Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

by Adam Minter

Few consumers, anywhere, have heard of the wiping rag industry. But it bails out everyone. Approximately 30 percent of the textiles recovered for recycling in the United States are converted to wiping rags, according to Secondary Materials and Recycled Textiles: the Association of Wiping Materials, Used Clothing, and Fiber Industries (SMART), a U.S.-based trade association. And that’s probably an undercount. The 45 percent of recycled textiles that are reused as apparel eventually wear out, too. When they do, they’re also bound for the wiping rag companies. Nobody counts the number of wiping rags manufactured in the United States and elsewhere every year. But anyone who knows the industry acknowledges that the numbers are in the many billions, and growing. The oil and gas industry, with its network of pipes and valves, requires hundreds of millions of rags per year to wipe leaks, lubricants, and hands. Hotels, bars, and restaurants need billions of rags to wipe everything from glasses to tabletops to railings. Auto manufacturers need rags to wipe down cars as they come off the assembly line; repair garages need rags to clean off dipsticks after oil changes; car washes need them to apply wax. Painters need them to wipe brushes, spills, and drips. And the healthcare industry demands endless numbers of rags to keep hospitals and clinics clean and sanitary. If these businesses can’t reuse clothes and sheets, they’ll opt for disposable paper towels, synthetic wipes, and new clo...

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.

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.

Behind me is a door that leads out to a giant laundry machine that looks a bit like a giant green metal caterpillar. It handles multiple individual loads at once, without mixing them. And not all those loads are used clothes. “The washer exists to make a new T-shirt feel like an old one,” Todd explains. This makes sense when I think about my own laundry. A new cotton T-shirt, generally, doesn’t feel as soft as one that I’ve had and washed for years. “Now think about it,” Todd says. “That soft T-shirt is going to do a better job of absorbing liquid than one you’ve just pulled out of the pack.” As a result, buyers of clothes intended as rags typically pay more for used T-shirts than new ones. And when they can’t get used ones, they spend money to launder new ones so that they feel like used ones. For example, every three weeks Star Wipers receives a load of castoffs from apparel makers in Bangladesh that must be run through the washer before cutting. “That’s upside down to me,” I concede. “You haven’t spent much time around rags,” Todd says with a smile.

Todd attributes the company’s success to two factors. First, he cares. As he says to me repeatedly during a several-hour-long visit, “I love rags!” Second, he is a stickler for quality. “A rag is a tool,” he explains. “No different than a screwdriver. Different tools for different applications. You have to make the tool and make it well.” A janitorial service doesn’t want to buy rags with sequins that scratch the furniture; an oil and gas company doesn’t want a polyester rag that’s going to discharge static electricity and set off an explosion; a maid service doesn’t want a colored rag that’s going to bleed dye onto a countertop.

“Go try to buy a hundred percent cotton shirt today,” Todd says with exasperation. “Even when it says ‘a hundred percent cotton,’ you can’t be sure.” This isn’t idle conspiracy mongering. In recent years, manufacturers have incorporated more and more polyester into clothes to meet consumer demand for ever-cheaper clothing. But they haven’t always done so honestly. Fabrics labeled 100 PERCENT COTTON often aren’t; and cotton-polyester blends often contain more polyester than the tag claims. Star Wipers first noticed the change in the millions of pounds of linens it purchased from laundries serving healthcare facilities. Sheets and blankets that used to be cotton-polyester blends were turning up as 100 percent polyester. That’s a problem. “A hundred percent polyester wiping rag is not going to do the same thing as a poly-cotton blend,” Wilson explains to me. “It won’t absorb as well.” That’s the least of it. Polyester might melt in the presence of certain solvents, heat, or—worst of all—emit static electricity.

In another curious twist of trade, the prohibition of trading Kandla’s clothes into India has a spacious loophole. According to the law, “mutilated” clothes, which can’t be worn and can’t be sold as garments, can be sent northeast to Panipat, the town that Abdul Majid Moledina of Used Clothing Exports in Mississauga was eager for me to visit. Located fifty miles north of Delhi, Panipat has been for three decades the place where unwanted woolen clothes from the world’s wealthy countries go after nobody wants to wear them anymore. That’s a lot of clothes. Unlike summer clothes, which flow to developing countries in warm climates, winter clothes typically lack a reuse market. According to Nohar, Panipat at its peak could import close to a thousand shipping containers per month of secondhand woolen clothes. “You will see,” Nohar tells me as we eat. “The business is changing. In a few years, Panipat as we know it won’t exist anymore.”

“This is reclaimed white sweatshirt. For us to keep up with demand, we have to buy it offshore. There’s not enough in the States.” The problem, for those who view it that way, is that it’s typically cheaper to cut sweatshirts into rags in India than in Ohio. None of the cut-up fragments of sweatshirt through which Wilson is rummaging were used in India. Rather, they were likely made in South Asia, exported to the United States, and worn until they were donated to Goodwill, the Salvation Army, or some other thrift-based exporter. When they didn’t sell there, they were exported again, to Kandla most likely (or perhaps Mississauga, en route to Kandla), cut up, and exported again—this time to Star Wipers in Newark, Ohio. Each step of that journey makes perfect economic sense, even if the totality of it sounds ridiculous.

Though I’ve never been much of a shopper, the experience of reporting this book—days spent in thrift shops and attending home cleanouts—made me reassess my own consumption and hoarding. The things that I value, I quickly realized, generally aren’t valuable to anyone but me. Once I had that understanding, I started letting go and curtailing what I was buying in the first place.

Roughly fifty seats were up for sale, and all but three sold, all in a matter of minutes. Prices ranged from five to thirty dollars. As the seats disappeared, one of the bidders asked a Goodwill employee when the next ones would arrive. Thinking back on the auction, I think it’s too bad that Target recycled those more than 500,000 seats over the years. They would’ve sold, and many children south of the border would be safer because their parents had access to a secondhand market.

Planned obsolescence is too much a part of consumer culture to be eradicated by law enforcement. Indeed, it’s a venerable tradition. In 1955, Harley Earl, the first designated head of design at General Motors (and arguably one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century), explained that his designs weren’t intended to be timeless: Our big job is to hasten obsolescence. In 1934 the average car ownership span was 5 years: now [1955] it is 2 years. When it is 1 year, we will have a perfect score.4 Earl was mostly successful. During the middle decades of the twentieth century, abandoned cars became one of the most public and pressing environmental problems in the United States, worthy of mention and action by Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.

Sustainably minded consumers don’t often think of motorized vehicles as sustainable models of anything. But perhaps they should: in 2018, Americans bought 17.3 million new cars, and 41 million used ones. That’s not an anomaly, either. In developed economies like the United States and the European Union, used-car sales tend to be two to two and a half times greater than new. And as short-term leasing of cars becomes increasingly popular (around one third of all new car production is leased), the size of the secondhand market expands as more cars go off-lease. That, in turn, makes high-quality, recent-model cars available to more people. And it’s all happening at a time when demand for automobiles is increasing rapidly, especially in emerging Asia and Africa.

Similarly, the share of large household appliances (like refrigerators and washing machines) that had to be replaced within five years of purchase grew from 7 to 13 percent. If those numbers don’t seem large, think of them in terms of a single manufacturer. What would the consuming public think—much less say in online reviews—about a washing machine manufacturer whose five-year failure rate increased from single to double digits in the span of eight years? Consumers know what’s happening. In 2014, a British nongovernmental organization that works with business, government, and communities released data showing how badly manufacturers of household appliances are doing when it comes to meeting consumer expectations.9 For example, British consumers expected washing machines to last a minimum of six years. But according to survey data, a whopping 41 percent of washers purchased in 2012 replaced products less than six years old, and 82 percent of surveyed respondents claimed that the replacement was due to a breakdown or an unreliability. Refrigerators and vacuum cleaners performed even worse. Not all—or even most—of the quality problems can be blamed on the manufacturers. Price is king for most consumers, and manufacturers are always seeking ways to lower costs so that they can meet that demand. Sometimes meeting the demand means cutting corners, as consumers of fast fashion learn when they fish out their faded garments from the laundry. But not always. The first Motorola cell...

One option is for governments to become more directly involved in regulating the durability of products. To some extent, they already are. Minimum safety standards in cars, child safety seats, electrical appliances, and other products are common and necessary. But stepping beyond safety to require, for example, that Maytag make washers with the same quality standards as Alliance Laundry Systems is more ambitious—and more problematic. For one thing, Alliance Laundry Systems probably wouldn’t like it. After all, the company’s booming consumer business (and its pricing) are built on the idea that consumers should be able to choose a better machine among many that are inferior. Second, and even more important, consumers who can’t easily afford Speed Queen would be the ones who suffer if governments started imposing durability requirements that raise the price of stuff. That’s not only unfair; it’d probably result in a backlash against the social and environmental goals that inspired durability requirements. Finally, regulations requiring minimum durability standards would inevitably chill the quest for innovation in new and existing products. Forcing companies to get it right on the first go will convince many to skip the innovation and development process altogether, and just keep making what they’re already making. For most of humanity, the argument that progress must stop in favor of dependability won’t fly.

Many of the same anti-repair practices are common in the consumer electronics and appliance industry. Consider the practices of Apple. In recent years the world’s largest consumer electronics manufacturer has systematically disabled iPhones that had their home buttons replaced by independent repair shops (imagine if Ford remotely disabled your car engine because your power locks were fixed at a local garage, not a dealership);3 sued an independent Norwegian repair shop for using secondhand iPhone repair parts;4 and sealed up its phones and computers with unusual screws that—for a while at least—most independent repair shops didn’t have the drivers to loosen.5 And those are just the one-off occurrences. As a general practice, Apple refuses to make service manuals or parts available to independent repair shops or consumers (even for relatively simple procedures like an iPhone battery switch).

In some respects, iFixit is the twenty-first-century analogue to Lydia Maria Childs and The American Frugal Housewife. Just as nineteenth-century frontier women lacked complete information on how to manage and fix their stuff, so too do contemporary Americans overrun with technologies. “How many objects are in a home?” Kyle asks as he exits into San Luis Obispo. “Is it a thousand? Ten thousand? It’s an order of magnitude more than it was fifty years ago. And yet the economics don’t work for there to be a local espresso-machine repair guy. So either consumers have to figure out how to repair things themselves or …” He shrugs.