For years I put outgrown clothes in a bag by the door, carried it to the container at the end of the street, and treated that as the end of a small good deed. I did not look any further. It is a slightly embarrassing thing for someone who works in textiles to admit, but the bin is designed to end your thinking, and it worked on me for a long time.
The European Environment Agency puts used textile exports from the EU at more than 1.44 million tonnes in 2025. That is around 3.2 kilograms per person per year. Roughly 48 per cent went to Asia and 43 per cent to Africa. Whatever else the container at the end of the street is, it is the entrance to an export business.
Export is not the same as villainy
I want to be careful here, because this subject attracts a lot of easy outrage. The secondhand trade is real commerce. It employs sorters, graders, shippers, importers, market traders and menders, and it clothes an enormous number of people affordably. Traders in Accra or Nairobi are not receiving charity. They are buying bales at their own risk, and they are extremely good at judging what is inside one.
The complaint that holds up is narrower. A bale is bought unseen. The buyer pays for all of it and only part of it sells. What does not sell becomes somebody else's cost, in a place with far less waste infrastructure than the country that shipped it. The problem is not the trade. The problem is what we put into it.
A school uniform is close to the worst possible export
Think about what makes uniform uniform. A crest embroidered on the chest that means nothing outside one town. A colour chosen by a school board. A heavy blazer cut for a Northern European winter, or a polo cut for a Mediterranean one. Sizing to a curriculum year rather than to a body.
Almost none of that transfers. A crested jumper is not a sellable garment in an open air market. It drops to the low grades, where it becomes wiping cloth or shoddy for insulation, or it does not sell at all. We will have shipped a durable, expensive garment several thousand kilometres in order to shred it.
There is a version of that journey I find difficult to defend on any grounds at all. A blazer bought in Palma, worn for two years, bagged, graded in Eastern Europe, baled, shipped, opened in a market where nobody wants a wool jacket in that weight or that colour, and finally downgraded to rag. Every step was somebody's honest job, done properly. The outcome is still that a good garment travelled further than the child who wore it ever has, in order to become insulation.
The same crest that makes it worthless there makes it valuable here
Four hundred metres from the school gate, that crest is the single most useful thing about the garment. It matches an exact specification that hundreds of local families are obliged to buy. No sorting, no grading, no bale, no freight. There is a child in the year below who needs precisely this item, in this colour, with this badge on it.
Which is why the least glamorous thing we built is the one I am most attached to. A jumper left on a bus can be scanned by whoever finds it and returned, without the finder ever seeing who owns it. A garment that goes home is not a garment that entered the waste stream and was recovered. It never entered at all.
What actually helps
Return it to the school before you consider a container. Keep a labelled box in the hall and let families take from it without having to ask. Sell what is left within the school community rather than bagging it for collection. Send to the textile container only what genuinely cannot be worn again, because that is the job the container does well. It is a reasonable last step and a poor first one.
None of this is a moral test. It is simply that the useful version of circularity for a school uniform is measured in metres, not in shipping lanes.