Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

by Adam Minter

What transformed this act of household thrift into an industrial process were the factories and machines that created the industrial revolution. Maintaining and repairing those machines required rags to apply or wipe up grease and oil. In industrializing England, the most abundant source of those rags was the growing surplus of used, unwanted textiles made by those very machines. An industry emerged to collect and deliver them to the rag makers, and by the late nineteenth century, British rag makers were as industrialized as the textile mills, with buying networks as complex as those used to distribute clothing to the growing retail industry. Rag making soon went global: by 1929, the United States was the leading rag-making nation, home to at least twenty-six wiping rag companies with industrial laundries that ensured the cleanest rags possible. Thousands of people were employed in rag-cutting factories. The need for rags hasn’t gone away over the last century. Star Wipers has 110,000 square feet of space in Newark, much of it devoted to warehousing the rags that it packages and ships around the United States to distributors who know—intimately—what kind of user needs what kind of rag.