become fuzzy. For example, nobody keeps data on how much clothing moves from closets to rummage sales, there’s no metric on the number of pieces of furniture that flip from college apartments to Goodwills, and no government agency tabulates or even estimates the number of garage sales held annually in the United States and how much revenue they generate. It’s not just a U.S. issue, either. Trade data related to the booming global business of secondhand is even worse. For example, there’s almost no data on the vast trade in secondhand between the world’s developing economies, especially in Africa, where consumers embrace imported secondhand as the ubiquitous material of daily life.
Fortunately, a lack of data doesn’t mean the trade in used goods is untraceable. But instead of finding it through data, a reporter must travel to the places where secondhand goods are collected, bought, repurposed, repaired, and sold. That might entail watching someone take a picture of a shirt and post it to Facebook, eBay, or Poshmark. Or it might entail following a Ghanaian buyer of old laptops from the United States to the city in northern Ghana where he sells them.
Both are small acts that underline an often overlooked truth. Secondhand goods clothe, educate, and entertain billions of people around the world. And all this is accomplished using less energy and far fewer raw materials than what’s required for new goods. However, because governments tend to focus on the value of things made and sold new, the value of used things exchanged between people and businesses is generally invisible except to the people who are involved in buying, selling, and moving them.
This book seeks to uncover that value and restore it to a central place in the daily life of the planet. That’s not easy. Just as no single book can cover the new-goods trade in all its geographic and economic immensity, no single book can hope to cover all secondhand goods, either. Though I’ll touch on a wide range of items, especially in the early chapters, I will eventually focus most intently on clothing and the electronics that accumulate around us. Both are among the most valuable and traded secondhand goods in the world today, and they are the ones with the most interesting—and potentially troubling—futures.
Thanks to innovations in mass production and marketing dating back to the industrial revolution, the world is filled with more things than at any time in history. That’s often a blessing. But not always. As I traveled in the world of secondhand, I was repeatedly overwhelmed by the scale of unwanted stuff. In Tucson, only one third of the donations to Goodwill sell in the charity’s stores. Who buys used plastic antlers (who buys the new ones)? A tattered sofa? A pilled T-shirt?
The flood is rising. Just twenty years ago China was a major importer of secondhand clothes; now it’s a major exporter, with a huge supply that’s driving down the price of used clothes—and the economics of the used-clothing business—globally. It’s not just China that’s shifting to new, either. Growing affluence across the developing world means that more and more consumers are opting for new stuff. Sustainably minded consumers in wealthy countries with the best of intentions simply aren’t numerous enough to make up for the global erosion in secondhand demand.
That imbalance manifests itself in growing piles of unwanted stuff.
According to a 2018 study by the World Bank, humans are on track to generate waste at a pace more than double that of population growth through the year 2050.2 Most of that growth will occur in developing regions of Asia and Africa striving to achieve American-style consumption-based economies.
Let’s not pretend: that growth will have negative consequences for the environment. But those consumption-based economies will also bring tangible benefits to billions of human beings, including better health and education. Nothing that an affluent American minimalist can say about consumerism and stuff is likely to change the mind of a developing-world teenager whose only experience of minimalism has been involuntary.
The good news is that this doesn’t need to be the end of the discussion. Social problems have social solutions. One of those social solutions is the already existing secondhand industry, which supplies billions of people with goods around the world. In the latter chapters of this book, I’ll argue that this crucial industry isn’t suffering from a crisis of stuff so much as it is from a crisis of quality. Simple, voluntary steps by manufacturers and consumers to encourage the production of more durable and repairable goods could go a long way toward ensuring that secondhand thrives and grows for decades to come. It doesn’t need to be a revolution, either. Already, manufacturers big and small are building better for growing numbers of consumers who demand it. I’ll highlight a few of them and show how their approach creates a secondhand future.
Quality isn’t the only barrier to a secondhand future. Opposition to globalization also inhibits reuse. But the most serious trade barriers involved in secondhand aren’t tariffs and bans. Rather, the most intractable barriers are prejudices that inhibit people in wealthy countries from selling and shipping their unwanted stuff to people in developing countries. Throughout this book, I’ll explore the origins and impacts of those prejudices, including how they’re promoted, and how and why they should be overcome. There is no secondhand economy that excludes the developing world, and consumers in the wealthy, developed world need to embrace that reality.
If this book succeeds, readers should come away with a much better understanding of how the afterlives of their purchases impact the global economy, the environment, and, ultimately, their closets and basements. With any luck, you’ll have a better idea of what happened (or didn’t happen) to those bags of clothes and that beat-up sofa Mike conveyed through the donation door. And just maybe you’ll change how and why you purchase stuff, if only to make sure you don’t leave a mess for others to clean up later.
Like most Americans, I have done my own share of accumulating over the years. Researching this book helped me let go of some—but not all—of it. I can’t promise readers of this book that they’ll have a similar experience. But they will find a surprising world where what’s old becomes new again, over and over, and the desire to profit from castoffs creates innovation and livelihoods—all over the world at all hours of the day. Finding it is a treasure hunt, one that anyone can join.