Europe's used clothing exports are expanding rapidly. Since 2000, the volume of discarded textiles flowing out of Europe each year has tripled, reaching approximately 1.7 million tonnes in 2023. The destinations are highly concentrated: nearly half goes to African countries, and over 40% is shipped to Asia. But what happens to these goods after they leave home is something ordinary consumers in exporting countries typically know nothing about—and often never think about again.

An unavoidable question follows: when secondhand clothing travels the world, is it solving the waste problem, or just shifting responsibility elsewhere?

Circular economy is not charity

The secondhand clothing trade is often told as a success story, and to some extent it genuinely is. In countries like Ghana and Pakistan, the rewear economy sustains a large number of traders, repairers, shopkeepers, recyclers, and entrepreneurs, extending the life of garments and providing affordable clothing. These systems remain among the most circular parts of the global fashion economy. But they are simultaneously under enormous pressure and intertwined with marginalization.

In Ghana's Kantamanto market alone, roughly 15 million items arrive each week. Research conducted by Project Rewear found through sampling that 86.5% of the garments arriving there had some form of damage. Traders buy entire bales without knowing what they are getting, and when clothes don't sell, they bear the full financial risk themselves. The burden of exporting low-quality used clothing doesn't disappear when the clothes leave Europe—it simply shifts to other participants further down the value chain. Donating clothes for free is charity, but exported used clothing bales are bought at a price. Secondhand export is a massive global business that creates livelihoods while pressing enormous costs and risks onto importing countries.

Transparency is the blind spot

The most surprising finding in Project Rewear's research wasn't what they discovered—it was that some things simply cannot be traced. Reusable textiles are exported under used clothing tariff codes, but damaged, low-quality, and commercially unsellable garments are mixed in as well. Because bulk shipments are rarely inspected item by item, distinguishing "genuinely wearable" goods from those that will become waste shortly after arrival is nearly impossible.

The lack of transparency leaves blind spots all along the way: importing countries can't see how much waste they'll be receiving or what facilities they need; exporting countries can still declare high collection and recycling rates while having no real certainty about where things end up. The result of this fragmented picture is that everyone sees only one corner—textiles will eventually become worthless residue somewhere, and who bears this environmental damage? Quality decline is hitting established secondhand markets, and who bears the cost? Ever-rising export volumes are pushing the waste problem forward, and who is responsible?

The good news: most clothes aren't broken

The problems are interconnected, but the report also points to opportunities. Researchers examined over 8,000 garments at sorting facilities in the Netherlands, Spain, Poland, and Lithuania, finding that 37% were completely undamaged, and another 41% had only minor flaws. In other words, the vast majority of clothes entering the sorting system are actually still wearable.

The more critical judgment is this: clothes are discarded not because they're beyond saving, but because saving them doesn't pay. Cleaning, repairing, de-pilling, and re-listing often cost more than the resale price those actions can recoup. In a market flooded with cheap new clothing, keeping a garment alive simply doesn't add up. The difficulty isn't a lack of usable secondhand clothes—it's the absence of economic returns that would keep them in circulation.

Rewearing needs to make business sense

A wave of innovation is emerging from this gap. Save Your Wardrobe has developed an open-source "after-sales diagnostic tool" to help brands identify where repair and care services can generate value, reduce costs, and create new revenue streams; United Repair Centre's example shows that with proper repair, garments destined for low-value markets can stay longer in higher-value rewear systems; Reverse.Fashion is experimenting with AI-powered sorting to help operators more quickly determine where each garment should go, reducing waste and lifting value.

For years, rewear and repair have been treated as environmental tasks—important, but difficult to scale profitably. Project Rewear proposes another possibility: under the right conditions, "rewearing" itself can be a viable business.

No matter how new the ideas, they can't contain the root problem

The other side of the research is a reminder that focusing only downstream is far from enough. Rewearing can create jobs, extend product lifespans, and reduce demand for virgin resources—it's an indispensable part of circular fashion—but it cannot keep pace with accelerating production volumes. Today, fashion production far outstrips the capacity of the global rewear market to absorb it. Clothes get cheaper and turn over faster, losing value midway before they've even served their final purpose. At this rate, rewear risks becoming a side operation that manages the leftovers of fashion's binge while never touching the root cause. This isn't to say it's unimportant—on the contrary, it's more important than ever.

Those who keep clothes in circulation—vendors, tailors, regeneration innovators—are demonstrating what a fashion system that values resources more highly could look like. They see value where others see garbage. Yet the definitions of "value" and "waste" are still shaped by global inequality. What high-consumption, high-disposal countries consider "waste" is re-valued by Pakistan's recycling networks and Kantamanto's upcyclers. But the industry doesn't treat these places as the birthplace of circular innovation and cultural models—it continues replicating a disposal logic that exploits people and nature.

For rewear to truly realize its potential, and for the historically rooted rewear cultures of various places to resonate with production at scale, we must stop treating the export of worn goods as an ending—something to be casually thrown away. The more important question to return to is: why is a garment's first life so short?

Source: The Story We Tell Ourselves About Donated Clothes Is Incomplete · Originally published 2026-09-21