Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

by Adam Minter

Todd Wilson, the wiry, fifty-eight-year-old vice president of Star Wipers, stands beside me, watching Amity with rapt attention. “Did you see how many multiple cuts she did?” he asks with excitement. “Every time she runs it through the blade”—he stops to compose himself and then declares loudly: “Our competition doesn’t do that!” Todd is one of the wiping rag industry’s most passionate boosters. And Star Wipers, located in Newark, Ohio, forty miles east of Columbus, is one of the last American companies that—in his estimation—does rags “the right way.” Like most people who don’t make money from cutting rags, I long assumed that the “right way” was how it was done at home. My mother would take old T-shirts and tear them into rags for polishing furniture and wiping down sinks. Our house wasn’t unique. For most of human history, rag making has been an act of household thrift so common that few consumers think of it as recycling, sustainable, or green.