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In February, a threadbare polycotton bedsheet landed on the desk of Simon Roberts, CEO of Sainsbury’s. A “protest by post”, it had been sent by the Sheffield-based designer, maker and eco activist Wendy Ward. “I purchased this from Sainsbury’s at least 10 years ago,” she wrote in the accompanying letter. “It has served me well. However, I have no sustainable options available for what I should do with it.” Beyond repair, it was too damaged to donate to a charity shop, she explained. She couldn’t compost it as it had been blended with polyester, and she couldn’t repurpose it as cleaning cloths, as, being polycotton, it wasn’t absorbent. And, she added, “I don’t want to put it into a textile recycling collection as the likelihood is that it will be shipped overseas or incinerated and not recycled.” Ward qualified her assertions with links to respected sources – as a sustainable fashion PhD student, she is well informed on such matters.
“The only action I can personally take,” she continued, “is to put it into my general waste bin. I don’t want to do this, as in Sheffield all general waste is incinerated as ‘energy recovery’. This isn’t a sustainable option as such processes have been shown to be as damaging to local air pollution as burning coal.” So, she concluded, “as Sainsbury’s is responsible for designing and manufacturing this product, making decisions to use polycotton with no consideration for what could be done once it reaches the end of its life, I have decided to return it to you. I would really love to hear what you decide to do with it.”
Sainsbury’s response, sent from its executive office, was “a lame fob-off”, Ward says, and read as if it had been “cut and pasted from a complaints template”. (Sample platitude: “Sainsbury’s always welcome feedback from customers.”) But when she shared her protest with her 20,000 Instagram followers, the resounding approval – “Brilliant!” “Please upload your template” – motivated her to launch a campaign: #TakeItBack. She created an adaptable, deliberately non-combative letter (“If you’re confrontational, it won’t go anywhere,” she tells me), and encouraged her followers to return their dead clothes to brands. “It’s an empowering action,” she says. “I was wresting back a bit of control as a consumer.”
I joined Ward’s #TakeItBack campaign, sending my daughter’s ravaged school tights to Marks & Spencer’s CEO, Stuart Machin. To the UK heads of Uniqlo and H&M, I sent my kids’ damaged polyester-blend T-shirts, and to French Connection’s CEO, a greyed, misshapen T-shirt of mine that’s so timeworn, it’s transparent, all accompanied by a version of Ward’s letter. I know they’ve all been received, because I tracked them, on Ward’s advice; similarly, I washed everything first. M&S was the first to respond, reminding me about its “industry-leading sustainability programme”, Plan A, and its take-back scheme. Uniqlo sent a letter acknowledging mine, and “will respond as soon as possible”. I haven’t heard back from H&M or French Connection yet.
Ward recommends following up if they don’t answer the key questions: “What would you suggest I do with this item?” and “What are you actually doing about this problem?” She’s unsure how many people have joined her campaign, though she doesn’t expect vast numbers yet: “I know I’m preaching to the converted.”
You may be thinking: why not donate your unwanted clothes and other textiles to a charity shop? End-of-life textiles have for many years been a valuable revenue stream for charities. Rag merchants would buy them by weight and sell them on to be down-cycled into stuffing, blankets, wipes etc. But many UK charity shops are now “having to spend money getting rid of waste textiles”, says Dawn Dungate, an independent consultant who advises charities on textile recycling. Indeed, Ward’s protest was inspired by a sign in her local charity shop asking customers to dispose of “damaged, torn or worn-out items” in the bin, “as the cost of disposal is very high”.
The growing rag mountain particularly affects independent charity shops and small chains, which lack the donation volumes of bigger chains to woo textile collectors into taking their scrap (they are mainly interested in reusable items for export). “We can’t afford to upset our rag merchant,” says Emma King of Somerset-based Weston Hospicecare charity shops. “If they stop coming, our stock rooms become a health and safety nightmare, and we can’t accept more donations.” King considers herself “lucky” – they’re still getting paid for their unsold textiles: “Ten years ago, though, we’d get 65p per kilo. Now it’s just 10p.” They try to sell their scrap in-store, marketing it as upcycling projects and craft fabric. More remote shops in Cornwall and Devon are having to drive their waste clothing up the country, she says, “because it’s not financially viable for merchants to drive to them”; many shops are now forced to refuse donations.
My local independent charity shop, Second Life in East Sussex, found itself in “a crisis situation”, says manager Naomi Phitidis. In December, the rag merchant stopped coming, complaining that it was receiving too much end-of-life clothing (the shop had been donating the best of its unsold textiles to local charities for homeless people, rescue animals and families in need). “Because it costs the rag man to recycle scrap, they wanted the good stuff too,” Phitidis says. “And we weren’t even getting remunerated for it – it was just to get it out of the shop.” But the team felt uncomfortable about their unsold clothing going to Ghana, and their scrap to Pakistan, a global hub for textile recycling (that’s standard practice, by the way – the environmental action charity Wrap reports that, of the 469,000 tonnes of used textiles that passed through UK sorters and graders in 2022, 425,000 tonnes were exported). So instead they reluctantly decided to have the scrap incinerated locally (at a cost), and to resume donating locally, thus avoiding “waste colonialism”. “It’s depressing,” says Phitidis. “Making the right choice is so difficult.” Second Life now asks customers not to donate stained or damaged clothing: “We wanted to say yes to it, but it’s just too much.”
The crisis is happening downstream, too. To understand why end-of-life textiles pose such a problem, we need to look at the industries dealing with them – the collectors, sorters and recyclers. The sector is facing “partial collapse”, according to a forthcoming Wrap report, seen exclusively by the Guardian. “Not everyone is going to make it through,” Wrap’s senior textiles specialist, Cristina Sabaiduc, tells me. Wrap found that the UK’s worn-out textiles are costing collectors and sorters £88m annually to collect and process – no wonder they don’t want them. Given this financial burden, Sabaiduc predicts that “textile banks in our neighbourhoods will disappear and charity shops will no longer take donations; charities will have to pay to incinerate [waste] and we’ll be putting stuff in the bin, even if we don’t want to.” The loss of revenue will be fatal for some businesses, she adds.
It’s already happening. A decade ago, there were “60 or 70 sorting and grading companies”, says Dungate. “Now only a dozen remain … This market was booming, but it’s come to a crunch point.”
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Many believe fast fashion to be the culprit. A 2024 Wrap report explained that the “saturation of low-quality fast fashion” means that charity shops are selling fewer used clothes, and are therefore sending more to rag merchants. The low quality “results in less income for reuse and recycling sectors”, which leads to an increase in offshoring – ie it’s just not worth the bother here. Various shop managers tell me fast fashion doesn’t sell well for them because it dates quickly and doesn’t wear well over time (according to the European Commission, 50% of clothes are discarded due to pilling and colour fading). At Second Life, volunteers clear out approximately 250kg of unsold clothing every fortnight – and that’s just one small shop.
With the market flooded with unsaleable used clothing, it’s inevitable that scrap holds minimal value. What’s more, there isn’t a business case for what Ward calls “true recycling”, where unwanted textiles are recycled into new, fashion-grade fabrics (known as fibre-to-fibre recycling). According to Ross Barry of LMB Textiles, fibre-to-fibre recycling is more expensive – and much harder to do – than buying virgin polyester – “the cheapest form of plastic going”. Unsurprisingly, progress with fibre-to-fibre recycling has been minimal: “It’s not even at a drop-in-the-ocean stage yet,” says Barry (recycled-polyester clothing is mostly made from plastic bottles, not old clothes). Besides, synthetic clothes have a high calorific value, states the industry website Recycling Inside, meaning that incineration for energy recovery makes commercial sense – not least when almost 70% of all textiles contain human-made fibres.
OK, but what about the many fast-fashion take-back schemes, where you can drop off unwanted, used clothing to be reused or recycled (H&M, Primark, Zara)? Unfortunately, there’s little evidence to prove they are sustainable. A 2023 investigation by the environmental campaign group Changing Markets Foundation (CMF), entitled Take-back Trickery, found that 75% of clothing donated to fashion stores – among them, Marks & Spencer, H&M, Zara and Nike – was destroyed, abandoned in warehouses or sent overseas. Since then, says CMF’s Urska Trunk, “We’ve seen no indication that the situation has changed – take-back is textbook greenwashing.”
A 2024 report by Remake, a sustainable fashion action group, found that none of the major fashion brands evaluated were sufficiently transparent about what happens to clothing collected through take-back programmes. (Reskinned’s take-back scheme, run by LMB, could be a better model – it collaborates with 32 brands including Finisterre, Seasalt Cornwall and Sweaty Betty, and says it resells only to the global north. The rest is repurposed by designers such as ELV Denim and Ahluwalia, or recycled into insulation, stuffing, wipes, etc.)
So you can see why conscious consumers want to take fast-fashion brands to task. Ward has also sent her partner’s jeans back to Sainsbury’s, because, she says, “the elastane has degraded, so they have saggy knees and that weird fluting, and I can’t think of a way to remedy the problem”. Eilidh Weir, a Perthshire-based artist, also sent her kids’ synthetic school trousers back to Sainsbury’s. “They were second- or third-hand, I’d already mended them, and they were looking really ratty,” she says. “I wouldn’t feel right handing them on, and I don’t want them to end up in poorer countries – or the bin.” Sainsbury’s declined to comment on these issues when contacted.
The fact remains that doing the right thing with our clothes when they die feels like a “really difficult, unsolvable problem”, says Ward. Things could be different, she believes, if the policy of extended producer responsibility (EPR) – which holds companies accountable for their products’ end-of-life impact – were enforced (Ward calls her campaign “guerilla EPR”). While there are no plans to legislate for textiles EPR in the UK, the EU is expected to implement mandatory EPR for textiles within the next couple of years. EPR is essential, says Dungate, “in order to fund the infrastructure for collecting, sorting and recycling [waste clothing]”. But, Ward adds, “many feel cynical about whether our government has the balls to do it”.
Ward hopes her #TakeItBack campaign will illuminate what she views as a “hidden problem” – she likens charity shops and rag merchants to “Wombles getting rid of stuff that we don’t have to be faced with. People think they’re doing a good thing and that their rubbish will be of some use, but I think your average person would be shocked if they were confronted with the reality.”
