What actually happens to your old clothes — and where to put them if you care

What actually happens to your old clothes — and where to put them if you care

*Published by Samantha, founder of Teddy Locks*

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Most of us have a version of the same ritual. You clear out your wardrobe, fill a bag with things you no longer wear, and feel quietly good about dropping it at a charity shop or stuffing it into a clothing bank. Job done. Sustainable decision made.

I spent a long time believing that too. Then I started researching textile waste properly, and what I found changed how I think about the entire end-of-life question — not just for the clothes I make, but for everything in my drawer.

This is what I found out.

 

The numbers you need to know first

Less than 1% of textiles globally are recycled back into new textile fibre. That figure comes from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and has been independently corroborated by McKinsey and WRAP. It is not a rounding error.

Of all the textiles discarded in the UK, WRAP's 2024 Textiles Market Situation Report found that nearly half end up in general household waste. Of those, 84% are incinerated and 11% go to landfill. The charity shop and textile bank route — where most people assume their old clothes end up being worn again by someone who needs them — handles the other half. But what happens within that route is considerably more complicated than the donation bin implies.

What actually happens when you donate to a charity shop

Charity shops operate on a tight commercial model. They have limited floor space and a constant oversupply of donations. The reality is that only around 20-30% of what is donated to charity shops in the UK ends up on the shop floor for resale.

The rest follows a hierarchy. Items in good condition but not suitable for the local shop — wrong demographic, not in fashion, excess stock — are sorted and sent to centralised warehouses. From there, much of it is sold in bulk to commercial wholesalers and exported. The most common destinations are West Africa, South Asia and Eastern Europe. Kantamanto Market in Accra, Ghana, receives an estimated 15 million garments every week. In Uganda, secondhand imported clothing now accounts for 81% of all clothing purchased in the country — a volume that has effectively destroyed the local textile industry.

This isn't a reason not to donate wearable clothing in good condition. It is a reason to understand that your donation is entering a global commercial supply chain, not a charitable one, once it leaves the shop floor. And at the end of that supply chain, whatever doesn't sell — typically around 40% of what arrives at markets like Kantamanto — ends up in open landfills, dumped in rivers, or left to fragment on beaches.

The charities themselves are not the villains here. They are dealing with a volume of donations that vastly outstrips demand, created by the same fast fashion system that made the clothes cheap enough to be disposable in the first place.

The blended fabric problem

Even setting aside the export chain, there is a more fundamental obstacle to textile recycling that rarely gets discussed: most clothes cannot be recycled at all in their current form.

To recycle textiles mechanically — the most established method — fibres need to be sorted by type and colour before anything can happen. A pure cotton T-shirt can be shredded, carded and respun into recycled cotton yarn. A pure polyester fleece can be melted and extruded into new polyester. A 100% wool jumper can be pulled apart and re-spun, and the UK has wool recycling infrastructure — most of it concentrated in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire — that has operated for over 150 years.

But look at the label of almost anything you own. A typical high street garment is 60% cotton, 37% polyester, 3% elastane. Or 95% viscose, 5% spandex. Or a dozen other combinations. These blends are used because they make clothes cheaper to produce and easier to wear. They are a recycling nightmare.

Mechanical recycling of blended fabrics produces a degraded, mixed fibre that can be used for insulation, stuffing or industrial rags — not for new garments. The fibre shortens dramatically during shredding, losing the tensile strength needed for yarn spinning. As one leading textile recycling chemist puts it: "You cannot take a well-used cotton T-shirt, mechanically tear it apart and then make the cotton fibres into a new cotton T-shirt, because they have lost so much fibre quality."

Chemical recycling — which breaks fibres down to their molecular components and rebuilds them into new fibre of comparable quality — can theoretically solve the blending problem. A 2024 study in Science Advances demonstrated chemical separation of polyester from polycotton blends using microwave-assisted glycolysis. Worn Again Technologies in the UK is developing a commercial process for the same problem. But these technologies are not yet operating at meaningful commercial scale.

The UK's first commercial post-consumer polyester recycling plant, a joint venture between the Salvation Army and Project Plan B, launched in 2024 with a target of processing 2,500 tonnes of polyester per year. For context, the UK generates approximately 900,000 tonnes of textile waste annually.

What about the charity clothing bin on the street?

These vary considerably, and it matters which one you use.

Some bins are operated by genuine charities — TRAID has over 900 across the UK, and all donations are processed at their UK warehouse, with unsellable items recycled rather than exported in bulk. Oxfam's network feeds into their sorting facility in Huddersfield. These are legitimate operations with transparent processes.

Others — the standalone bins you find in car parks and retail forecourts — are operated by commercial textile merchants who pay local authorities a small fee for the pitch. They are not charities. The commercial textile merchants who operate those bins are grading, sorting, exporting. The clothing gets the same outcome but you're generating revenue for a private company rather than a charity. If the bin has no registered charity number, no money goes to a good cause. But the environmental outcome for the textile itself is broadly the same. The clothing collected is sorted and sold commercially, often exported wholesale. 

The biodegradable myth, and why landfill is worse than you think

A common response to all this is: well, at least natural fibres biodegrade. Cotton, wool, linen — these are organic materials. They'll break down.

This argument collapses when you understand what landfill actually is.

Modern landfill sites are engineered structures. Waste is compacted under pressure, which squeezes out oxygen. The environment that results is anaerobic — oxygen-deprived. In this environment, natural fibres do break down, but not through the clean aerobic composting process most people imagine. They break down through anaerobic digestion, driven by bacteria that don't need oxygen. The primary byproduct of that process is methane — a greenhouse gas 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.

The CottonWorks research platform, backed by Cotton Incorporated, reports that landfills contribute 14% of global methane emissions, significantly from organic material that was expected to quietly decompose.

So a cotton sock in landfill is not returning to the earth. It is slowly generating a gas considerably more damaging than the emissions produced by making it, and leaving behind the synthetic elastane it has been knitted with.

Synthetic fibres in landfill simply don't degrade. They persist for hundreds of years, slowly fragmenting into microplastics. Neither outcome is acceptable. But the idea that choosing natural fibres solves the end-of-life problem is not supported by the science — not unless those fibres are composted in oxygen-rich conditions, which requires separating them from synthetic blends, which almost no domestic waste stream enables.

What to actually do with different types of clothing

**Wearable clothing in good condition**
Charity shops, TRAID, Oxfam, or resale platforms (Vinted, Depop, eBay). This is the best outcome — maximum reuse, longest extension of the garment's life.

**Wearable but worn — faded, pilled, slightly stretched**
TRAID recycling banks accept these. Oxfam accepts them. The M&S Shwopping scheme, running in partnership with Oxfam, now accepts unwearable items alongside wearable ones and offers a free postal return service. These items are unlikely to be resold but can enter the recycling and downcycling stream.

Roughly 12% of all discarded textiles globally are downcycled into insulation, stuffing or industrial rags. Of the clothing that doesn't get resold in charity shops, around 20-30% becomes industrial rags and 20% becomes insulation and padding materials. In the UK organisations doing this include — Nathans Wastesavers, Roberts Recycling and FibreLab

**Old underwear, worn-out socks, tights**
Most charity shops won't accept used underwear for resale, which is correct. But several organisations will take it for recycling. TRAID accepts all textiles — new underwear with labels can go on sale, and worn items are recycled. Oxfam accepts worn underwear, which goes to their Huddersfield sorting facility and is recycled into filling materials. M&S Shwopping through Oxfam accepts them. The Salvation Army textile banks accept them.

One important note: whatever you donate, it needs to be clean (stained can be downcycled). Soiled or contaminated items cannot be processed and contaminate entire bales of otherwise recyclable material.

**Pure natural fibre items — 100% wool, 100% cotton, 100% linen**
These are the highest-value recycling feedstock. A 100% wool jumper going to a textile recycler in Dewsbury will most likely become yarn again. Look for specialist wool recyclers, or donate to TRAID or Oxfam with a note of the composition if possible. These items are worth separating out.

**Blended synthetics — anything with elastane, mixed fibres, performance fabrics**
Honest answer: the recycling infrastructure for these is not yet there at scale. Keeping them in use as long as possible through repair, and donating wearable items through TRAID or H&M's scheme, is currently the most realistic option.

The uncomfortable conclusion

Textile recycling in the UK in 2025 is not a closed loop. It is a partial, underfunded, export-dependent patchwork that handles a fraction of what we discard, and that fraction is mostly downcycled rather than truly recycled into new garments.

The most effective thing most of us can do is extend the life of what we already own. Buy less. Choose better quality. Repair. Wear things until they genuinely cannot be worn anymore, and then put them through the best available route — TRAID, Oxfam — rather than the bin.

The infrastructure for something better is being built. UKFT's Automated Textile Sorting and Pre-processing facility, currently in development, aims to create the UK's first high-volume sorting system that can feed fibre-to-fibre recycling plants. The Salvation Army's polyester recycling plant is a beginning. Chemical recycling technologies are advancing.

But they are not here yet, and it's worth being honest about that rather than pretending a charity bin makes the problem go away.

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*Teddy Locks socks are made from REPREVE® recycled polyester, certified to the Global Recycle Standard and SCS Recycled Content Standard. They are not biodegradable — Wear them for years and eventually donate them worn out to TRAID*

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