Council expects to flip the financial model underpinning used-clothes banks

On 17 February, a guy in a high-vis jacket was hunched at the giant orange Clothes Pods that sit in Inchicore village, pulling out mounds of clothes and a few teddies.

A white van was pulled up nearby. Its back doors were flung open, ready for loading.

The Clothes Pod staff were back to doing pick-ups after a hiatus, during which residents across the city began to complain more about clothes being left soaked and muddied at overflowing banks.

Clothing collections had been suspended on 27 January and began again on 13 February, said a Dublin City Council spokesperson by email last week.

The reason? “Due to ongoing global events, many international textile markets are currently inaccessible, which has resulted in an extraordinary backlog of materials in storage in Clothes Pod’s warehouses,” they said.

On Monday 27 January, “storage facilities reached maximum capacity and the service was temporarily suspended”, said the spokesperson.

At the council’s mobility and public realm committee earlier this month, Barry Woods, the acting head of waste management, said that Dublin City Council had been engaging with the business, Clothes Pod, to get the service running again.

He didn’t give any details about what those negotiations involved. But the economics and regulations around the used-clothes trade have shifted dramatically in recent years.

It used to be that the operator paid the council for each tonne of material that it collected, but the flow of money will have to switch in future, said a council spokesperson.

“Due to the ongoing difficulties in the international textile industry, this model has become increasingly unsustainable in recent years,” they said.

“It has become apparent that future contracts will require Local Authorities to pay service providers to carry out the service,” they said.

Dublin City Council last tendered for the collection of textiles for reuse and recycling a decade ago.

A council spokesperson says that the council is now finalising a “request for tender” to set up a new framework agreement for the collection of textiles for reuse and recycling.

Councillors say this could be an opportunity for a discussion on different approaches to how used textiles are managed in the city, and to add more transparency to where the textiles end up.

But officials don’t seem to be all that open to that conversation, said Donna Cooney, a Green Party councillor.

Cooney had no idea that there had been a pause in textile collection late last month, she said, until she pressed Woods on the issue at the council meeting.

Councillors should be told what is going on with a contract and consulted on that, she said. “This is not just an operational issue, it’s a policy issue.”

“We’re not having those conversations and I don’t understand why we would be kept in the dark about this,” she says.

Lee Clifford, a director of Textile Recycling Limited – the company behind Clothes Pod – said on the phone on Monday that he didn’t want to talk about anything to do with the business.

Where does it go?

Carolyn Moore, a Green Party councillor, said she expects the climate action committee to take up the issue of textile waste in the city.

She has tried in the past to drill into where the clothes left in Clothes Pods end up, and what responsibility the council has.

“It’s something that I would be intending to follow-up on,” said Moore, who sat on the National Textile Advisory Group.

A spokesperson for Dublin City Council says that the “used clothes are sold to international markets”.

Data from the National Transfrontier Shipments Office shows the beginning of that journey.

In 2023, Textile Recycling Limited – which handles used textiles in other council areas, not just the city – exported 7,610 tonnes of goods coded as “textile wastes”, the data shows.

The first port of call for a little shy of half of that was Northern Ireland. Most of the rest was sent first to other European countries, such as Latvia, Poland, Great Britain, and Lithuania.

Smaller amounts went directly outside of the European Union to Turkey and Pakistan.

Solene Schirrer, a project manager for textiles at environmental charity VOICE Ireland, says she doesn’t know the ins and outs of where Clothes Pod ships.

But, speaking generally, private textile banks ship used clothes to huge warehouses in Northern Ireland, where they are roughly sorted, she says. “Whether pants, t-shirts, things like that.”

They are next sent to wholesalers in European countries, among them Poland, Germany, or Ukraine, she said, where they are sorted by quality.

About 10 percent of that clothing is extracted for European vintage markets, she said.

Up to 20 percent may be downcycled either within the European Union or sometimes in Pakistan, she said. “Making clothing into rags, into insulation.”

“The majority of clothes would be exported just for what is called repurposing,” says Schirrer.

Much of what is sent to the Global South now is low-quality, synthetic fast-fashion, she says, and so can end up in landfill or being burnt in countries such as Ghana. “We’re sort of dumping our waste in other countries.”

Seeing changes

Schirrer, of VOICE, says that international textile markets have been in flux for some time. “It’s a long-term change. It’s just that we see it more visibly now that it is affecting us.”

The fast-fashion industry is dumping so many clothes that there’s just too much for the system to handle, she says.

Ukraine had been receiving, sorting and re-exporting lots of European clothes but the war disrupted that, she says. “The capacity to receive and sort the clothes in Europe has decreased because of that.”

Countries in Africa are cutting how many used clothes they allow in, as they can’t deal with what they are being sent, she says.

Lawmakers at an European Union level have been working to better tackle the fall-out from fast fashion, she says. Since January, member states are supposed to have separate collections in place for textile waste so none ends up in the black bin.

The government should bring in an “Extended Producer Responsibility Scheme” for textiles to help fund that separate collection, said the National Textile Advisory Group last year.

Plans to revise the EU’s Waste Framework Directive also include this type of scheme.

On top of that, new regulations on waste shipment apply stricter rules on waste export, Schirrer says.

Starting from 2027, the governments of receiving countries outside of the OECD will have to tell the European Commission that they accept waste, and show they can manage it in a sustainable way, Schirrer says.

But for that to apply, used textiles have to be labelled as waste rather than reusable, she says. “I think as long as we don’t have clear definitions, there is still a loophole there.”

That said, defining used textiles as waste should be dealt with by the Waste Framework Directive which is being revised at the moment, said Schirrer.

The current proposed version says that anything that is discarded is waste and would have to go through a sorting process to be properly assessed as something else, she says.

“That should be in the incoming years, hopefully it will be a bit harder to dump our waste on other countries,” she says.

Suggesting changes

The eTenders website, which lists government tenders and contract awards, shows a tender was awarded in 2015 to Textile Recycling Limited to collect and process textiles.

A council spokesperson said last week that it is currently finalising a request for tender for a new framework agreement for textile collection.

“Any contracts that arise from such will be in place by Q2 2025,” they said.

In April 2021, and again in March 2022, Green Party Councillor Carolyn Moore had asked about re-tendering plans.

That was because she was interested in the possibility of ensuring greater transparency in where textiles end up, she said.

“My issue has been the idea that people are bringing their unwanted textiles to quote-unquote recycling facilities, and then actually the council takes no responsibility for the lifecycle of those textiles,” she said.

In the written response to Moore’s question in March 2022, an official said that “Dublin City Council has no oversight role in the life-cycle of clothing or textiles”.

But when Dublin City Council tendered in April 2015 for used-textile collection, it did tell bidders that there should be an audit trail for where textiles end up, and that the council may audit service providers.

Exploring regulation to ensure transparency around textile banks so it is clear where textiles go is also another of the several recommendations made by the National Textile Advisory Group last year.

Dublin City Council hasn’t answered a query as to whether it has ever audited where the used clothes go from textile banks.

Buy less

Claire Downey, the CEO of the Ballymun Rediscovery Centre, said that Ireland’s level of textile consumption is just unsustainable.

“Unless we reduce consumption, the pressure on outlets for post consumer (unwanted) textiles, including export outlets, will continue to grow,” she said.

As well as consuming less, we need to support recirculation locally, she said. Like, “through driving demand for second hand textiles, as well as lending and swapping behaviours”.

That includes awareness campaigns, but also “to invest in key infrastructure like sorting, warehousing, reuse, repair, upcycling and other means of enabling swapping, lending, upcycling and second hand textile sales in Ireland”, she said.

At a meeting of the council’s North Central Area Committee meeting on 17 February, Green Party Councillor Donna Cooney put forward a motion asking for more alternatives to the current system of textile handling.

She asked that, “given the abuse of clothes banks with regular dumping and the need to reduce wasted textiles garments” that the council “support an alternative pilot for a swap/free clothes shop, market with garment up-styling, altering and repair demonstrations”.

Other councillors have also said that they want to explore the idea of municipal swap centres all over the city, as there are in Copenhagen.

The council did pilot a community clothes swap shop kit in 2023, and community groups can borrow that kit to run their own events, according to Woods, the acting head of waste management, in a written response to Cooney.

The council also procured a service provider, Change Clothes Crumlin, to manage the swap-kit project, he wrote.

But scaling up alternatives to encourage the reuse of second-hand clothing in the city is “outside of the remit of Dublin City Council”, said a council spokesperson last week.

In its recommendations, Ireland’s National Textile Advisory Group said that the government should develop a policy and legislation “recognising the existing significant role of the Local Government sector in the collection of used textiles at bring banks”.

And then “determine the resources required for the Local Government sector to implement any new regime around the management of postconsumer textiles at national, regional, and local level and seek support at government level for any additionality required”.