Trade and Transformations of Secondhand Clothing: Introduction

Textile, Volume 10, Issue 2, pp. 128–143

DOI: 10.2752/175183512X13315695424473

Reprints available directly from the Publishers.

Photocopying permitted by licence only.

© 2012 Berg. Printed in the United Kingdom.

LuCy NorrISLucy Norris has completed a research Fellowship in the Department of Anthropology, uCL, where she worked on the Waste of the World project (2006–11). She has conducted research in the uK and India on the global secondhand clothing economy, local systems of reuse in Delhi, and industrial textile recycling in north India. She is the author of recycling Indian Clothing: Global Contexts of reuse and Value (Indiana university Press, 2010).

Abstract

T his article draws out some of the broader themes arising from

the study of secondhand clothing economies, as an introduction to this special issue. The articles in the issue address worn clothing markets and recycling technologies from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, charting the expansion of the trade from relative scarcity in the longue durée to the current global industry dealing in millions of tons of used clothing. The used clothing economy brings into one frame the links between the market, materiality and morals, revealing complex connections as gifts of clothing are commodified by charities in the Global North, sold onto the international market, and

become a resource for developing local livelihoods in the Global South. The heterogeneity of materials and the temporalities of fashion cycles and disposal strategies create a variable supply of unknown quality and quantity, for which differential markets must be developed, yet more work needs to be done to understand where the maximum value is extracted, and how this might be measured; issues of reciprocity, power and inequality are implicated at each stage. This article suggests that the specificity of the secondhand clothing economy has much to offer contemporary theoretical concerns with economization, marketization, and the convergence of economic value with cultural values.

Keywords: secondhand clothing, textile, waste, recycling, charity donations, sustainability, economic anthropology, economic geography

Introduction

A long chain of charity and commerce binds the world’s richest and poorest people in an accidental intimacy. It’s a curious feature of the global age that hardly anybody at either end knows it.

George Packer, New York Times magazine, March 2002

It is striking how unaware most people are of what happens to their donations after dropping off the bag of cast-offs at the charity shop. Often a convenient means of disposing of unwanted garments (Fisher et al. 2008), there is a network of mutually reinforcing values that appear to be supported through recycling old clothes. It is believed to be more environmentally sustainable by avoiding landfill and reusing the embedded carbon,1 its remaining usefulness is not wasted once the personal associations have been stripped away (Gregson and Crewe 2003), and the charity can create exchange-value to be used for its “good works,” transforming riddance into thrifty behavior directed outwards to benefit wider society.

Nevertheless, in the UK in 2008 more than half of annual clothing purchases were simply thrown away, and only a quarter collected for reuse and recycling (Morley et al. 2009). Recent research confirms the trend

towards consumers on aggregate buying an increasing quantity of clothing for ever-decreasing prices (see Schor 2005), leading to rising volumes of poor-quality, cast-off clothing; about 2 million tons of new clothing were consumed in the UK in 2007 (Morley et al. 2009). Interest in the global production and consumption of new textiles and clothing is slowly moving up the political agenda in the Global North, driven by general concerns of environmental and social sustainability (Allwood et al. 2006; Clark 2008; Defra 2010; Fletcher 2008; Lee 2007; Scaturro 2008; Siegle 2011). Applying the waste hierarchy of reduce, reuse, and recycle, a handful of fashion designers are beginning to upcycle worn clothing into more valuable garments as part of the growing “green fashion” movement (Black 2008; Brown 2010; Clark 2008). But reducing consumption and spending more on longer-lasting clothing is of course a strategy rarely articulated as a viable option for the mass market. While this might be an obvious reflection of the underlying “crisis of capitalism” and the incommensurability of expanding economic growth through increasing spending with the sustainability agenda (Hart et al. 2010; Harvey 2010), ethnographic research reminds us how ridding ourselves of stuff is not only central to our ability to reformulate the self but also to reconfigure

Trade and Transformations of Secondhand Clothing: Introduction

Trade and Transformations of Secondhand Clothing: Introduction 131

social relations established through consuming, exchanging, and living with things (Gregson 2007; Norris 2010). Unwanted clothing and textile waste are the inevitable consequences of these processes. Unlike growing public awareness of sustainability issues concerning food waste, plastic packaging, electronic goods, and toxic chemicals, for example, the value of used clothing is conceived in the Global North through the model of charitable donations, environmental protection, and widely distributed benefit. How accurate are these perceptions? How do we measure the value of our old clothes?

Clothes that charities cannot sell locally are sold to commercial textile recyclers, who also buy the clothing dropped into textile banks. They are the lynchpins of the global trade, transforming discarded and donated worn clothing into a finely graded range of commodities in huge sorting factories. Just over half a million tonnes (metric tons) of old clothing was collected in the UK in 2008, of which 60 percent was exported to developing economies for reuse (Morley et al. 2009). In 2010 this comprised 320,000 tonnes worth US$42.5 million, a 15 percent increase in value on the previous year. The main markets were Poland, Ghana, Ukraine, Benin, and Hungary, all major re-exporters (COMTRADE 2010). The positive environmental framing is complemented by the charitable sector’s reliance on the considerable revenues raised through clothing donations, and the profitability of the trade for commercial recyclers who pay relatively little for their stock.

Few people seem to realize how much used clothing is profitably sold abroad, and those that do know a little about the market are completely unaware of its value, scale, and impact. The value of the global trade in secondhand garments has risen to US$2.97 billion in 2010, an increase of 13 percent from 2009 alone (COMTRADE 201). Available figures are underestimated in this under-regulated trade: the value of sealed bales of worn clothing are notoriously hard to judge (Brooks and Simon forthcoming; Hansen 1994: 265; Norris 2005), the increasingly complex network of global re-export hubs and special economic zones make tracking commodities extremely difficult, and many countries that officially ban the import of used clothing operate substantial black markets fueled by neighboring entrepôts such as Cottonou and Dubai (Abimbola, this issue; Norris 2010).

The emergence of new markets in the “second” world also highlights the need for further research on the economic relationships between used clothing economies embedded in particular regional markets, and the means through which these groupings connect to wider capitalist economies in the Global North. Comparative examples include the circulation of old clothes within the East African Community (EAC) studied by anthropologist Sayaka Ogawa (2011), Milgram’s fieldwork on the links between the Philippines and Hong Kong (2008), and work on cross-border smuggling between the USA and Mexico (Gauthier 2009). There is little research

into this largely unregulated, internationally networked market, involving a multiplicity of actors extracting value from cast-offs by separating things into specifically targeted categories of clothing, making profits by forming connections with niche consumers, and trading across social, cultural, and economic divides, as well as political and legal borders.

Research into the global trade in textile waste, a corollary of secondhand clothing sold for reuse, constituted part of a wider ESRC research project, the Waste of the World. Based in the Department of Anthropology at UCL with Danny Miller, the textile project included my own ethnographic research on Indian textile recycling factories (Figure 1) (Norris 2012, forthcoming), work on the recycling of denim jeans in the USA (Olesen 2010a, b), and an ethnography of working in a London sorting factory (Botticello, this issue, forthcoming). To place anthropological work on these recycling industries within the broader context of secondhand clothing economies, in June 2010 we organized the workshop Recycling Textile Technologies.

This special issue, edited by Norris and Botticello, brings together a cohesive selection of those papers. The articles address worn clothing markets and recycling technologies from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, charting the expansion of the trade from relative scarcity in the longue durée to the current global industry dealing in millions of tons of used clothing. Their analysis of specific examples at points throughout the network give rich insights into the strategies different traders employ

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to make a profit, but they also show us just how little we know about how the global used clothing economy really works, which is, after all, the destination of so many of those billions of garments whose design, style, and consumption we pay so much attention to.

Public policy in the UK is to increase textile recycling, although the regulatory frameworks that determine which kinds of worn clothing is reusable and which is waste (and hence comes under legislation to prevent overseas dumping via the Basel Convention) are often unclear (Oakdene Hollins et al. 2006). The system is grounded in charitable donations yet provides a market-based solution to managing the textile wastestream that appears to benefit everyone (Defra 2011). There has been little published research into the political economy of the trade on a global scale, and work has been fragmented. The

secondhand clothing economy has much to offer contemporary theoretical concerns with economization, marketization, and the convergence of economic value with cultural values.

Berndt and Boeckler identify three research strands that they claim reveal marketization to be deeply ambivalent, incomplete, and prone to failure (2011). In the first, markets are conceptualized as heterogeneous arrangements of people, things, and socio-technical devices—processes of marketization are characterized by distributed agency. The second is grounded in a substantivist approach conflating moral economies with market economies, and thus cultural value(s) with economic value. The third strand concerns work on markets in motion, or global supply chains, where the performativity of economies is analyzed through mapping commodity production

Figure 1Piles of imported Western clothing in a warehouse in Panipat, north India, waiting to be processed for fiber reclamation. Photo: www.timmitchell.co.uk.


chains and how value is distributed along them.

These theoretical approaches view markets as “bundles of practices and material arrangements always in the making,” where links are continually established and severed, and people, places, and things are both incorporated and expelled. Callon suggests that the dynamics and instability of markets trigger new matters of concern (overflows), new social identities, and unexpected social communities (2007). Using these approaches to study the rapid growth of the global secondhand clothing economy affords an opportunity to make visible the links between micro-practices of consumption and riddance on one hand, and the macro-politics of waste economies on the other, revealing the wider impact of emerging political, economic, and social concerns.

Collecting Clothing: Charities and MarketsWhile the current scale and reach of business growth may be remarkable, its structural relationship to capitalist production and consumption is not new. The historical development of the used textile trade as charted by Lemire (this issue) rises alongside the development of early capitalism in Europe. She identifies three broad phases of economic and social change between 1600–1850, corresponding to scarcity, growing abundance, and industrial plenty. In the earliest phase, used clothing acted as an alternative currency, encouraging the growth of economic activity during a period

where clothing was a repository of savings that could be sold into the secondhand economy when necessary (cf. Fontaine 2008). As such, garments were always open to transformation and exchange; detailed knowledge about their materiality, construction, and fashionability meant that their value was widely understood.

However, rather than see these payments in kind as being alternative liquidities outside the developing market economy, following Braudel (1985), Lemire argues that these hybrid practices are essential to economic development, opening up routes for enterprise alongside capitalist markets. The trade became a route for women in particular to develop small businessed and expand the circulation of goods. As colonial trade routes expanded, the secondhand clothing market followed alongside. By the late nineteenth century the effects of industrial plenty enabled increasing numbers of middle-class consumers to increasingly shun used clothing markets, a trend which has continues down the social scale today.

Hansen shows that already by the end of the nineteenth century the commercial trade in secondhand clothing was limited to exports, especially to colonial Africa; at the same time, charities began to collect used clothing for redistribution to the poor (Hansen 2008). Cheaper clothing and growing consumer purchasing power after the Second World War led to an increase in donations to charity. She identifies a fundamental shift in used clothing distribution from charity

to commerce post-Second World War, whereby philanthropic groups in the USA stopped giving away clothing to the poor and started selling them in shops instead to raise money for their diverse causes. (Similarly, the first Oxfam shop opened up in London in 1948, selling donated used clothing to support other projects.) By the 1980s the falling costs of garments and the growth in supply coincided with the liberalization of African markets in particular, resulting in a spectacular increase in the amount of worn clothing being sold to commercial textile recyclers for expanding reuse markets.

From the 1980s, Hansen finds both an increase in commercial used clothing traffic and humanitarian aid flow to African countries at the same time (2008). As Tony Clark, the former manager of Oxfam’s Wastesavers depot, explained to me during my own research, clothing is rarely directly given away to those in need by organized charities, even as emergency relief in disaster zones. This is due to logistical reasons and, in the majority of cases where potential recipients are overseas, donations from developed countries are often ill-matched to the basic climatic and cultural requirements of recipients in developing, often southern, economies. But as Hansen ironically notes, “clothing donated for crisis relief often ends up sold commercially in local markets” (2008: 223).

Used clothing is a means to an end; for most UK charities, overseas development is tangential or unconnected to their core activities, and clothing collection is simply

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a relatively easy way to make money. They have a duty of care to make sure that used clothing is exported legally and textile waste is not dumped in countries that cannot process it properly, but no further obligation. Members of the Charity Retail Association sign up to a Code of Charity Retailing that encourages them to consider whether their commercial activities could compromise the objective to maximize income for the charity through selling donated goods.2

Formerly relying on the less remunerative recycling business for their profits, commercial textile recyclers have grown into a significant market sector controlling a highly profitable export trade. In the UK, the textile recyclers have their own representative organization, the Textile Recycling Association (TRA), and form an integral part of the UK’s waste management strategy, taking part in formulating guidelines and policy development. But the current system for collecting used clothing is becoming increasingly complex and competitive. The relationship between the charitable sector and commercial firms and the financial benefits for both sides are not publicized. Recently various scandals have surrounded the low returns paid to charities, such as the deal whereby the Variety Club earned just £5,000 in royalties in 2009 for donated shoes reputedly worth £1.9 million (Booth 2011a). In 2011 a recycler was prosecuted over a deal between the Salvation Army and his firm, Kettering Textiles, whereby directors of the commercial recycling firm earned over £10 million in three years collecting clothing for the charity,

and the recycler himself sat on the charity’s main board (Booth 2011b). The Salvation Army has now purchased the company.

Market values of used clothing have been growing steadily. In December 2011, letsrecycle.com estimated the average paid to charity shops for unsold stock at the backdoor was £490–£550 per tonne, and for stock collected in banks it was £275–£349, with the firms paying charities as little as £50 per kg in royalties to use their logos. Charitybags.org.uk estimate that a dress weighing 1 kg given to a charity bag collection would raise 5 pence for the charity. The same dress given to a charity shop might raise £10, minus their overheads. The latest competition for charities is recyclers opening up shops next door on the high street and offering to pay the public directly for their old clothes by the kilogram.3

The large-scale theft of clothing from textile banks (run by both charities and commercial firms) in the UK is another growing problem (McVeigh 2009). The British Heart Foundation states “Stealing stock that is intended for our charity is akin to robbing people with heart conditions of a better quality of life” (British Heart Foundation 2011). It estimates revenue losses from doorstep collections and textile bank theft to be £6 million (up to a quarter of their £22 million revenue from shops in 2009–10), and lists a variety of techniques including skimming (where the contents are hooked out), breaking and entering, climbing in (sometimes involving the use of children, and occasionally requiring thieves to be cut out after getting stuck inside), cutting their way in with acetylene torches,


distracting drivers and stealing the contents, and simply tipping the banks over (the latter filmed by the Sunday Mirror and posted online). As the TRA commented:

Theft of used clothing left for collection at the kerbside and in collection banks is on the increase and is helping to fund more serious criminal activity, such as drug trafficking and people smuggling. (Mann 2011)

The TRA are now working with the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau to map the activities of criminal gangs in the UK and abroad. Domestically, theft of bags left out for doorstep collection is so rife that there is now a hotline to report instances, and the Crown Prosecution Service has prepared guidelines for the police on prosecuting clothing bag thieves.

Transforming Cast-offs into CommoditiesCast-offs become source material for markets in the Global South, and value is extracted and reinscribed through processes of decomposition and reincarnation. It is the work of sorters to create exchange-value, from the charity shop volunteer to the textile recycler, importer, local market retailer, and itinerant seller (Hawley 2001, 2006). Although traded in bulk as a commodity, each and every bale has been carefully packed and repacked two, three, or four times in transit, to refine selections and redirect pieces to more financially, culturally, and climatically suitable markets. The sorter’s profits rely upon the scale and reach of their networks, their concentration in particular places

acting as nodes, and relations of trust between brokers.

Externalizing waste to the economic periphery is at the heart of the capitalist system, where it may be transformed and reincorporated (Alexander and Reno 2012). Used clothing is a heterogeneous category, the specificity of each garment means that a lot of work is required in order to extract value from a mass of unsorted garments and turn them into exchangeable commodities; the success of value transformations are bound up in the ability of recyclers to find a niche market for the peculiar materialities of clothing discards (Crang et al. forthcoming).

Botticello considers contemporary categorization and revaluation of secondhand clothing in a UK rag sorting factory prior to its export to global destinations, revealing that it is in fact dirt as a productive entity that creates the complex categories of reprocessed clothing for the market. Significantly, this is the reverse of the discarding process by which they arrived at the factory, as “matter out of place” (Douglas 1966). Which clothes goes to what part of the world is mutually dependent upon the categories set up by the rag sorting factories—worked out over time through their relationships with global buyers—but also by the material qualities of the clothing and the sorting and discernment skills of the workers. Furthermore, how the factory sorts and grades their clothing inscribes an alternative brand value onto the clothes. This shifts the focus away from labels on individual items to a collective brand of the sorting

company, who generate a definitive mark of quality through the sorted constitution of their bales.

Developing MarketsThe fact that these value transformations take place out of sight at the margins of the global economy leads to the compartmentalization of debates about its impact. Aid and development professionals have heated online exchanges about the potential damage to local markets done by well-meaning donors collecting unwanted garments and gifting them directly as aid-in-kind to developing countries, potentially depressing local markets.4 The underlying issue is the impact of used clothing sales on local textile manufacturing, primarily in Africa, with widespread belief that it has led to its virtual collapse (e.g. Morley et al. 2009; Siegle 2011). The neoliberal opening up of markets in developing economies in the 1980s to used clothing imports coincided with a decline in local textile production, and Mangieri suggests that increasing imports in the 1990s were at least partially blamed for the collapse of the Kenyan textile industry catering to the local population (2008).

However, Brooks and Simon argue that the relationship is not necessarily causal, that general trade data is inaccurate and insufficient to back up these claims, and that grounded research reveals the complexities of a market where “traditional” cloth is no longer worn daily, it is now cheap Chinese imports that are the main competition, and that these are valued less than better quality imported cast-offs (Brooks

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and Simon forthcoming). Abimbola outlines the case against used clothing disrupting local production more forcefully in the example of Nigeria, one factor being that the highest-quality, locally worn textiles were originally made in Europe and now suffer competition from cheaper Chinese cloth (Abimbola 2011).

The trade itself creates a wide range of jobs in local economies, from large-scale dealers, market traders to itinerant peddlers, augmented by tailors and people mending, washing, and ironing sacks of clothing (Baden and Barber 2005; Field 2000, 2007; Hansen 2004a). Indeed textile recyclers in the UK often use this research to support their claims that the international trade brings benefits abroad rather than suppresses local economies, although the research is limited to a few studies in a handful of Africa countries, and quickly becomes out of date.5 As Abimbola has commented (personal communication), Nigerian traders are proud to demonstrate their ability to turn a good profit out of someone else’s waste, and the sophisticated urban market includes middle-class professionals who appreciate the value of buying high-quality, used Western clothing for themselves and their children. Value lies not only in profits and livelihood, but also in the importance of clothing itself as an agent of social change. Used clothing in Zambia affords the provision of a much-needed resource that permits end consumers to appropriate and construct complex modern identities from heterogeneous elements; end consumers refuse

to view used clothing as “need” in preference for “want” (Hansen, 1994, 2000, 2004b). Similarly, traders dealing in imported clothing in Delhi (Figure 2) are able to offer good-quality, foreign styles to attract better-off buyers, while those selling recycled Indian clothing on the pavement opposite (Figure 3) are supplying customers in need of clothing with cheaper, more familiar items.

Observers of wholesale markets for imported secondhand clothing typically describe the frenzy when a new bale is opened, where the specific qualities of garments inside are never guaranteed, and the difference between the “right” jeans and the “wrong” jeans has a critical effect on all of the traders’ capacities to make even a small profit. Abimbola’s article focuses on the personal relationships through which trade between Britain and Nigeria is conducted as a means to overcome the information asymmetry between buyers and sellers regarding the quality of consignments. With a lack of standardization of goods, the development of trust in the brand value of the exporting firms helps to reduce the financial risks of buying bales unseen. He focuses on Igbo traders, who are significant importers of used clothing, and their use of an embedded local apprentice system to place junior relatives in UK source factories to both select clothing styles and manage financial transactions at that end. The assurance given by the British origin of the clothes, together with the brand of the sorting factory, and the personal ties underpinning business serve to bridge the


Figure 2Traders in the Sunday Coat Market, opposite the red Fort, New Delhi. These men sell used Winter clothing imported wholesale, arranging jackets and coats on hangers high up on bamboo scaffolding, while jumpers and thick shirts are piled up on trestle tables in front. Photo: www.timmitchell.co.uk.

gaps in knowledge available to buyers, secure the best stock in a competitive market, and improve their chances of making a profit.6

Milgram’s article shifts the focus to the Philippines to show how the street trade in recycled textiles is mobilized to support women’s incomes. These women capture and reconfigure spaces in between the formal and informal economies, establishing vendor associations and making agreements with local shopkeepers, and transforming public space into one that services the needs of the urban population. The women cultivate networks based on trust and loyalty to obtain

the best boxes of clothing, with the chain often stretching back to Hong Kong in order to overcome local cartels of middlemen. The traders maintain good relationships with a range of suppliers, and will complain when bad consignments are received; worn clothing routes are also used for other valuable illicit goods. The vendors strategize their retail practices by refreshing stock between sites, selling off bales cheap when stock does not move, and circulating types of garments around the country to match climate conditions.

In contrast, Brooks’ contribution highlights how the used clothing

trade does not always provide adequate livelihoods for street vendors in Mozambique. His article shows how traders struggle to overcome similar problems of stock quality as those addressed by Milgram and Abimbola, but have much less influence with their suppliers, the gatekeepers to the wholesale trade. Significantly, the importers are Indians with links to originating countries in North America, Europe, and Australia, who operate in different social circuits from the local Mozambican market traders. As foreign intermediaries, they appear to present a barrier to vendors

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who might hope to strengthen the personal ties in their supply chains, and thus directly influence the contents of their bales. Although the article primarily deals with the street vendors’ livelihoods rather than the wider networks of supply, the article’s broader conclusions are that the trade in and consumption of secondhand clothing does not afford them the cosmopolitan lifestyle and dress they desire; in Brooks’ words, “their pathway to modernity has petered out,” resonating with a “sense of

loss of membership of the world society.”

The collection includes a short article by Ryder and Morley on current technical research investigating how low-grade mixed textile fibers reclaimed from used clothing can be recycled across both cultural and historical registers into another medium, in this case paper, in an effort to “re-innovate” older technologies. The category of “recycling grades” that cannot be sold for reuse is significant

Figure 3rows of Indian Waghri traders sell used Indian clothing at the Sunday flea market outside the red Fort, New Delhi. These clothes have been bartered from middle-class householders in exchange for new kitchen utensils, steel pots, and glasses. Photo: www.timmitchell.co.uk.


(see Botticello, this issue) and the tonnage is likely to increase as the quality of new clothing continues to fall in the overproduction of cheaply made goods (Oakdene Hollins et al. 2006). In the UK, the flocking industry currently converts reclaimed fibers into low-value mattress protectors, carpet underlay, and geo-textiles, while many garments are exported to India to be shredded for the “shoddy” reclamation industry (Norris 2005, 2012, forthcoming). But the recycling industry needs new, higher-value products that are in more general demand, as paper made from cotton rags used to be prior to its sourcing of mechanical wood pulp as its main constituent material. As Ryder and Morley remind us, cotton rags used to be a convenient and cheap source of cellulose, but now the issue is to find markets for waste textiles that would otherwise go to incineration or landfill. The article shows how broadening the scope for refashioning new products includes incorporating diverse socio-technical sources to reimagine textiles in new forms, and as such extends the themes central to this special issue in new directions.

ConclusionsThe global secondhand clothing economy has a number of heterogeneous, idiosyncratic characteristics; fundamentally it is grounded in its very materiality and temporal relationship to consumption trends, fashion cycles, redundancy, and material decay, creating a variable supply of unknown quality and quantity. Clothing’s inherent refashionability and the numerous possibilities

for the re-contextualization of its material properties propel the used clothing trade; scarcity of affordable, good-quality clothing is a marker of the developing world. The trade operates through the contingency of disparate factors such as the consumption of new garments and the rate of ridding in the Global North, international waste management policy and trade regulations, currency exchange rates and the costs of transport, and often social networks and personal trust are developed to stabilize these external fluctuations and improve quality control.

The used clothing economy also brings into one frame the links between the market, materiality and morals, revealing complex connections as gifts of clothing are commodified by charities in the Global North, sold onto the international market, and become a resource for developing local livelihoods in the Global South. Differential markets must be developed, and more work needs to be done to understand where—or by whom—the maximum value is extracted. Research on the contexts of this material flow prompts questions not only about the specific and changing forms of value materialized in this network, but also foregrounds political issues of power, governance, and sustainability between developed and developing economies which link primary garment production all the way through to the consumption of cast-offs.

As a global trade in waste that thrives on developing niche markets, it skirts the borders between the legal and illegal, with

some dealers processing shipments in liminal zones, allegedly paying for consignments in cash, and thus converting local soft currencies into hard currencies, black money into laundered funds. The used clothing market itself visibly demonstrates in and of itself how value is created, added, and extracted in the process, and how the material and the market are co-constructed. Yet, the invisible spaces in the global market where additional, alternative value is created are less easy and sometimes dangerous to research and document (Gauthier 2010).

Guyer (2004) offers one approach from which to develop research into the entanglement of these economies in new directions, through her work on African cash economies and poverty. In an attempt to move beyond the perceived dichotomy between the universalism of capitalist relations and the specificity of local forms of economic arrangement, she turns to ideas of temporality rather than spatiality, an approach that resonates with Lemire’s analysis. Her work on finance (Guyer 2004), and concepts of credit and money (e.g. Guyer 2010) contrasts two different monetary principles, drawing on Simmel (1978), amongst others. The first are hard-currency economies based on “liquidity” (the capacity to convert assets kept out of circulation over longer timescales into cash), characterized by long arcs of intermediate links and living formalized through the life cycle. The second are soft-currency economies based on “liquidness” or the availability of money (Amato

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and Fantacci 2011), characterized by short arcs of intermediate links and livelihoods of daily duration. In soft-currency cash economies, debt must be cleared: traders rely upon measurement in transactions over time, such as accounting, scheduling, and enforcement, releasing money for subsequent transactions and requiring a high velocity of circulation and the capacity to evacuate hoards.

Articulation between these two spheres has to deal with these different temporalities; for example, traders in cash economies often use “deferred payments” (rather than “credit” or “debt”) requiring relational systems and guarantors, and the mobilization of skills and resources in an alternative set of transactions. Thus on the one hand cash economies are not the same as informal economies, and on the other, although they may use formalized systems, they do not convert money into an asset system that cannot be cleared, sometimes resulting in a shortage of cash itself.

Guyer goes on to suggest that more research is required into multiple economic spaces and rankings found between them, in order to “identify the exact points of linkage between cash economies and the dynamics of acquisition” (Guyer 2010: 11); it is at these points that “marginal gains” are made (Guyer 2004). Her development of concepts such as the role of performance and composition in a “pragmatics of valuation” draws on an empirical understanding of the role of people and things in the co-construction of value.

The used clothing economy affords a rich case study for investigating the interlinking

of various different types of economies through global trade and the nature of the opportunities, risks, and profits made possible by these. Multiple sequences of exchange, transformations, and re-embedding in local economies are dependent upon the intrinsic material nature of the commodity itself, its close relationship to the body, the unique context of its transformation from gift to commodity, and social relations in the local markets in which they are traded. These repeated cycles of consumption and disposal operate on vastly different scales, and within varying business frameworks, weaving in and out of national economies, multinational corporations, and family businesses, all based on clothing’s essential reusability as material object and the exchangeability of this form. The only way to make money out of the used clothing trade is to keep it moving, keep sorting and recombining it, imagining new contexts and creating those pathways.

AcknowledgmentsBoth Botticello and Norris would like to thank all the conference participants for their contributions (not all of which we were able to include here), and the chairs of each session: Daniel Miller, Nicky Gregson, Dinah Eastop, and Susanne Küchler. We are grateful to all the referees of individual papers for their valuable and timely responses. The Waste of the World project was funded by the ESRC (RES 000-23-0007); the Journal of Material Culture and a British Academy Small Research Grant (SG100952)


provided additional support for the conference.

Notes 1. The reuse of clothing saves

29 kg CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) per kg of clothing compared to recycling, and 33 kg CO2e compared to disposal, according to the Charity Retail Association. It is estimated that the potential for reuse enabled by charity shops in the UK helps reduce CO2 emissions by about 6.3 million tonnes per annum. See http://www.charityretail.org.uk/reuse.html#sustain (accessed March 21, 2012).

2. See www.charityretail.org.uk for their members’ ethical code.

3. For example, see www.european-recycling.com/cash4clothes.co.uk.

4. For example, in May 2010, Jason Sadler set up the “One Million T-shirts2 campaign intending to donate shirts freely to four countries in Africa (http://1millionshirts.org/, accessed July 5, 2011). The campaign drew severe criticism across the development sector (e.g. http://aidwatchers.com/2010/01/nobody-wants-your-old-shoes-how-not-to-help-in-haiti/, accessed July 5, 2011). Similarly the gift of 100,000 misprinted NFL T-shirts to World Vision in February 2012 provoked a wealth of negative commentary (see Schimmelpfennig 2011 for a list of blog posts on the controversy).

5. See www.textile-recycling.org.uk, for example.

6. This works in a parallel fashion to the intentions of the Geographical Indicator system, which should function to overcome information asymmetry for buyers of new products from specific regions.

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Trade and Transformations of Secondhand Clothing: Introduction

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