Wednesday Walk: 2,184 Bales of Clothes
A visual for fashion waste, comparing malls to social media, hearing from Santa
Welcome to Willoughby Hills!
Every Wednesday, I offer a few short ideas that I hope will inspire you to do some more reading, thinking, and exploring. Let’s take a little walk together and see where the path leads…
Visualizing Clothing Waste
Sometimes I feel like I’m beating a dead horse talking about our overconsumption in this newsletter. But I recently came a very strong visual that really illustrates the problem.
This is the entrance to a Savers thrift store in Manchester, CT:
It’s a little hard to read the sign in the photo so here’s what it says:
“Each week, this Savers location recycles 40,000 to 45,000 lbs. This helps support other economies around the world. Donate and help keep millions of pounds of clothing out of landfills each year!!! This clothing bale weighs 1,050 lbs.”
I’ll do the quick math for you. Each Savers store is receiving so many clothing donations that it can’t possibly sell all that it takes in. The excess clothing gets baled up, and this single location generates roughly 42 of these bales every week. That’s 2,184 bales every year.
2,184 bales of clothing FROM ONE SINGLE THRIFT STORE IN CONNECTICUT!
Savers operates somewhere in the ballpark of 300 stores in the U.S. (they also own Value Village, Unique, and 2nd Ave). So the quick, back of the envelope math (assuming the figures in Manchester apply to every location), gets us to around 655,000 bales of clothes being “recycled” each year.
If you’ve been around this newsletter long enough, I’m sure you know that “recycling” doesn’t really mean recycling. In fact, that sign says exactly where these clothes end up: “other economies around the world.” But do these bales of clothing really “help support” those economies?
Before I learned more about the process, I always imagined thrift store donations ending up on the shelf right at the store to be resold. I’ve even had the experience of seeing some of our own clothes that we donated wind up on the rack a few days later, so that is definitely one piece of the puzzle.
I also used to understand that what couldn’t be sold was sent overseas, although I somehow imagined people who could not afford clothing being given nice outfits from the U.S. from some kind of charity or other aid organization. I imagined people being handed something that’s sized to their body and in good shape.
The reality, as the lobby of Savers illustrates, is a compacted mess of textiles that more resembles a garbage pile than a charitable contribution.
I interviewed Francisca Gajardo on my podcast earlier this year about where these clothes really end up.
Fran grew up in Northern Chile, near the port town of Iquique. It’s one of the main South American destinations for these bales of used clothing (many also end up in Africa).
Fran became a sustainable fashion designer, using only used textiles in her work after seeing the sheer volume of clothes moving through Iquique. Some of the clothes end up in secondhand markets. But many end up in open air landfills in the Atacama Desert or is burned.
The only remedy for all of this clothing waste is to opt out of our wasteful fashion industry as much as possible. Stop it at the source. Resist buying new clothes. If you must buy new, look for products that are designed for longevity and ideally made in America (where labor laws and practices are less likely to lead to the kind of exploration and forced labor happening in places like China).
Most importantly, consider the end of life for your clothing when you buy it. Know that it will someday could end up in a bale getting shipped around the world, to ultimately end up in a landfill thousands of miles away.
That bale of clothing certainly gave me pause and much to contemplate.
Alive Malls, Dead Malls, and Twitter
Over the weekend, I was in the Holyoke Mall in Holyoke, MA with my family. Christmas lights hung from the ceiling and garlands were strung on the railings. The corridors were full of crowds.
At one point, my view down the hallway included a Champs Sports, Aeropostale, Finish Line, and Gap and I felt strangely nostalgic. It had been a while since I had been in a mall full of people and with shops still operating.
I remembered Christmas shopping of my youth- giving gifts in the era before the internet. I remembered the discomfort of wearing a winter coat in the mall because it was hot indoors with so many people, but freezing outside. I remembered the fun of looking at Christmas decorations and seeing the hustle and bustle of shopping.
That nostalgia wore off quickly (partially because I was reminded of the problems with our overconsumption), but it was there for a brief moment and it was potent.
Perhaps one reason going to the mall was triggering was because the Holyoke Mall felt “alive” in the era of dead malls.
had an amazing piece in his newsletter titled “Are Social Media Platforms the Next Dying Malls?” that is really worth a read.Since Elon Musk purchased Twitter, many people have left the site and have been looking for the “next Twitter.” There’s Bluesky, Mastadon, Meta’s Threads, and even Substack’s Notes. But none of them have quite the same appeal as “old Twitter.”
In Gioia’s telling, part of the reason social media isn’t as fun anymore or isn’t resulting in the same kinds of connections is that, like malls, social platforms are all beginning to look the same. Furthermore, like malls, they often attract unsavory people and bad actors.
Gioia also discusses the endless fire hose of new social apps to keep up with:
“People keep telling me that I need to move to Threads. Or Bluesky. Or Twitch or TikTok or Discord or Truth Social or Snapchat or Rumble or YouTube shorts or whatever.
I’ve set up profiles on some of these platforms—but then, sooner or later, I just walk away. Who has the time to post on all these apps?
For a long time, I thought that I needed these platforms for my vocation. Maybe you think the same way. But I now realize that they need us even more.”
Continuing with the mall analogy, these new social platforms remind me a bit of walking around the dystopian mega mall American Dream in East Rutherford, NJ. There are stretches where the corridors are lined with murals and it feels like you’re walking through a long hallway rather than a mall.
It took me a minute to realize that these murals are really just masking vacant storefronts (in the case of American Dream, they’re stores that have yet to have tenants rather than stores that have closed). The stores are ready for a Banana Republic or a Forever 21 to move in, but nobody has yet. (I discussed all things mall including American Dream with Alexandra Lange on the podcast a while back.)
It takes a critical mass of stores to make a mall just like it takes a critical mass of users to make a viable social platform. The nascent ones feel like they’ll never quite make it off the ground (like American Dream), and most of the legacy ones feel increasingly less useful and relevant (like the dead malls that now litter our suburbs).
But at the end of the day, both malls and social media platforms are ultimately for-profit enterprises masquerading as community. Neither one can give us true community because the profit motive will always get in the way. The only way we can build true community is on the ground, person to person.
Take a minute to read Gioia’s take on the parallels between malls and social media. I think there’s a lot to unpack there.
Santa Story
Continuing with the mall theme for a moment, I wanted to share an interesting read from
that I happened to stumble upon. Ryan interviewed Mike Graham, who has been playing Santa Claus at Tyson’s Corner Center in Northern Virginia for nearly 40 years.Graham runs a construction company in Tennessee, but he spends the holidays in Virginia every year after getting recruited in the 1980s by a Santa agency (who knew?!). He has become a local staple in Tyson’s Corner ever since and the mall now pays to board him locally each year.
The piece is a beautiful read about the changes in our malls, the changes in our culture, and what Santa thinks engaged parenting looks like.
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Other Wednesday Walks
If you’ve missed past issues of this newsletter, they are available to read here.
I have good memories of going to and/or working in malls. Of course, shopping online is live saver for super old people like me.
Good article, thanks for the info.