Your unwanted clothes are now so valuable John Lewis gives you vouchers for them - and your charity shop donations could end up being RESOLD in Africa - as 'fast fashion' fuels £140m rag trade

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A knot of low-slung jeans, piles of Breton tops, endless black dresses and a crumpled mass of shirts. Perhaps there’s a growing army of lone socks and baggy knickers, too. How many of us know exactly what lurks at the back of our wardrobe?

Once we’ve tired of our clothes, we either take a few choice pieces along to the local charity shop or chuck them in the bin.

And it’s often a case of out of sight, out of mind. But did you know fashion waste is becoming an environmental crisis to rival plastic pollution in our oceans?

It’s thanks largely to ‘fast fashion’, which enables us to snap up a look we spy online in seconds — and ever more cheaply.

Each year in the UK, a staggering 300,000 tonnes of clothing is sent to landfill.

Globally, 73 per cent of clothing produced eventually ends up there. According to the Government’s Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP), fashion has the fourth largest environmental impact, after housing, transport and food. However, there are a number of schemes that claim to help.

This week John Lewis announced it’s piloting one to pay customers for returning discarded clothing bought from their stores and website over the last five years — no matter their condition. Once you have a total buy-back value of at least £50 (a pair of damaged cashmere gloves could fetch £4, an old bra £5), they will send a courier to collect them.

The totals are calculated by an app and you receive a giftcard in exchange. Although other High Street take-back schemes are offered by TK Maxx, H&M, M&S and Zara, they require a bit more effort on your part as you must drop the clothes off in-store.

And while you receive vouchers or loyalty points in return, the John Lewis pilot gives a price for each piece rather than a lump sum, ‘encouraging people to see the value of every item’.

There is a more cynical reason, however, behind all these High Street shops’ generosity — your old clothes are surprisingly valuable.

Help or hindrance: Academics say donations can restrict new retail economies in developing economies. Stock picture

The price rag dealers pay for used clothes has climbed from about £220 a tonne in 2007 to about £500 a tonne today — and it’s an industry now worth £140 million.

And rather than being unpicked and rewoven, as you might imagine, around half of old clothes you take to a charity shop or retailer are actually sold on — mainly in Eastern Europe and Africa.

John Lewis says this is the case with its scheme: the bought-back clothes will either be resold or recycled, but the trial is at too early a stage to give expected percentages in each case.

What’s more, charities say donations are falling in the face of this High Street competition, and that criminals are also being drawn to the high prices — there’s reports of donations being stolen.

Many firms have sprung up offering to collect clothes door-to-door for free. Shipping them off to be sold isn’t the end of it, though.

Alan Wheeler, director of the Textile Recycling Association, says: ‘Just because a retailer collects garments doesn’t mean the problem is solved. Where do they go?

‘Typically clothes go through a sorting programme and maybe 50 per cent will be sold for export.

‘The rest will need to be recycled: sometimes they are cut for wiping cloths, depending on the material, or they are used to manufacture heat and sound insulation or filling materials such as mattress or duvet fillings.

‘Some textiles are used to make “shoddy”, a wool-substitute yarn which can make blankets used in relief work. Recycled fibres can also be used to manufacture the interior linings in cars.

‘Even if the used clothing is of good enough quality to be reused, eventually it will wear out and have to be either recycled or disposed of.

‘Of course, it would be much better to be able to recycle these worn out items, so it would be good if new garments were designed with recycling in mind.’

And in terms of the plastics used in clothes, controversially Wheeler says that if the public turned against polyster in favour of cotton, it would only be swapping one big environmental problem for another.

India Sturgis with the clothes mountain at the Oxfam Wastewise recycling centre in Batley, West Yorkshire 

Conventional cotton production can cause huge environmental problems. It typically takes 20,000 litres of water to produce just one kilogram of cotton.

Polyester — a synthetic man-made polymer and mostly non-biodegradable plastic — is used in 60 per cent of our garments. The most common is polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, which is the same plastic used in soft drink and ketchup bottles.

In many respects, polyester’s popularity is a no-brainer. It’s cheap, lightweight, shape-retaining, easy to blend with other materials and long-lasting. Manufacturing techniques have become so sophisticated that it can now be spun finer than a human hair.

Forget the rough, thick polyester shirts of old — some modern polyesters rival even the most expensive natural fibres in quality.

Polyester or otherwise, what’s the best way to recycle your clothes?

The new app reGAIN might offer consumers something different to the High Street take-back schemes. The idea is simple — choose a minimum of ten items to package in a cardboard box and use the app to locate your closest drop-off point.

You receive a discount code from the partner of your choice to go towards your next purchase. Above all, Wheeler prefers the good old-fashioned method of taking clothes to the local charity shop — where the money they raise will go to good causes.

But what happens to your bag of old clothes once you drop it off?

Most of us do not appreciate what a massive and sophisticated operation lies behind your humble, High Street charity shop.

I paid a visit to Oxfam’s colossal clothing sorting centre, a 90,000 sq ft former bed-making factory — bigger than a football pitch — on the fringes of Batley in Yorkshire, to find out.

Here any excess clothing from its charity shops is sorted — and the complexity of dealing with our fast fashion habit is clear.

On the morning I visit, the deliveries are rolling in. Endless steel conveyor belts send streams of black bin bags to workers who sort their contents by hand.

Out come Hobbs dresses, M&S cashmere cardigans, babies’ bibs, and old shirts and suits, which are flung into industrial wheelie bins for compressing and packing.

The walls heave with hay-bale-sized bags of clothes stacked against them and there’s a smell of musty attic fibres in the air.

Some 17 tonnes of clothing a day are sorted here. More than half is sent to Frip Ethique, the charity’s social enterprise project in Senegal providing work for 40 local men and women and stock for market traders. A large chunk of heavy-duty winter garments heads off to be commercially resold in Eastern Europe.

If it can’t be worn again — the case in around a tenth of donations — it’s sold to recycling companies for industrial use as rags or mattress stuffing. Nothing — not one sock — gets sent to landfill.

If items are too damp or dirty to process — around a minuscule 2 per cent of overall donations — they’re incinerated locally to produce energy for 400 Yorkshire homes.

Despite this ingenuity, Lorraine Needham-Reid, the site’s manager of production, is still concerned about our wasteful attitude.

‘I’m absolutely stunned by what people throw away,’ she says. ‘We see brand new items sent here, never worn, with tags still in. It is scary what people chuck out.’

So what of the clothes we send to council recycling banks that are found on urban streets or in supermarket car parks?

Sixty per cent is exported overseas for resale in second-hand clothing markets to countries such as Poland, Lithuania, Benin, Ghana and Togo.

But this troubles Dr Andy Brooks, a lecturer in development geography at King’s College and author of Clothing Poverty, a book about fast fashion and the second-hand clothing sector.

‘People think their old clothes are most likely to be sold in a local charity shop,’ he says. ‘However, there is a large international trade in used clothing that’s hidden from view.’

‘Poor countries have had their markets flooded by second-hand garments.

‘Factories in African countries including Ghana and Zambia have had to close down because they are uncompetitive.

‘In the short term, cheap used clothing seems to be good for poor African consumers, but in the long term it harms their balance of trade and restricts industrial development.’

So if recycling overseas is problematic when not overseen by an organisation such as Oxfam, and landfills equally so, could a beacon of hope be ‘fibre-to-fibre chemical recycling’ — essentially, making new garments out of old synthetic ones?

Scientists have yet to find a workable method to magic synthetic clothing into new apparel — but the best attempt has so far come from outdoor clothing specialists Patagonia, who use PET clear plastic drinks bottles to make jackets, shorts and fleeces.

But there are problems with taking that to the next stage, says Alan Wheeler.

‘With polyester clothing you’ve got different dyes, you might have cotton threads within the item, it might have a nylon lining. Every item is different. Chemical recycling processes are looking at how to change all different polyester clothing into one homogenous product that can then be recycled easily.’ A move towards a circular clothing economy is something a few industry leaders are beginning to tentatively work towards.

‘We need to slow down the amount we produce and encourage people to keep and use their clothes for longer,’ says Wheeler.

‘The whole notion that celebrities and royals like the Duchess of Cambridge are radically “recycling” clothes when they’re spotted wearing the same item more than once is very frustrating. It should be considered normal practice,’ he adds.

Wheeler points to the ‘elephant in the room’ when it comes to recycling and clothing retailers. ‘It is difficult for them to be sustainable because their survival is dependent on us buying more and more clothes,’ he says.

‘I would argue that they need to encourage the public to buy less, pay more (that way they would pay their workers more, too) and design items that are made to last.’

Currently consumer pressure for new garments means companies produce clothes faster to lower standards — which are then less able to withstand repeat wear.

According to a recent report from WRAP, the average piece of clothing in the UK lasts for 3.3 years before being discarded.

Other research puts the lifespan of UK garments at 2.2 years.

For a younger demographic, you can probably halve that. But the experts want us to do better than that.

So it’s a case of step away from the shopping basket (literally or virtually), rewear what you already own, and recycle those you don’t — this way you save the planet as well as your pennies.