Why the town’s bras are much in demand in Africa

Feb 9 2009 Huddersfield Daily Examiner

TONY Clark is standing in the middle of a giant warehouse in Huddersfield surrounded by conveyor belts dotted with endless amounts of clothes.

The belts run from one end of the factory to another, swirling out from a large holding cage filled with bin bags.

Workers pore over jeans, sweaters and jumpsuits and separate them into bins. There are piles for every style imaginable – retro clothes, designer duds, gothic looks.

The supply is endless – over 120 tonnes (15,000 bin bags) of clothing are delivered here every week.

Wastesaver, the factory in Colne Road off Chapel Hill whose floor resembles that of a thousand teenagers’ bedrooms, is where all the clothes, shoes, and textiles that couldn’t be sold in any of Oxfam’s 700 shops across the UK end up.

Clark is the manager, and today he’s going to tell me why I should recycle my bras.

It doesn’t occur to us to recycle our clothing; whether we’ve worn it to shreds or not at all, it’s more likely than not that we’ll bin it rather than donate it to charity.

Clothing even comprises 3% of all the stuff we throw away.

But at least half of all of it can be reworn or reused, according to WasteOnline, and bras, interestingly enough, are some of the most valuable items to come out of our trash.

You might wonder who on Earth might want your old bras, much as I did. The answer is easy: Africans, says Clark.

“African buyers are looking for fashionable and colourful items and bras are that kind of item,” he explains.

“They’re very expensive to manufacture new and difficult to replicate with local textiles, so the market for them is just huge.”

Phew – so at least that means that my slightly misshapen Calvin Klein bra won’t be gracing the rails of my local Oxfam.

But what else ends up in Huddersfield?

“We can get anything, really,” says Clark.

“Out of season stuff like anoraks that we don’t have enough room to store, or Primark-type clothing that retails new at £3.99, so we can only sell it for £1 and not earn any profit – that comes through here a lot.

“And sometimes we get designer stuff too, Vivienne Westwood or Firetrap or Diesel jeans. We cherry-pick through it all and send the best stuff back to be resold in the UK markets, and the rest goes abroad.”

The 22,000 square foot factory acts as a sort of trade intermediary between the UK and the rest of the world where jeans, blouses, swimsuits, shorts and colourful ’summer’ styles (including bras) are sold on to sub-Saharan Africa. Autumn/winter styles of heavier trousers and jumpers go to Eastern Europe and the cheaper-priced items go to Asia or the Middle East.

Textile recycling originated in the Yorkshire Dales about 200 years ago, and these days Wastesaver, located in West Yorkshire, is helping to keep that tradition alive.

The clothes arrive, and leave, in black bin bags. It’s like the ultimate recycler, with Clark acting as the ultimate trader.

So what if you don’t donate to Oxfam, or you still think that old tracksuit really is best suited to the bin, rather than any charity? There’s still a place for it to go – and it’s not the dump.

Clothes are bulky – anyone who’s ever tried to pack a suitcase can tell you that much. So how will throwing your clothes into a giant landfill help?