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Tracker hidden in a skirt uncovers what can happen to our recycled clothes
Some garments donated to major retailers travel 15,000 miles ... before they are burnt or dumped, a new investigation reveals

Used clothing handed to big retailers such as H&M and C&A for recycling is being shipped across the world, where items that cannot be sold are at risk of being burnt and sent to open dumpsThrough electronic tags, sewn into the lining of garments, campaigners tracked a skirt and a top, which were dropped off at the H&M store in Oxford Street, London, to Mali, a 15,000-mile journey.
Donated in November and December, the items were driven to Warwickshire, then to Southampton. They sailed separately to the United Arab Emirates, followed by Senegal, before being taken by road to Mali, in west Africa, where two thirds of the population live in poverty.

Drop-off points in H&M assure customers that clothes deposited will be reworn, reused or recycled
The beige training top has been on market stalls for the past three months, unsold, while the olive green skirt was last tracked to a wasteland on the outskirts of Bamako, the capital of Mali.
The journey has been made public after a year-long investigation by the Changing Markets Foundation, a sustainability campaign group. Clothing in good condition was placed in recycling bins in shops around Europe, then tracked around the world.
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A black zip-up top dropped off at an H&M store in Belgium appeared at a secondhand street market in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in central Africa. A blue jumper given to C&A in Brussels went to Mauritania, in northwest Africa.
Some of the world’s most deprived countries are being deluged with fast fashion from the West, campaigners say, with many ill-equipped to recycle and dispose of pieces that cannot be sold.

Mamadou Sawani, 65, with his wife and son in Marché SougouNi Coura, a vast secondhand clothing market in Bamako, MaliOLIVER MARSDENOLIVER MARSDEN

Asan Bacilli, 42, buys bails of used clothes in bulk and sifts through to find those he may be able to sell at the marketOLIVER MARSDEN
“If the fate of our tracked garments is reflective of the wider market for used and donated clothing, it represents a very significant problem indeed,” the foundation says in a report published today.
Researchers from the group linked a Find My app from an iPhone to the trackers and watched, over several months, as some garments passed through four time zones and across three continents.
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The Sunday Times went to Mali and visited the last place that the tracker on the skirt was still active and where it had remained for two months. The grass was strewn with rubbish and the ground had been scorched by a large open fire, scattered with remnants of clothing. Neither the skirt nor the tracker, which was last active on July 6, could be found.
The sports top was traced to a nearby secondhand clothing market, Marché SougouNi Coura, in central Bamako, where vast volumes of garments from the West were packed into a maze of stalls.
The foundation concealed the tracking tags in ten garments, all of which had been bought in UK charity shops, and placed them in the collection boxes of high street retailers. Another 11 items were dropped off at shops in Belgium, Germany and France. The clothing was then collected by third-party charities or recycling companies.
At H&M, boxes say: “Members get points for recycling. We welcome all textiles, from all brands, in any condition. Your garments will be reworn, reused or recycled.”
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Since last winter, only five of the 21 garments left in the boxes found their way to customers on the same continent, typically via secondhand shops. Only one of the pieces was resold in the same country in which it was initially donated: a shirt dropped off at a Zara store on Oxford Street went to a British Heart Foundation shop in Cheshire.
Other garments in good condition were sent to eastern Europe and Africa, or were traced to textile plants where garments are shredded for stuffing. One item is believed to have been burnt for fuel at a cement kiln in Germany.

Markets such as Marché SougouNi Coura are where some of the items deposited in Europe end upOLIVER MARSDENOLIVER MARSDEN
At the market in Mali, men and women sat waist-high among mounds of clothes. Sory Sy, 28, sells shirts for about 300 CFA (46p) each. “The clothes come from Germany, Belgium and France,” he said. “This isn’t a job to make money, it’s just enough to live and feed my family.”
Asan Bachili, 42, works in a small warehouse and buys 600 bales at a time. Some garments are dumped, he says, before being sifted through by children looking for things to sell.
Alongside their stalls, many had sewing machines to repair damaged items. Yet, away from the crowded stalls, the foundation says that Mali has “an informal waste-management system resulting in large, overflowing landfills and dumpsites”. Mali imported 29,351 tonnes of used clothing in 2019, according to data from the United Nations.
A Ghanaian-based environmental campaign group, the Or Foundation, has launched a “stop waste colonialism” campaign, calling on nations and producers to send money with their secondhand clothes so recipients can build the infrastructure to dispose of the inevitable waste.
Branson Skinner, its co-founder, said: “It’s absurd to think that while a G7 country struggles to manage all of its own textile waste, one of the poorest regions in the world would be any better off. It’s also absurd and quite colonial to think that if a garment is not good enough for the donor it’s good enough for someone else.”
In the Daoudabougou area of Bamako, thick black water, almost oil-like, was snaking its way through the dump as smoke rose off burning materials. Nearby, a woman and her baby, along with a few young boys, were searching through the pile for things to sell.
Djibril Kassogue, 32, from Environnement Sans Frontières, which visited the site with The Sunday Times, said things were often burnt to “reduce the quantity”. Most people in Mali relied on secondhand clothes, with the worst-quality ones dumped, he said.
Play VideoThat same day on Oxford Street, shoppers streamed out of H&M laden with bags. In the summer sales, sandals were £6, while tops cost as little as £5.
There are thousands of drop-off points in the UK at retailers including Asda, John Lewis, M&S, Schuh, H&M and River Island, with some offering money off a future purchase.
The foundation said that by incentivising a new purchase at the point of drop-off, retailers perpetuated “the very model of fast fashion that drives excessive consumption and waste”.
In 2020 H&M alone collected 18,800 tonnes of unwanted clothes and textiles through its garment collection programme, the equivalent of 94 million T-shirts.
When told about the findings, H&M said it took them “very seriously”. Leyla Ertur, the head of sustainability at H&M Group, said: “We are humble to the fact that we and our previous partner in this case have not managed to live up to our own high standards.”
H&M said it had changed the company operating its collection programme since the investigation was conducted. “It goes against our efforts, and our strict policies that textiles are dumped in nature or other places where they clearly don’t belong,” Ertur said.
All garments collected in the UK would now be sorted in Europe but some high-quality items might still be sent on globally, H&M added.
C&A was approached for comment.
According to UN data, the UK is the third-largest exporter of used clothing after the United States and China. British consumers buy more clothes per person than any other country in Europe.
Boohoo said it was continuing to explore the most effective ways to divert clothing from landfill, while Zara said its take-back scheme helped charities raise vital funds. Uniqlo said it was in partnership with the United Nations Refugee Agency and credible organisations to reuse clothes and deliver them to people in need.
George Harding-Rolls, the campaign manager at the foundation, said: “The ideal destination for these clothes would have been reuse in the country they were dropped off in. All of our clothes were in perfect condition, some even had the tags still attached, so there’s no excuse for them to be downcycled or shipped thousands of kilometres away.”

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/how- ... -83m867r0m