Where Do Donated Clothes Really Go?

Every year, Americans donate billions of pounds of clothing. The motivation is almost always the same: someone wants their old clothes to help a person in need, stay out of a landfill, or do some good in the world. It's a genuinely generous impulse.

But there's a significant gap between what most donors believe happens to their clothes and what actually happens. Understanding that gap isn't about blaming any one organization — it's about making your donation count.

The Journey of a Donated Garment

When you drop a bag of clothes at a donation center, it enters a sorting and processing system that most donors never see. Here's how that system actually works, based on data from the Secondary Materials and Recycled Textiles Association (SMART) and reporting from organizations that work directly in textile recovery.

That top number is the one that surprises most people. Only about 15% of donated clothing gets resold locally — meaning roughly 85 cents of every donation dollar, in terms of material, leaves your community entirely.

The Overseas Export Problem

The largest portion of donated clothing — roughly 45% — gets exported to developing nations as secondhand goods. This is a global trade worth billions of dollars annually, and it operates largely invisibly to the donors who supplied the raw material.

Countries like Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Pakistan, and Chile receive enormous volumes of Western secondhand clothing. In Ghana's Kantamanto Market in Accra, tens of thousands of tons of used clothing from the US, UK, and Europe arrive every week, sold in bales that traders buy without knowing what's inside.

The impact on local textile economies has been substantial. Researchers studying markets in Sub-Saharan Africa have documented how the flood of cheap Western secondhand clothing has undercut local fabric producers, tailors, and small clothing manufacturers who cannot compete on price. Communities that once had vibrant garment industries have seen them contract significantly over the past few decades, a shift that many economists and development researchers trace in part to the scale of textile exports from wealthy countries.

What Happens to Clothes That Can't Be Resold

Clothing that doesn't make it onto a thrift store shelf or into an export bale gets sorted into one of two streams: recyclable textiles or landfill waste.

The recyclable portion — about 30% of all donated clothing — gets processed into what the industry calls "shoddy." Garments are sorted by fiber type and color, then mechanically shredded back into raw fiber. This fiber gets used as:

Industrial wiping rags — Used in manufacturing, auto shops, and janitorial services. This is one of the largest end markets for recycled textiles.

Home insulation — Programs like Blue Jeans Go Green take denim specifically and process it into UltraTouch insulation, used in residential construction.

Furniture and automotive fill — Fiber fill for seat cushions, mattress padding, and car door linings.

New yarn and fabric — A smaller but growing stream, where fiber is respun into new textile products. This is the most technically demanding form of recycling and still represents a small percentage of the total.

The remaining ~10% — clothing that is wet, moldy, contaminated, or too degraded to process — goes to landfill. This is why most donation centers specifically request that donated clothing be clean and dry.

Does This Mean You Shouldn't Donate?

Not at all. The point isn't to stop donating — it's to donate more intentionally.

The system described above is largely the result of volume economics. Thrift stores receive far more clothing than their local markets can absorb, so they've built processing infrastructure to handle the overflow. The problem isn't donation itself — it's that most donors have no visibility into where their specific items will end up, and many assume a local outcome that isn't guaranteed.

The better approach is to match your donation to its most likely outcome based on condition. A professional blazer in great condition has a very different ideal destination than a bag of worn t-shirts. Treating them the same — dropping both at a general thrift drop-off — guarantees neither gets the best possible outcome.

The Bottom Line

Your donation intention is good. The system you're donating into wasn't designed to be transparent about where things end up. That's not a scandal — it's a structural reality of how large-scale textile recovery works.

What you can control is the first step: choosing a destination that matches what you're donating and what you want to happen to it. That single choice — made with 30 seconds of information — is what BetterThanThrift.com exists to help with.

The clothing you donate has real value. Worn-out jeans can become insulation in someone's home. A good blazer can help someone land a job. A bag of t-shirts can go directly to a neighbor through a mutual aid network. None of that requires more effort on your part — just slightly better information at the moment you decide where to donate.