SHEIN clothing

The clothes that end up on the beaches in Africa are not necessarily the surplus that they can't deal with. I think they're the clothes which are such rubbish they can't be used. The same clothes that get rag-bagged in the charity shops. They are useless.

Chestnut
That’s not the case in our shop. It’s shameful the amount we have to rag, purely because we can’t keep the amount that is donated.
I have a friend who’s a manager in a very well know charity shop. They get so many donations that all clothes/bedding/shoes/bags are ragged at the end of the day because they know what’s coming tomorrow.
At this time of year ( change of season) we all have to be ruthless.

What is then done with the items that are ragged? is it recycled? Turned into packaging materials, carpet felt etc, is it incinerated and used to produce power.

Why is it all exported elsewhere? Our council has a huge incinerator for burning and incinerating landfill rubbish and using it to generate electricity.

Last month I watched Simon Reeves in South America.
He was in Iquique Chile - an industrial town in the desert.
He visits a place where 60,000 tonnes of clothes are dumped each year. Some were new still with tags on. There was even a barely worn tweed jacket from Bloomingdales.
This was the remains of clothes traders bought in bales to re-sell.

This is worrying. I never sent clothes to Oxfam as I had heard about them years ago. I tend to use local charities. I saw that programme with Simon Reeves what an eye opener.

Oddly enough, as a result of this thread, I am realising that the best way of disposing of worn out or less than perfect clothes is to put them in the rubbish bin.

Where I live, most of the contents of the black bins goes to a large incinerator, which uses the heat generated from burning the rubbish(and clothes) to generate electricity for up to 60,000 homes.

A far more ecological way of disposing of it than having it exported and then dumped to pollute other country's environment, and poison their seas.

But surely you would always put worn out clothes in the general rubbish. I have never done anything else, because you can't use them. I only use charity shops and clothes banks for clothes that can be used.

Until recently Chestnut, we had textile recycling banks around us that took all textiles including bedding, curtains etc etc, that I understood were reused in carpet underlay, packing insulation etc etc.

When clothes in landfill dustbins were dumped in waste pits and left to rot, bins did not seem to be an acceptable place to put worn out clothing.

In the last year or so, textile banks have gone, to be replaced by clothes banks - and that is the cause of my dilemma. In fact after what I have read and hear I am beginning to worry about stuff I put in clothing banks and give to charity, as they seem very quickly to consign them to rag merchants, who are the ones, I assume, are the source of all the waste clothes found in poor countries.

Recently I was able to give a bag of DH's clothes, that he has outgrown, but are otherwise in good condition, to a local homeless charity, who were desperate for men's clothing.

In future more clothes etc will go in the blackbin because they will be icinerated and used for power production