Shoes & Clothes: What Happens After
How Your Donations Make a Difference
Every week, Anglo Doorstep Collections gathers approximately 500,000 donated clothing and shoe items. Equivalent to 100 tonnes. An impressive 95% of these donations are re-homed across the UK and abroad, including regions such as Africa, the Middle East, and Ukraine. That means around 470,000 items find new owners each week, extending their lifespan and reducing waste.
What Happens After Collection?
Once our drivers have picked up your generously donated clothes and shoes, they return to the nearest warehouse, where the team carefully unloads, sorts, and prepares each item for its next journey.
As shown in the image below, donations are then packed into large 200kg botany bags, securely sealed, and made ready for transport to those who need them most.
Your donations truly make a difference, supporting both sustainability and communities in need. Thank you for being part of this impact!
Grading, Bailing and Distribution
All donated clothes undergo careful manual inspection and sorting into around 500 grades based on gender, age, season, style, and condition. This specialist process is labor-intensive.
After grading, the clothes are compacted and sealed in bales to increase the weight of shipping containers, reducing transport costs. It’s worth noting that transporting a container with 30 tonnes of clothes costs the same as one with 15 tonnes, resulting in significant savings on both price and pollution.
In the distribution phase, markets order clothes tailored to their specific needs and desires. For example, Ukrainian markets predominantly request heavy winter clothing during the colder months, while African markets prefer lightweight summer attire. This custom ordering system ensures efficient resource allocation and minimises waste.
Environmental Impact
We want items to be rehomed for their original purpose and give them a new home. Your unwanted clothes do not need to go to landfill, we can gvie them a new home! The fast fashion industry is a significant contributor to the climate crisis, responsible for as much as 10% of global carbon dioxide emissions. To produce just 1kg of cotton would require around 10,000 litres of freshwater. Cotton accounts for around 21% of the clothes we wear in the UK. To find out more about this click here.
Every week we save the planet more than 300,000,000 litres of fresh water from re-homing your un-used clothing. To find out more about Fashion and Water consumption, read here.
That amount of fresh water would fill an Olympic sized swimming pools 120 times, each week!
Our collection and distribution process has been carefully built and managed by Anglo Recycling since 2012 to reduce inefficiency and waste.
We are saving our planet significant amounts of freshwater by reducing the demand for new clothes by re-introducing re-wearable clothes back into markets around the world.
Anglo Doorstep Collections
You can help put your unwanted clothes, shoes and many other household items back into circulation for their original purpose by booking your doorstep collection today through Anglo Doorstep Collections. For more information about the service and partnered charities click our read more button.
Anglo Doorstep Collection is a part of Anglo Recycling Company. For any further information about our service click the button below.