Donating your clothes: is it really useful?

Romain Barbe

Founder · Mieux Donner · Reading time: 9 min

Donating clothes is one of the few acts you never have to justify. We assume it is generous, ecological, helpful to charities, that it clothes people in need. Four benefits in a single gesture. No one asks "what does this really achieve?", because the answer seems self-evident.

Yet when you look at where these clothes actually go, who buys them, and what it changes for the people we imagine helping, the picture blurs. The collection system is in crisis. The clothes flow into a global commercial circuit whose effects are, at best, ambiguous.

Does this mean we should stop donating? Not necessarily. But the image we have of the gesture seriously deserves to be reconsidered.

What really happens to donated clothes?

Official figures from the French collection system

In France, the textiles, household linen and footwear (TLC) sector is overseen by a state-accredited extended producer responsibility body, Refashion. According to its 2024 activity report, 891,310 tonnes of TLC were placed on the French market that year. Of this volume, 289,393 tonnes were collected, an increase of nearly 8% year-on-year.[1]

Once processed in sorting centres, donated clothes are channelled into three broad streams.

This recovery rate may seem reassuring. But it obscures a central piece of information: where reuse actually happens.

From bin to shipping container: half goes abroad

The vast majority of clothes destined for reuse are not resold in France. According to Refashion, the current collection system relies on exports for more than 60% of its volumes.[2] French charity shops, such as Ding Fring (operated by Le Relais) or Le Coin du Réutile (Emmaüs), absorb only a marginal share of collected volumes. At Le Relais, France's largest collector with around 22,000 containers across the country, only about 6% of collected clothes end up in a French shop. More than half are shipped abroad, packaged in large compressed bales of twenty or fifty kilos depending on the operator, loaded onto cargo containers bound for Africa, Eastern Europe or Asia. The rest is recycled into wipes or insulation.[3]

In other words, when you drop a bag of clothes into a French collection bin, the most likely trajectory of that bag is: sorting centre, baling, cargo container, second-hand market abroad. This reality is neither hidden nor illegitimate, it is how the system normally works. But it rarely shows up in the mental picture of the person dropping off the bag.

A solidarity sector on the brink of asphyxiation

This export mechanism works because second-hand bales have market value. But that value has been collapsing for several years, driven mainly by fast fashion and ultra-fast fashion (Shein, Temu, and their equivalents). The average quality of clothing placed on the market has deteriorated to such an extent that sorting centres now receive a growing share of garments that are virtually unsellable.

In August 2025, the three largest Belgian operators of the social and solidarity economy (Terre asbl, Oxfam and Les Petits Riens) published a joint statement warning that the sector was "on the brink of asphyxiation".[5] The same phenomenon is playing out in France, where the average price per tonne of sorted textiles dropped sharply in the early 2020s after rising steadily for decades.

Exports to Africa: an ambiguous balance, not aid

A large share of Africans wear Western second-hand clothing

The mental picture many donors hold (a donated garment clothing a family in need) corresponds to a very different commercial reality. Clothes collected in Europe and North America feed an international second-hand market worth several billion dollars per year. Africa absorbs a significant share. According to estimates reported by CUTS International, around 70% of global clothing donations end up on the African continent, where they are resold on local markets at prices well below those of new clothes.[6]

These clothes are not distributed for free. They are sold, to consumers who can afford them, by merchants who make a living from it. In Kenya alone, the "mitumba" sector employs around 65,000 traders. In Ghana, the Kantamanto market in Accra brings together about 30,000 sellers and sees nearly 15 million items arrive every week. In the United States, the export sector to East Africa is estimated to represent several tens of thousands of direct jobs.[7]

Put plainly: this is neither humanitarian aid nor a clandestine trade. It is a market. And like any market, it has winners and losers.

A documented effect on local textile industry, but not a simple causality

This is where economic research converges on a worrying observation. Several peer-reviewed and replicable studies show that the massive influx of second-hand clothing is associated with a decline in local textile production in receiving countries. A reference study covering the period 1981 to 2000 estimates that a 1% rise in second-hand imports is linked to a roughly 0.6% drop in local apparel production.[8] More recent work has nuanced the exact magnitude, but the direction of the effect, negative, is broadly shared across the literature.

This conclusion needs to be tempered by methodological caution. Establishing clear causality is difficult: trade liberalisation, competition from cheap new Asian clothing, weak infrastructure and inconsistent industrial policies have all weighed heavily. A recent systematic review concludes that second-hand clothing simultaneously contributes to economic growth and job creation (through the resale chain) AND to the documented decline of local textile industry (through competition).[9] Both effects are real, and their net balance varies by country and period.

One element remains hard to ignore. Textile manufacturing has historically been the first rung of the industrialisation ladder for most countries that escaped poverty over the past forty years. It requires little capital, plenty of labour, and offers an immediate export outlet. In Asia, hundreds of millions of people have seen their living conditions transformed by this dynamic: more than 800 million in China between 1990 and 2024, and more than 200 million elsewhere in East Asia, according to the World Bank.[10] Over the same period, the number of sub-Saharan Africans in extreme poverty rose from 282 million to 464 million. Several factors explain this divergence in trajectory, and the share attributable to second-hand imports is contested and certainly not the majority cause. But the notion that our donated clothes "help" populations who might otherwise have benefited, in the absence of these flows, from better-paid manufacturing jobs, deserves at least to be raised.

A market that also creates jobs, and which banning would not replace

The opposing argument is also serious. Several development economists, including researchers at the ODI (Overseas Development Institute), point out that banning second-hand imports would not mechanically revive African textile manufacturing. In the absence of structural reforms (affordable energy, logistical infrastructure, vocational training, favourable trade agreements), second-hand clothes would simply be replaced by cheap new Chinese or Bangladeshi imports, and local industry would remain suppressed. The 2016 East African episode illustrates this difficulty: six countries (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan) had voted a plan to phase out second-hand imports by 2019. All backed down under the threat of losing access to AGOA trade preferences from the United States, with the exception of Rwanda, which effectively lost its AGOA benefits in 2018 for maintaining its policy.[11]

One must also acknowledge a concrete positive effect for consumers. Second-hand clothes are on average three to five times cheaper than equivalent new ones. For a low-income household, this can make the difference between owning a single poor-quality garment and owning several suited to different seasons and activities, or between buying mediocre new clothes and accessing higher-quality pieces originally made for the European market. This gain in purchasing power is real, and it benefits the poorest first. It is one of the strongest arguments for keeping the second-hand clothing trade going.

To this must be added the waste question. As the average quality of bales arriving in Africa keeps falling, a growing share of garments finds no buyer. At the Kantamanto market in Accra, the local NGO The Or Foundation estimates that around 40% of clothes end up as waste, after attempts to resell them.[12] This estimate is contested by the Ghanaian importers' association, which argues that fewer than 5% of bales are unusable on arrival. The distinction matters: bales are not full of waste when they arrive, but the average quality has become such that many items no longer find a buyer and end up in illegal dumps or as textile pollution. This is an environmental cost that ultimately falls on the receiving countries.

Donating clothes is not a targeted act of aid

Better than throwing away, but not therefore a generous act

If you have read this far, you probably want to ask a question: "Fine, but it is still better than throwing them away, isn't it?" The answer is: yes, almost always. A garment dropped into a collection bin has a real chance of being reused or recycled. A garment thrown into household waste goes to incineration or landfill. Continuing to deposit clothes in collection bins remains rational.

What is problematic is the place this gesture occupies in how many people picture their own generosity. The available figures reveal a striking gap depending on how the question is asked.

Part of this gap is probably explained by the fact that some of those who see themselves as donors include their donations of clothes, food or objects in that category. But "better than throwing away" is not the same argument as "a generous gesture that helps someone". Putting a glass bottle into a recycling bin is better than putting it in regular waste. No one considers, for that reason, that returning bottles is a generous act. It is closer to a sorting gesture, in a system doing its job.

Donating clothes belongs almost exclusively to this category (with the exception of donating or selling a particularly valuable garment in good condition that you could have kept using). The fact that part of this system is run by non-profit organisations (Le Relais, Emmaüs, Les Petits Riens) does not change the nature of the gesture: these organisations use donated clothes as raw material to fund their activities, primarily through export and resale. Some charities run direct distribution to people in difficulty in France (Secours Catholique, Secours Populaire, Croix-Rouge), but they absorb only a marginal share of total collected volumes.

No one asked us for these clothes

When a French donor drops their clothes into a collection bin, one thing deserves to be named: at no point in this chain have the people the donor imagines helping been consulted. No one asked them whether they wanted Western clothes. No one checked whether this is really what they needed. No one asked: "Rather than a bag of used garments, what would actually help?"

This is the asymmetry that defines the gesture. We decide from Paris, Lyon or Brussels what will be shipped to tens of millions of people on the other side of the world. The format, the quality, the quantity, the timing, the composition: all these decisions are made on our side, with no consultation of the populations concerned. And we keep calling this gesture "generous", as if generosity were measured by the act of giving alone, regardless of what is given and to whom.

This logic is not specific to clothing. As we explore in detail in our article on paternalism in international aid, this is a documented pattern in development assistance, which researchers like Teju Cole have named the "White Savior Industrial Complex": a system in which helping others becomes primarily an experience that elevates the helper, more than a response to the needs of those it is supposed to benefit. Clothes are a particularly clear illustration. The gesture reassures the donor, who parts with an unused object while feeling useful. What the person on the receiving end actually gets, and whether they needed it, are not the first questions asked.

An important nuance: this does not mean help should only be provided when populations explicitly ask for it. Many urgent needs (vitamin A supplementation that prevents blindness, an insecticide-treated bednet that prevents malaria) are not explicitly requested either, simply because the people concerned do not always have the medical information to identify them as priorities. Effective generosity means serving fundamental and universal preferences (to live, to be healthy, to see one's children grow up) with the best available evidence, avoiding both the paternalism of "I decide your needs based on what suits me" and the passivity of "I wait to be asked".

Donating clothes does not respond to a request, nor to a documented urgent need. It responds to another need, that of the donor to dispose of a bag while feeling aligned with their values. It is a routine gesture, possibly better for the planet than the alternatives, but it is hard to argue that it is a solidarity act intended to help others.

The instructive case of TOMS shoes

The most rigorous study on in-kind donations confirms this mechanism. A 2018 paper in the World Bank Economic Review evaluated the shoe donation programme of the company TOMS, which for years delivered one pair of shoes to a poor child for every pair sold. The evaluation covered nearly 1,600 children in rural El Salvador and produced three results[14]:

• the impact on general health, foot health and children's self-esteem was non-significant
• a slight positive effect on school attendance for boys, with no equivalent among girls
• children who received the shoes were significantly more likely to state that their family's needs should be met by outside assistance rather than by their own efforts

The researchers' conclusion: in a context where most children already owned shoes, the programme delivered little, and produced a measurable psychological effect of dependence. The donation had been designed from the company's perspective, not the beneficiaries'.

The parallel with clothing donations is not exact (TOMS distributed for free, whereas your clothes are resold), but the mechanism is instructive. We give what we have in excess, to people we imagine need it.

Compared to a targeted donation, the impact gap is considerable

To assess the impact of a clothing donation, the right reflex is to compare it to what the same economic value would produce if allocated differently.

A T-shirt in good condition, donated to a French collection bin, generates for the collection chain a resale value at export of a few cents to a few tens of cents depending on its quality. The same T-shirt resold directly on Vinted or eBay by its owner can fetch five to fifteen euros, depending on brand and condition. This difference is not anecdotal: logistics, sorting and transport costs absorb nearly all the economic value of the garment in the standard circuit. As we explain in our article on cash versus in-kind donations, a financial donation allows charities to address real needs on the ground with much greater efficiency.

Five to fifteen euros donated to a charity recommended by an independent evaluator such as GiveWell or Giving Green can fund, for instance:

• around three insecticide-treated bednets against malaria, with a demonstrated impact on child mortality
• several doses of vitamin A supplements for children at risk of deficiency
• or a direct unconditional transfer to a household in extreme poverty via GiveDirectly, whose effectiveness is documented by more than a hundred studies

What to do instead?

Better than the bin. Far from a targeted donation. The right stance is not to feel guilty nor to stop donating clothes. It is to stop confusing this gesture with a high-impact act of generosity, and to direct your donor energy toward choices whose effects can be measured.

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