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Textile sector to counter African waste export ‘myths’
10 August, 2021 By Mark Smulian
The textile recycling industry has mounted a campaign to dispel “myths” and “erroneous information” in media reports warning against used textile exports to Africa.
Textile Recycling Association (TRA) director Alan Wheeler said there was growing fear in the industry that people with a misguided concern for sustainability were damaging the reputation of the second-hand clothing market in Africa, and so deterring the public from supporting it.
The TRA has joined with its equivalents in the EU, the US and with the Bureau of International Recycling (BIR) to try to counter hostile propaganda.
These organisations said: “There is a common misconception that second-hand clothing exported to developing countries partially ends up being discarded right away.
“The fact is clothing not sold directly in the market simply gets passed down the supply chain and ends up selling in smaller markets throughout the region…No profitable business will spend money on packing, shipping and distributing a product only to have it end up in a landfill."
Wheeler told MRW that, in many cases, second-hand clothes sold in Africa were of a higher quality than new and cheaper ones from China.
He said some activists saw mixed bundles of clothing being delivered to Africa and mistakenly assumed some must be waste. In fact, the normal practice there was to grade clothes by quality but in mixed bales so that, for example, a retailer did not buy a bale and find they had only one type of garment.
Martin Böschen, president of the BIR textile division, said: “Due to high transport and import costs, it does not make sense for importers to import second-hand textiles which are not suitable for the local market.
"Discarding or recycling those textiles in the US or Europe would be cheaper than sending them to Africa. Therefore, the hypothesis that a large fraction of the imported textiles goes directly to landfill is highly questionable.”
The Institute of Economic Affairs in Kenya in April released a study that found the used clothing textile industry was crucial to Kenya's economy, with two million people being directly employed and thousands of other jobs created by it in sectors such as transport. It estimated that 91.5% of households in Kenya buy second-hand clothes.
The country imported 185,000 tonnes of second-hand clothing in 2019, equivalent to some 8,000 containers.
The industry bodies said their campaign would continue by seeking to “set the record straight and strongly encourage the world to consume used clothing and textiles”.
2021-08-10 Mark Smulian
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