After walking for about 15 minutes from Wembley station, West of London, we arrived to TRAID's warehouse. The charity has been working in the UK to reuse clothes and diverting them from landfill since 1999. The funds they raise from their second hand shops are used to improve conditions and working practices in the textile industry globally. We were greeted by Jose, a smily recycling development manager, and after a quick intro, we headed to the main access area where the vans unload their donations. You can tell Jose's passion for this industry as he quickly starts explaining us they reuse about 2,500 tonnes of clothes a year. Their main aim is to reuse and sale them in shops across London, like the Dalston one in Hackney. They grade their donations by quality but as they keep recycling to a minimum, the vast majority 92% is reused. Low quality textiles are turned into industrial garments.
The first thing it hit me was the colourful piles of clothes in the main access point. They are huge, and there are loads of these. It is a bitter sweet image. It is obviously better all of these are being reused and not burnt or sitting in landfill for hundreds of years, but it does make you think the amount of wasted cotton, synthetic materials, energy and water used to produce these only to be donated so that we can keep buying more. It isn't sustainable, but at least TRAID is slowing the impact.
In Hackney we have over 90 clothes banks, Jose explains how they need to keep up with organised crime stealing their donations from these banks, and finding their stolen clothes being sold in vintage shops in eastern Europe. A tonne of clothes from these banks is worth up to £300.
"We are only capturing a fraction of what is being thrown away."
The bags are opened and loaded into the conveyor belt, removing single shoes first, which apparently they are getting loads more recently, Jose thinks these may be deposited back by those stealing from their banks and unable to find the matching pairs. The clothes go up, and two shop managers choose the clothes items they are likely to sale in their shop. Ripped jeans are likely to sale in Camden but perhaps not as much as in Hackney. When we visited there were about five people filtering the clothes and throwing them into cages destined to the nine London shops.
Shops like Reiss donate to TRAID, these are unfit clothes or accessories that are slightly damaged, so it helps stocking the shops with quality items. Jose showed us a couple of Reiss suitcases (£740 online) with a slight dent which will be sold for a fraction in their shops. The opposite of what major expensive brands are doing like Burberry, who in order to 'protect' their brand they were burning £28 million worth of items, that is insane. But Burberry isn't the only one, Louis Vitton, Nike and Urban Outfitters are at it too. But it isnt just the post-consumer waste, as less than 20% of brands and retailers disclose what happens to pre-consumer surplus too.
In our last waste composition analysis in Hackney we found 4.5% of the rubbish contained textiles or clothes, thats 2,500,000 kg and if last year, we reused 450,000 kg of clothes, means we are only capturing a fraction of what is being thrown away. On a more positive note TRAID:
Donated £3,124,156 to projects ending exploitation and improving conditions in the supply chains making our clothes.
Funding has provided 2,800 farmers in Ethiopia with training to stop using pesticides. 200,000 people are killed by pesticides every year from cotton farmers and 25 million agricultural workers suffer from acute pesticide poisoning.
Trained around 3,500 cotton farmers in Mali to sustainably grow their own supplies of plants to make organic pesticides to control pests and control crops.
Supported 4,500 small-scale cotton farmers in Pakistan to reduce pesticide use.
Provided 74,453 garment workers in Cambodia with free legal assistance in 2016 to fight their cases.
They bought birth certificates for 150 children at the centre in Bangladesh enabling them to go to state school, get health care, and prove their age to avoid underage marriage and labour.
Our last social media paid-for campaign in January achieved 1,000 new website hits to our textile and clothes bank page map finder, and the best news is that we managed to beat the record of clothes donated ever with 60,000 kg reused and avoided from landfill.
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