Are charity shops supporting fast-fashion?
One of the biggest structural challenges facing a sustainable transformation of the fashion industry is the constant strive for increased growth and profits. During the past decade, fast-fashion brands have been subject to particularly rapid growth; so when media and customers are calling for conscious clothing and environmental responsibility in the industry many fast-fashion brands opt for clothing donations or recycling as a means to demonstrate circularity in their businesses. So how would charity shops be supporting the fast-fashion industry?
Can fast-fashion be sustainable?
Let’s start off with the basics. How does a company grow? In order to increase profits, you can either; increase your sales or decrease your costs. An increase in sales entails increased production, which implies an increase in the usage and exploitation of the planet’s resources; and if the resource happens to be oil — it will take thousands of years for it to be renewed.
So, if you choose not to increase sales, what about cutting costs? For most individuals from a short-term perspective, saving, or cutting costs most often means giving up on something that you like, often making your life just a little bit less comfortable. And surprisingly... The same logic applies to the trillion-dollar fashion industry. The only difference is that the people who cut the costs, most often make it less comfortable — for someone else.
Money can be saved by locating production in a country that doesn’t have minimum wages or unions nor regulations of chemical usage and the exploitation of the earth. As a consequence of this, workers are often paid just enough to survive (not to make a living) and the local landscape and water resources are often subject to contamination and pollution.
So, if fast-fashion brands aim to gradually increase profits year by year, they are enabling, supporting, and encouraging a constant output of low-quality garments, garments that eventually, most likely, will end up in landfill — or in charity shops.
But as the industry is under pressure to demonstrate sustainability in the presence of the lingering climate threat, the industry’s response to society’s demands is often to encourage customers to either donate their used garments or, return the garment to the retailer for recycling.
It’s often better to something than to do nothing at all, but unfortuantely, these initiatives comes with a few downsides. Firstly, as a reward for returning your used garments for recycling, retailers often offer customers a 10–15 % discount voucher on their next purchase, which is nothing but an incentive for customers to buy more new clothes. As a consequence, these recycling initiatives could cause a reversed effect, and instead of reducing the consumption of new garments — generate increased growth through the distribution of new garments.
But as this is a complex issue that has a few more hidden drawbacks, it doesn’t end with that as most garments today either can’t or are too expensive to recycle. Conventional cotton as an example can only be recycled a couple of times and must often be mixed with virgin cotton as the fiber length of recycled cotton is shorter than that of virgin cotton. In addition to that, fabrics that are made up of mixed materials, blends of e.g. polyester, cotton, elastane, and acrylic, or fabrics with mixed colors — can’t be commercially recycled at all.
This means that donated garments that can’t be recycled or resold in Europe, are exported to poorer countries where they are resold on markets and eventually will end up in landfills. As a result, the responsibility of these garments, and the issues that come with them, is shifted from one country to another.
So what about the garments that are donated to charities?
Let’s go back to the systematic role of the charity shops in this industry and setting. When donating to a charity shop, most people probably pat themselves on the shoulder feeling like a good samaritan and walk away feeling a bit lighter of finally getting rid of the garments that only took up space in their wardrobes. But again, just because you donated your clothes, it doesn’t automatically mean that they can be sold or used by someone else. You see, the same logic applies to the charity shops as the fast-fashion industry.
Charity shops make their living on reselling garments that could be worn by someone else. But as fast-fashion garments normally hold lower quality (since they are cheaper to produce) they might not even survive a second wearer, and as a consequence, they can’t be resold. There are so many low-quality garments produced and sold today that charity shops don’t even try to sell many of the donations they receive as many garments are made of almost “disposable quality” — making them impossible to resell or rewear. Therefore, your donated garments might not make it through the assortment and quality screening in the charity shop and will instead of being resold to a new wearer, be sent directly to landfill or, at best, textile recycling.
If encouraging and justifying a new purchase with a recycled garment rather is a bad excuse than a sustainable solution, are charity shops supporting the same system?
But as charity shops nurture on peoples’ laid off clothes, in fact, their whole survival is based on a constant outflow and inflow of clothes, charity shops are actually depending on fast-fashion brands. One might even argue that charity shops are parasitizing on the fast-fashion industry, and indirectly support the industry’s fake impression of contributing to a circular fashion-system, making customers believe that as long as you donate and recycle, you can keep shopping with a good conscious. So with this in mind, are charity shops even slowing down the change, or the obliteration, of the fast-fashion industry, and so implicitly support this industry’s continued existence?
Charity shops could finally move away from being people’s garbage bins and personal recycling assistants and serve their true purpose as an important player in a circular economy.
Because as long as the fast-fashion industry sticks to their current business model, charity shops will silently nurture the same system. Unless we have witnessed a major change in the fast-fashion industry, it will be difficult for charity shops to move away from being people’s alternative garbage bin and recycling assistant — to instead serve their true purpose as an important player in a circular economy.
So for now, as a consequence of this and in the present situation, the responsibility and the power to change is put on the customers' shoulders. We must be better informed, act rationally, and, in the first place, only buy quality garments that we actually need, want, and can keep for a lifetime.
