What Really Happens to Your Clothes After You Donate Them?
EILEEN FISHER Renew take-back program
You’ve done the closet clean-out. The pile’s bigger than you expected, but hey — you’re donating it. Someone else will get use out of it. Right?
That’s what we’ve been taught: donation = second life. It feels responsible. Sustainable, even. Like we’re keeping things out of landfill and helping someone at the same time.
But the reality is messier — literally. Most of the clothes we donate don’t stay in our communities. A large portion never get worn again. And a disturbing amount ends up right back where we were trying to avoid: dumped, burned, or clogging up coastlines across the globe.
The donation bin doesn’t close the loop. It just shifts the problem somewhere else.
The Gap Between What We Think and What Actually Happens
Most people think of clothing donation as an act of generosity — like a guaranteed pass to reuse. But that’s rarely the case.
Donations today function more like a waste management system for fashion. They weren’t built to close material loops. They were built to absorb excess. And with the rise of fast fashion and microtrends, that excess has become overwhelming.
We donate to feel better — not to ensure better outcomes.
So Where Does It Actually Go?
Here’s the typical flow:
1. Local Sorting
After you drop your clothes off at a charity shop or bin, they’re sorted:
Wearable, clean, seasonal, branded? ➝ These might make it onto the thrift store floor.
Stained, outdated, damaged, or just too much volume? ➝ Rejected.
Most thrift chains don’t have the space or staff to process the sheer volume of donations. So only a small fraction stays local.
2. The Export Machine
Everything else — the overflow — is packed into massive bales and sold to textile exporters. These bales are then shipped to secondhand markets across the Global South: Ghana, Kenya, Pakistan, India, Chile, and more.
The vendors who receive them often buy blind — they don’t know what’s inside until they open the bale. Some of it’s sellable. A lot of it isn’t.
3. Open-Air Markets and Dump Sites
In Ghana, these clothes flood Kantamanto Market — one of the world’s largest secondhand clothing markets. Every week, 15 million garments arrive in Accra. Up to 40% of them are instantly trashed.
There’s no landfill infrastructure built to handle this. So clothes end up burned, buried, or dumped in rivers, ditches, and beaches. In Accra, deadstock literally washes ashore in tangles of fast fashion microfibers.
This isn’t reuse. It’s displacement.
Who’s Making Money — And Who’s Paying the Price?
Let’s be clear: the secondhand trade isn’t charity. It’s a global business.
Thrift chains like Value Village and Goodwill often sell overflow to exporters and wholesalers.
Exporters profit from the resale of bales to Global South vendors.
The receiving countries — the local sellers and communities — absorb the waste burden.
They don’t get paid to clean it up. They don’t have the infrastructure to dispose of it safely. And they didn’t consent to become fashion’s dumping ground.
This is more than a sustainability issue. It’s a justice issue. A system where wealthier countries export the fallout of overconsumption under the guise of “doing good.”
There’s a term for this: waste colonialism.
Let’s Be Honest: Donation Is Not Circularity
We tell ourselves that donation = reuse. That it's a second life.
But in practice, it's an open-ended, unpredictable loop. There’s no guarantee your donated item will:
Be worn again
Be recycled
Be responsibly handled at end of life
It might travel 6,000 miles only to get burned.
Circularity means designing for return. It means infrastructure. Intent. Accountability.
Donation? It just means you gave something away and hoped for the best.
So What Are the Better Systems?
Not every take-back program is just marketing — there are a few building actual infrastructure behind the scenes. They’re not perfect. But they’re intentional, traceable, and trying to solve the hard stuff most brands avoid. These are the ones worth paying attention to:
SuperCircle — The Logistics Engine Behind Circularity
Most people haven’t heard of SuperCircle, and that’s kind of the point — they’re not a brand, they’re the infrastructure. SuperCircle powers the take-back and recovery programs for companies like Reformation, Another Tomorrow, and Mate the Label. They’re the ones actually collecting garments, verifying what they’re made of, and directing them to the next best outcome: resale, fiber recycling, or responsible disposal. What makes them different is that they’re not selling you a feel-good bin — they’re building the system that makes return logistics functional at scale. It’s circularity that exists after the Instagram post.
For Days — A Consumer-Facing Take-Back System That Communicates Clearly
For Days sells “Take Back Bags” you can fill with old clothes — from any brand — and ship back for processing. They sort everything based on condition and fiber type. Some items get resold, some upcycled, some downcycled into insulation or rags. But here’s the key: they tell you what happens. You’re not left wondering whether your bag of clothes ended up shipped to Ghana or tossed in the trash. It’s still a business, but the intention is clearer than most. It’s built on traceability and scale — two things most brands still pretend are someone else’s problem.
Eileen Fisher Renew — Brand Accountability in Action
Eileen Fisher’s Renew program is one of the few true examples of brand-owned circularity. They collect their own garments from customers, inspect them, and route them into resale, upcycling, or recycling pathways depending on their condition. Some pieces are repaired and resold. Others are transformed into limited-edition collections made from deconstructed scraps.It’s not cheap or easy — but that’s the point. They’ve built an entire business unit around stewardship, not just style.
Patagonia Worn Wear — A Durability-First System That Feeds Itself
Worn Wear is more than a resale platform — it’s Patagonia’s way of reinforcing product longevity as a brand value. They offer repairs, take back used items, resell them through their own site, and push for care over churn. It’s not perfect (very little fiber recovery happens), but it’s an actual loop, not a one-way exit. And because Patagonia designs with durability first, the loop stays functional longer.
Mud Jeans — The Closest Thing to Closed Loop Denim
Mud Jeans has been working on circularity since long before it became a buzzword. Customers can lease or buy their jeans, and when they’re worn out, return them for fiber-to-fiber recycling. Old denim is shredded, blended with new organic cotton, and turned into new pairs. They’ve proven that a closed loop in fashion is technically possible — even if scaling it industry-wide is a different battle.
None of these systems are perfect. But they’re not pretending. They don’t ask the consumer to “do better” while ignoring the backend. They’re building circularity as a process — not a performance. And they’re doing it in a landscape where the default is still landfill.
The path forward isn’t a donation bin. It’s infrastructure. It’s traceability. And it’s giving materials a way to come home.
Final Thought: Donation Isn’t Evil — But It’s Not a System
Donating your clothes isn’t wrong. It’s not malicious. But it’s not a sustainability strategy either. It’s just one of many ways we try to offload the consequences of overproduction — and overconsumption — without disrupting the cycle that created them in the first place. And while a few pieces might get worn again, the system as a whole isn’t built to ensure that. It’s built to absorb volume. To keep the churn moving. And to make us feel like we’ve done our part — even when we haven’t changed a thing.
The real issue isn’t that people donate clothes. It’s that the industry keeps producing garments designed to be donated — not to be recovered. Not to come back. Not to last. If we’re serious about circularity, we have to start before the donation bin. In the design brief. In the sourcing strategy. In the business model itself. Because the better question isn’t “Where can I drop this off?”
It’s: Why was this made to be disposable in the first place? And what would it take to build something worth keeping — or returning — instead?