New Report: What actually happens to clothes after you donate them?

Today we are publishing the report coming from Sorting for Circularity: Project Rewear, and we think it is the most honest picture yet of what the global secondhand system looks like, where it is working, where it is failing, and what it would genuinely take to fix it. A few things we found that stayed with us.

• Most discarded clothes are in perfectly wearable condition. We examined 8,280 garments across four European countries. Thirty-seven per cent had no damage at all. We are not throwing away broken things. We are throwing away things we have simply moved on from.
• Over 86% of garments sampled at Ghana’s Kantamanto Market arrived damaged, despite being exported as rewearable. The traders who bought those bales had no way of knowing what was inside. They bore the cost.
• AI-powered sorting technology, tested in one of our pilots, modelled a profit shift from zero to €6.5 million annually for a mid-sized sorting facility. The economics of circularity can be made to work, but only if the right investments are made.
• Repair makes strong economic sense for the right garments. A repaired jacket in our pilot sold for €125, while fast fashion basics rarely break even. That gap tells you everything about what overproduction is doing to the system downstream.

The full report is out today. It covers the European secondhand market, original fieldwork in Ghana and Pakistan, three innovation pilots, and a set of recommendations for brands, policymakers, investors, and the rest of us.