shifting the burden

How can secondhand clothing systems support circularity without offloading textile waste to the Global South?

Shifting the Burden examines secondhand clothing sorting, value retention, and textile waste systems across local and transnational contexts. Focusing on the Canadian secondhand clothing stream, the project investigates how garments circulate through donation, thrift, sorting, reuse, export, and discard, and where responsibility for textile waste is displaced within those systems.

overview

Supported by a SSHRC Insight Grant, Shifting the Burden examines the Canadian secondhand clothing stream, from infrastructure and material flows to the sorting processes that determine whether garments are reused, repaired, repurposed, exported, or discarded. The project investigates how value is assessed, preserved, diminished, or lost as clothing moves through secondhand systems, while also questioning the limits of donation as a waste-diversion strategy. Donation is neither recycling nor a guaranteed pathway to reuse, and current secondhand systems cannot absorb the scale of clothing overproduction.

At its core, the project asks how secondhand clothing systems might better support local recirculation and higher value retention, rather than functioning as pathways through which textile waste is displaced elsewhere.

approach

The project uses a mixed-methods, systems-oriented approach to examine secondhand clothing infrastructures across multiple Canadian contexts. It combines research on infrastructure and material flows with in-depth study of sorting processes at secondhand clothing donation centres, including nonprofit and for-profit organizations in rural and urban settings.

The research focuses on how clothing is evaluated in terms of quality, fiber, fabric, garment type, and suitability for recirculation streams such as reuse, repair, refurbishment, and recycling. It also examines the challenges, opportunities, and performance measures shaping reverse value-chain activities in the Canadian secondhand clothing sector.

methods

Fieldwork / interviews / qualitative analysis / systems mapping / secondhand retail and sorting research

significance

This project shows that secondhand clothing systems are not just resale channels but informal infrastructures managing a major post-consumer textile stream with limited policy support, weak data systems, and uneven material outcomes. Findings from the current research suggest that decentralized, hyper-local models can strengthen recirculation, local collaboration, and value retention through low-tech practices such as repair, laundering, and repurposing, while more centralized systems often prioritize throughput and externalized downstream flows.

The project also highlights a larger ethical and political problem: municipalities promote donation as diversion while shifting responsibility for managing textile waste onto thrift organizations, volunteers, and export markets without corresponding structural support. In this context, Shifting the Burden asks how circularity might be reorganized around local recirculation, higher-value retention, and more accountable waste governance.

support

  • SSHRC Insight Grant (2022 - 2027) – Shifting the Burden: Exploring barriers and opportunities for managing post-consumer clothing and textiles in Canada.

outputs

** The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada is a Canadian federal research-funding agency that promotes and supports post-secondary research and training in the humanities and social sciences.