Why Do Those Charities Want Your Old T-Shirts?

We still have a landline phone, and 19 out of 20 calls are either 1) a scam for ripping off the elderly with a "free" health monitor that will cost them thousands of dollars, or 2) a notification that a truck from some charity or other will be in the neighborhood to collect old clothing.

I might be weird, but I wear my old clothing until it's worn out. I wear t-shirts until they get holes in the armpits, sweatshirts till the cuffs are frayed, and jeans till they get holes in the seat. Then I turn them into rags and use them to dust and clean my bike chain. Anyway, who could possibly want my old t-shirts?

Now I know who: people in Africa. From a story on NPR:

Jeff Steinberg had a maroon and white lacrosse jersey that he wore for years. It said "Denver Lacrosse" on the front and had his number, 5, on the back.

Then, one day, he cleaned out his closet and took the shirt to a Goodwill store in Miami. He figured that was the end of it. But some months after that, Steinberg found himself in Sierra Leone for work. He was walking down the street, and he saw a guy selling ice cream and cold drinks, wearing a Denver Lacrosse jersey.

Our old t-shirts are being packed into container ships, exported to Kenya where they sell for 15 cents. Often they are cut, resized (all those XL and XXL shirts are way too big for Africans), washed, ironed, tailored, and ultimately resold for a couple of bucks.

Over the years I've noticed on the news that people in other countries wear American t-shirts a lot. Why, I wondered, are so many Africans fans of the Chicago Bulls and the New England Patriots?

It turns out they're not. These countries are so desperately poor compared to us that they have entire industries based on the stuff that we just toss out.

I guess it's great that this stuff is being recycled. It's a lot more benign than the nasty recycling of electronics, in which circuit boards are sent to third-world countries and burned to recover precious metals, exposing the workers -- frequently children -- to highly toxic fumes.

But it really puts into perspective how wealthy the average American is compared to the average Kenyan.

And then you realize that there are some Americans who are almost as badly off as those Kenyans, who get their pick of our castoffs before we ship them off to Kenya. And they work for Walmart and McDonalds.