What Happens to the Clothes That Thrift Stores Can’t Sell?

Magpie Thrift Store

Thrifting can be great for the environment, but it still produces waste. At Magpie Thrift, we go through hundreds of pounds of donations a day and not all of them can be sold, so where’s the rest supposed to go? Well, that’s a complicated question.

Our hope is to run the most sustainable thrift store possible—while still being a fun, easy place to shop! Magpie donates as many resources as possible to support the work of Everly Seattle, a new nonprofit being developed by our store’s owner. Inspired by a decade in the thrift industry, Everly aims to engage local communities in sustainable living, creative reuse, and other circular practices. This partnership means that, at Magpie, sustainability is more than just a side project, it’s a part of who we are.

We wanted to start simple, let’s look at what we’re getting rid of. Right away, we had to accept that there was already a pretty big gap in our knowledge… What happens to our waste once it leaves the store?

What We Do With Clothes We Can’t Sell

Our staff at Magpie Thrift sort donated clothing every single day right as it comes into the store. These staff are trained to quickly analyze each piece we get to see if it meets our store’s standards. If an item isn’t for us, it usually fits into one of two categories: wearable or pass.

Wearable clothes that are not likely to sell in-store (due to condition, style, season, etc.) but are still useful, get set aside and donated to one of our community partners: WHEEL, Community Lunch, or Bailey-Boushay House. We have a list of what each group is currently taking so our sorting staff can bag up donations to be picked up on a regular basis.

Any clothes deemed unwearable are put into large garbage bags, which we call “pass bags.” These pass bags are picked up by the King County Solid Waste Division’s Threadcycle program multiple times a week. For a long time, this has been a reliable option for our pass donations, but with our new commitment to sustainability we wanted to dig deeper.

What is Threadcycle?

And what happens to our pass bags once they leave the store?

Well, we reached out to the King County Solid Waste Division (KCSWD) to find out. According to a staff member there, Threadcycle is simply a collection vehicle that transfers clothing to other vendors. These vendors include Goodwill (Evergreen, South King, Pierce and Thurston Counties), The Salvation Army, Value Village, TexGreen, and USAgain.

Unraveling Threadcycle’s Vendors

To know where our pass clothing truly goes, we would have to learn what each of these individual vendors do with whatever Threadcycle gives them (which also proved more complicated than you might think). After reaching out to these organizations and not hearing back, we researched them ourselves to find out more. Unfortunately, we had trouble finding up-to-date or independently verified information, but with that in mind, here’s what we found.

What does Goodwill do with unsellable donations?

According to this 2021 Seattle Times article, Goodwill throws out anything that is clearly unusable, like moldy clothes or broken furniture. Items that do not make it to the main sales floor (if they’re out of style or slightly damaged) are first sold at local Goodwill outlet stores, also known as “the bins.” After that, the outlet store’s unsold items become salvage, which gets separated and auctioned off to retailers or recyclers. Anything still left unsold gets balled up into balers, purchased by Buffalo Export LLC, and sold to other countries in Africa or Central and South Asia.

What does Value Village do with unsellable donations?

Value Village reports that they are able to sell or repurpose up to 95% of the donations they receive, and only 5% becomes “true waste.” They bundle up unsold or unsellable clothes in good condition and try to resell these bundles in marketplaces dedicated to large-scale, second-hand sales. These markets are both domestic and international, operating in over 30 countries, but it is unclear which or how many Value Village contributes to.

What does The Salvation Army do with unsellable donations?

The Salvation Army website states that they give unsellable clothes to cloth graders, who repurpose materials to make rags, upholstery, etc. for resale in both domestic and foreign markets. They claim to make a significant effort to minimize waste by reselling fabric for textiles, recycling scrap metal or cardboard, and selling metal or soft plastic to recyclers. However, many of the local Salvation Army stores are closing, so they likely no longer receive a lot of the things that Magpie gives to Threadcycle.

What does USAgain do with unsellable donations?

USAgain works to give clothes to lower-income individuals, because it is more affordable and sustainable, but we couldn’t find anything more specific on their website. Clothing that is passed to USAgain is either given to wholesalers or sorted by cloth graders. After that, it gets donated to second hand stores or recycled into items like insulation and wiping rags. They transport these clothes by balling them up into half-ton cubes and shipping them across the US or to various other countries.

What does TexGreen do with unsellable donations?

One organization that receives textiles from Threadcycle, TexGreen (also known as Green Team Worldwide), participates in direct fabric recycling, which stands out to us. Green Team Worldwide sorts and recycles most fabrics they receive to produce new fabric. Not only does this reduce textile waste in landfills, but it also cuts down the waste involved in traditional fabric production. The company has existed for twelve years and operates across the West Coast, the North East, and Texas. Though TexGreen is a for-profit business, they generate income for various nonprofits and seem committed to sustainability.

Where do the donations go after Threadcycle’s vendors?

We found that many secondhand clothing stores (including some that receive textiles from Threadcycle) ship their pass clothes to countries in the global south. Often, all that’s left in these bundles is low-quality fast fashion that can’t be sustainably reused or repurposed, so it just becomes pollution for whatever country it landed in. Additional evidence suggests that sending large quantities of our textile waste to other countries can harm their economies by competing with local textile industries.

There is still some debate over this topic, but we tend to be more in the “leave no trace” camp whenever possible, especially considering some of the items we’ve had to pass on. Furthermore, all of these processes are far removed from us, making it nearly impossible for our thrift store to understand how much we’re adding to them.

How can we use this lesson to be more sustainable at Magpie Thrift?

We still believe that giving our pass clothes to Threadcycle is a relatively good choice for us right now. Ultimately, we would like to be more certain of how our textile waste is being used by partnering directly with fabric recyclers or other organizations that repurpose unusable clothes. Rest assured, this process is only just beginning for us.

We will continue looking into a more direct relationship with textile recyclers, like Green Team Worldwide, to repurpose the fabric we cannot sell. In the meantime, we are always interested in adding to our network of local organizations that we can donate our pass items to, wearable or otherwise.

We all face systemic barriers to true recycling and reuse, but at Magpie we are committed to doing everything we can to overcome them. If you have any ideas on how to help us or have an organization that could use some clothes, please reach out here.