Between Classification, Objectification, and Perception: Processing Secondhand Clothing for Recycling and Reuse

In Western contexts, quantities of secondhand clothes are often reckoned as proportions of domestic charity donations exported abroad or as tonnage diverted from landfill. While there is much interest in the reuse of Western secondhand clothing in various global contexts and on local skills to convert clothes produced for Western consumers into products of moral, economic, and cultural appropriateness for own use, there is little attention paid to this pre-export side. This research seeks to redress this imbalance, by focusing on the valuation processes at home. Based on research in a secondhand clothing sorting facility in the UK, it will consider the processes of converting waste goods into commodities for the international and domestic secondhand clothing and rag market. The article details workers’ abilities to interpret the material qualities of the used clothes for their anticipated contexts of next use, classifying the clothes by their levels of dirtiness, i.e. condition, wear, reusability. It also shows that the categories created by the used clothing are not fixed, but are subject to the limitations of the materials, the skills of the workers, and the demands of customers; making the sorting process before export as context specific as the global situations of reuse.