Episode 97: Nothing is Disposable (with Liz Ricketts of the OR Foundation), part I

Welcome to Clotheshorse, the podcast that wants to normalize cutting open the tube of lotion/toothpaste/eye cream/concealer whatever and squeezing the last little bit of the contents into another vessel so you get maximum use of every thing you buy.

I’m your host, Amanda and this is episode 97. Today’s episode is part one of a three part series that will be filling out the rest of September, whose theme (just as a reminder) is NOTHING IS DISPOSABLE! I am so excited about this group of episodes…they have literally been months in the making. My super special guest is Liz Ricketts, the director of the OR foundation, a USA and Ghana based not-for-profit working at the intersection of environmental justice, education and fashion development. I am SO thrilled for all of you to meet her…we hit it off immediately and I feel so honored, so lucky that Liz is another amazing person that I’ve gotten to meet, talk with, and learn so much from.

Today we are going to be talking about the unpretty, truly disgusting truth about what happens to a vast majority of the clothing we donate each year, that we drop off in trash bags into bins that are conveniently placed to make throwing away our stuff as easy as possible. I know that sounds melodramatic…but well, it’s all the truth. Throwaway culture might not seem to be having an impact on you personally (other than that maybe you feel like you have too much stuff and it’s kind of a burden), but the rapid cycle of shop-wear a couple of times (or never) and then donate is having a massive negative impact on humans, animals, and the planet…it’s just happening out of our line of sight.

Before we jump into my conversation with Liz, let’s recap some of the facts that we know about our clothing:

The average American buys 68-70 new garments each year. We’re talking brand new stuff, not secondhand. That averages out to about a new item every five or 6 days. You’re probably listening to this and saying yeah well i haven’t bought new clothes in years…i’m still wearing the same stuff from college or i exclusively thrift or wear vintage or sew my own clothes. That’s great! But that 68-70 number is an average, so it means that for every one of us who hasn’t bought anything new in the past year, someone else bought 140 new items. That’s more like something new every 2-3 days…and of course there are tons of people who land between that average of 70 and 140, but no matter how you slice it…this is a lot of clothing being created, sold, and then discarded.

As a reminder, according to a study by Kinsey, 60% of clothing ends up in the landfill or incinerator within the same year it was produced. When you hear that statistic, you know that a lot of clothing just isn’t being worn very many times, if at all.

Ultimately 85% of the clothing we dispose of every year…regardless of how many times it has been worn or how much it cost or how we felt when we bought and wore it…85% of that clothing ends up in a landfil or incinerator.

That remaining 15% is donated. And donation fills us with a warm and fuzzy feeling. Yes, we overconsumed. Yes we barely wore that thing. Yes we got rid of it because our closet was bursting with things we didn’t like that much…but we donated it, so not only do we get the privilege of never thinking about it again, not only do we get to pretend that we never bought too much and wore it too little…but we also get to feel like we did a “good” thing by donating it. We get to feel like a hero, a philanthropist for just a few moments.

As we’ve talked about here on past episodes…at best 10% of those clothes are actually sold by the thrift store where we dropped them off. If we dropped that stuff in one of those “textile recycling” bins in say a Target parking lot…none of those clothes will ever be worn locally…We are cycling through so many clothes, so rapidly, that thrift stores can’t keep up with the flow. When I see people being secretive about where they thrift because they want to keep that spot to themselves…or when I see someone being a jerk on social media about resellers….I want to scream. Scream so loudly that HEY GUESS WHAT…THERE’S WAY MORE CLOTHING BE DONATED THAN WE CAN EVER POSSIBLY WEAR SO PLEASE DON’T WORRY WE AREN’T RUNNING OUT. There is plenty to go around. Because there is such an excess…and once again, this excess is overwhelming for thrift stores…and that’s only 15% of the clothing we’re tossing out ever year, which is a very low percentage. Imagine getting that grade on a test. You would be so grounded! That mere 15% is so overwhelming for thrift stores, that …the vast majority of all the clothes we donate will end up either shredded and used for industrial purposes or sent overseas.

It’s hard to get a gauge on the full scale of the global secondhand clothing industry because so much of it is conducted informally by individuals. But we do know that 2-4 million tons of secondhand clothing are being shipped from wealthier, more fast fashion consuming countries to poorer countries. No surprise here that the United States is the biggest exporter of secondhand clothing, followed by the UK.

Liz and I are going to touch on this more in our conversation…but this exported clothing is sorted by type, graded by quality, and baled up before it heads across the world. The better graded used clothing is exported to Central American Countries and the lower graded clothing is shipped to Africa and Asia. The biggest hubs for commercial sorting of preowned clothes are in South Asia, Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands and Hungary.

My conversation with Liz is going to focus on Ghana and specifically the Kantamanto market in Accra…but I can assure you that this deluge of unwanted clothing is flowing daily into other places.

This is the delusion of clothing recycling, the delusion of circularity playing out day after day. And this delusion is used to get us to consume more and more without guilt, blissfully unaware of the horrible repercussions of yet another office 5K tee or that dress we wore to one wedding.

The great news: after listening to my conversations with LIz and her team over the next few episodes…you will no longer be deluded. None of us will. And this is how real change begins. So let’s jump in!

Can I just say how excited I am to continue this conversation with LIz? She will be back next week for the second half of our conversation. And I’ll be giving you listen on circularity…another great concept that is being adopted and distorted by big brands for greenwashing purposes.

You can find the OR foundation on instagram @theorispresent or visit the or. org

I was telling Dustin that recording with Liz was super rad because I enjoy having these kinds of conversations and Liz is just so delightful…but I also felt kinda sick, just a little nauseated the entire time, as I heard the details of the impact of all that barely worn, but not very great clothing. And I…it’s hard. I worked in that industry for a long time. I worried that if I didn’t create stuff cheaply enough, fast enough, or popular enough, that I would lose my job. Buying/creating dumb future garbage clothes and accessories was what stood between me and well homelessness. I lost sleep over making my employer unhappy and thinking about the impact that making that employer happy would have on the planet and its people. It’s a hard thing to reconcile. That’s why I’m always reminding all of you that it’s progress over perfection. We’ve made mistakes in the past–omg I’ve had so many clothes that I barely wore and then sold at the Buffalo Exchange–but we’re learning, we’re doing better, we’re changing our behavior, and we’re educating those around us. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…One person can’t change the world alone, but when we all make these changes together, it makes a big impact on both the planet AND the way companies do business. We’re going to do this, I promise!