FIFE – Daiki Hidaka’s brown stocking hat pokes out the top of a 4-foot-tall box of shoes at a distribution center in Fife.
Knee-deep in vintage shoes, he examines each pair before tossing the keepers at that moment, beat-up leather cowboy boots and a pair of open-toed pumps, into adjacent cardboard boxes.
The manager of a vintage- and used-clothing store in Kyoto, Japan, Hidaka visits the Savers Inc. distribution center a couple of times a year. He spends two eight-hour days sifting through shoes that thrift stores were unable to sell.
“I just look for stuff that feels right,” Hidaka says. “I look for clothes that are refreshing to my eyes.”
Hidaka is one of several used-clothes buyers who visit the Savers distribution center, part of a 13-center recycling network operated by the Bellevue-based company around the United States and Canada. Hundreds of millions of pounds of used goods, the majority used clothes, pass through these centers each year, most eventually exported to developing countries.
The trade of these clothes represents a $267 million export business in the United States. It links nonprofit organizations with for-profit companies, employs people from sorters in Fife to traders in Zambia, and feeds a growing a demand for used clothing in countries where secondhand goods are the most affordable option as well as locations where vintage American cowboy boots might be the newest style.
Behind the boxes where Hidaka mined for shoes are 1,000-pound bales of unsorted clothes stacked to the ceiling. The clothes are bought by businesses called graders in the United States and abroad who sort the clothes into smaller shipments, such as women’s skirts or men’s shirts. They sell those bales again to buyers, many in foreign places such as Africa or India.
But the journey of someone’s used college T-shirt to a market overseas starts at home.
Someone cleans a closet and donates a bag of clothes to a nonprofit organization.
Nonprofits with attached thrift stores then try to sell the items at their stores. At Tacoma Goodwill, Susan Martensen, director of marketing and communication, said used clothing stays on the racks for a maximum of three weeks. If not sold, the clothes have a second chance at the Goodwill outlet store, where garments cost $1.39 per pound.
“If it doesn’t make it there, then it moves into the salvage market,” Martensen said.
That’s where Savers steps in.
Savers’ stores buy items from nonprofit organizations, including the Dyslin Boys’ Ranch, ARC of Washington-Pierce County and the Northwest Center for the Retarded. The company’s core business is selling these used goods at its 200 thrift store locations, including Value Village stores in Western Washington.
Six years ago, the company started exporting or reselling used clothes and items that didn’t sell in its stores.
People have criticized the business relationship between charities and for-profit companies. They question whether the profits should come from items that were donated to charity.
In Tacoma, Goodwill puts the money earned from the clothes’ sale back into its programs, Martensen said. Most other nonprofits do the same.
Savers won’t disclose its profits or how much it pays to the nonprofits for clothing. As a private company, Savers’ financial records aren’t available to the public. In a story published a year ago, The Toronto Star reported that Value Village was paying its nonprofit partners about 20 cents more than other buyers.
At the 90,000-square-foot distribution center in Fife, every corner is filled with used items the company could sell to be reused or recycled. Workers dump toys from cardboard boxes onto a conveyor belt. They toss out pieces of garbage and send the stuffed animals on to be compressed into 800-pound bales of soft toys. Forklifts buzz around 1,000-pound bales of unsorted clothes ready for shipment to graders. Bicycles are stacked in one corner. Workers sort shoes in another.
Tony Shumpert, Savers’ director of recycling and logistics, is proud of his company’s work. Less than 10 percent of the goods end up as waste.
“We’ve been able to find a market for these items, rather than them going into landfills,” Shumpert said.
Clothes too damaged to wear are recycled into rags, filler material or fibers made back into thread and fabric. Damaged shoes are sent to recyclers, who break them down and reuse the rubber. Plastic sacks people donate goods in are also recycled.
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