AS I SEE IT
BY MARIANNE HERON
Charity shops have a double whammy feel-good factor to them. On the one hand they give clothes a second lease of life at bargain prices, and on the other they are a way of expiating our guilt over unwanted garments by donating them to charity to raise funds for good causes.
The story isn’t quite so simple though. Our addiction to buying clothes, 60% more than were bought back at the start of the Noughties, brings an abundance of donations to the charity shop sector. The fact that up to 50% of what is donated is unsuitable for sale, for a variety of reasons, poses challenges about reuse or disposal.
A call to a local vintage shop, where I was hoping to offload an outgrown glamour number, revealed that the owner was refusing any more garments and was returning some to donors. It was an example of the Too Much Stuff syndrome, caused by our over consumption of fashion.
Last year we spent €3.8 billion on fashion, and the lion’s share, or should that be lioness’, is women’s fashion. The biggest buyers of fashion are young women and an increasing share of that is on low priced, fast fashion, worn only a couple of times before being discarded. Shockingly, considering the size of our population, we are the second highest producer of textile waste in the EU with a disposal of 164,000 tonnes of clothes a year.
Donations are at an all-time high, with 650 charity outlets for 40 registered charities in Ireland. Like any fairsized centre Kilkenny has plenty of charity shops including Oxfam, Enable, Conquer Cancer and Jack and Jill.
While sales are buoyant, given the way that charity shopping is now trendy, the volume of clothing coming in represents a rising tide.
The Irish Cancer Society’s shop on Parliament Street Kilkenny, with clothes and gifts for all the family had to close two days after it opened when Covid struck. Post lockdown it has been “a wonderful success,” according to Una O’Mahony, Regional Retail Manager for the charity’s 21 shops. “We depend on the generosity of the public to support us with donations to meet increasing demand, people come to shop because they want good quality and they want something different. Also we are so well supported by volunteers, there is a really positive feel, there’s always a bit of craic.”
Una confirms that ICS shops have been receiving more fast fashion donations recently. “It has increased but we are able to manage, we need donations.
“We recycle about 40% of our clothing, we try to use as much as we can,”she says.
So what happens in the afterlife of unsold charity shop garments? This is where a really bright idea for sustainability and circular use comes in. Cookstown Textile Recyclers(CTR) started 20 years ago with just 10 employees with the aim of diverting textile waste from landfill. Now the sorting hub based in Randalstown, Co Antrim employs a staff of 250 servicing 95 % of Ireland’s charity shops, textile banks and local councils.
Textile are sorted on site, and about 35% of clothing which is suitable for reuse in other countries where it will be helpful, is exported. The rest is sorted into up to 250 categories, some is sent to pulping mills where the textile waste is repurposed for things like insulation or in construction while a tiny percentage is incinerated or dumped.
But the great thing about CTR is that they try to avoid landfill, which is where the ecological damage happens. When unsorted textiles end up decaying in unauthorised dumps in Africa or else where they emit methane which is ten times more harmful that other greenhouse gases. The Randalstown hub also runs Cash for Clobber, which encourages school children to get involved in recycling and at the same time raise funds for schools.
EU regulation which should stop clothing ending up in landfill was published last July. Clothes will require passports Digital Product Passports (DPP) along with all other EU products. These passports are part of the EUs legislation on Extended Producer Responsibility and Eco-design Products Regulation (ESPR) and will have information running from origin through environmental impact and method of disposal. The legislation also includes a ban on destruction of unsold clothing.
Phew! Charity doesn’t just begin at home, it’s eco-friendly.
