You may think that once you’ve done your environmental thing or good deed by donating your used clothes to a charity or the Goodwill that they will be given to local people in your community for free or a small price. This is not always the case; we take a closer look at where are the clothes that your donating actually goes. The Goodwill and other charities essentially makes money on your used clothes in two ways: Selling the used clothes that come in there to regular consumers looking for cheap clothes and then other twenty five percent gets resold by the pound to recycling companies and to date are purchasing over a hundred million dollars every year. The rest gets sent to land fills, just the place you didn’t want it end up.

Times have changed and now with “Fast Fashion” becoming more and more popular as Americans are buying and throwing away more clothes at alarming rates as they try and keep up with the latest fashions at discounted prices. Now Americans are spending 5 times the amount today than they did in 1980 and are throwing away around 40% more due to this trend. This is contributing to our already tapped out landfills and 90% of the clothes going in there can easily be reused. According to the Environmental Protection Agency that means that 85 percent, or 12 million tons of unused textiles are carted off directly to U.S. landfills each year and it keeps going up.

How much gets reused in America? Today only around 20 percent of the clothes that people get tired of wearing will end up in a consignment store or second had clothing retail outlet. And that means the rest will be shipped to other countries like Africa, South America and China and all that adds up to around a billion pounds of clothing that the US sends to those countries. The fact is that over eleven percent of donations made to Goodwill in 2014 alone were deemed unsalable to other consumers and sent directly to landfills. It’s estimated that the Goodwill contributes about 22 million pounds every year and that this costs the organization millions of dollars in transport fees and other expenses to get all those clothes into the landfills. Only a small percentage will go to textile recycling facilities where it gets recycled and used for rags and household insulation. You have to remember that even transporting all the used clothes to landfills and around that world requires massive fossil fuels and other waste to get it where no one else will take it.

The Goodwill also sells the unsold used clothes to salvagers (private companies) who will go through the bails of clothes and pick what they think they can resell and the rest will be sold abroad to developing countries like Africa. This is not good either as it hurts their local textiles industry/economy which creates jobs for locals in those developing countries. The main problem with all our unwanted clothes going to the developing countries such as Africa is that used t-shirts, jeans and dresses can satisfy a basic need for affordable clothing but they ultimately help keep people in poverty because is inhibits the creation of the local textile industry and thus jobs. While second-hand clothing maintains the status quo unfortunately it doesn’t help the poor get richer, it just keeps things as they are at the moment and that’s not good for the people of Africa in the long run.

Between the profits that the Goodwill or Salvation Army and charities make from your used clothing, most of it will just end up in landfills or even worse destroy the economic eco system of a developing country with used clothes flooding the markets and killing industry and jobs.

Fabwsapp keeps your used clothes local and environmental

When you use Fabswapp, you trade, swap and get for free – great used clothes that won’t end up the Goodwill or charities. As we have seen, those used clothes a large percentage of those used clothes usually ends up in the local landfills if not off to a third world country to destroy their economy.   There are lots of local families in your neighbourhood that would love to get hold of your used dress, pants, jeans, shirt, kid’s clothes, women’s or men’s clothes and other accessories you may want to pass on to someone else. So next time, instead of taking your used clothes to the Goodwill or a local charity, install the Fabswapp app and save it from eventually going to another landfill or a developing country.

Get on over to Fabswapp today and find lots of great clothing for free and do your thing to reuse and recycle. You don’t need to go to the Goodwill. You can download the Fabswapp app now on Google Play or Apple iTunes and find something you’ll need for free. You’ll be saving money and the environment and that is best for both. We’ll even give you 100 tokens for signing up. Remember every time you post something of yours on Fabswapp, you’ll get 5 free tokens. And you will also be helping us reduce the waste in landfills.