Mary Portas take on dying High St's

fc123

I should have a definative, fully backed up answer to 'quantity of clothes owned' but only have anecdotal...so will have to do.

I have to confess something not very nice. We used to have a phrase in Vintage clothing/textile waste plants known as ''Dead Mans (or womans) Clothes''. These were the 'prize' on a buying trip whether to a charity store (they used to hold back goods for people like us) or a Textile waste processing plant (mostly based in Yorkshire).


In a waste textile processing plant, stock came in from unwanted goods collected by 'Rag Merchants'' who did a round of charity shops collecting black bags of unsaleable clothing/rag.
At the plant the vans tipped out the sacks onto the base of a long, slow moving conveyor belt and lads ripped them open and fed the belt. Dealers from second hand markets (not vintage) would also be there to pull out stock for their market stalls.

The conveyor belt went up high and had women (always women) stood along it who pulled off certain garments and threw them into 1 tonne cages place behind each station.

There were then 3 further conveyor belts for subsorting.

For example (are you still awake?) Conveyor belt 1 had a woman pulling 'knit' of any type. The knit then went to conveyor belt 2 where it was sorted into cashmere, wool mix, angors blends, acrylic in colours (cages sorted to colour), cotton blend, mohair and white wool (from yummy hand knit Arrans to old, undyed mothy blankets), socks and hats/scarves etc.

Every type went for recycling of some sort. Not any more though.

Conveyor belt 3 processed the wool knit and old coats.
All of it went up the belt to a 'mincer machine and was chopped. This reduced the price. I would sort wool cages for vintage Fairisles, cashmere (that belt 2 sorter missed) amazing 40's coats etc

The knitwear wool also used to be minced up and reowoven for cheaper wool cloth locally.

Only Pure New Wool (with the wool mark) comes straight from the sheep. If you have ever bought a cheap wool/poly blend item you can feel a slight grittiness in the weve. These are the old minced up buttons. It's also why this type of cloth tends to bobbly....too many impurities.

Any cashmere that is in a 10% blend came from recycled cashmere...except there was quite a bit of sneaky mis labelling going on pre Trades descrip so much of it wasn't cashmere but angora or silk blends.


Old suits were also sliced in 2 and exported to India to be re-sewn together as they were exported as destroyed waste not clothing so were much cheaper.



Anyway, Dead Mans Clothes was when a few sacks would be split and you could tell straight away as they came up the belt. Perhaps to start; Care home, polyester dresses with stiff iron on label, large sizes, then the decades would pass before your eyes as the clothing slowly moved along the belt....back to the 70's, then the fifities..the clothing would get smaller as the age of the deceased got younger.
You could watch someones life pass before your eyes.....OK I would be pulling the rare bits and pieces as it went by...and nearly always, there would be a wedding dress of some description.

A whole lifetimes of clothing (that wasn't thrown away) would usually be 6 refuse sacks for women.

For men, it would be 3 black sacks. I used to source Utility mark suits and pre 1945 suits to export to Japan and your average man who had died during the 90's would usually own 1 wartime suit, 1 mod suit and a dinner suit plus shirts and cufflinks (gold)...then there would be a large sized Poly 70's number at the end.

Many suits were let out time and time again (my job was to restore them by moving the inserts at the centre back...often cut from bits of blanket) plus waiscoats were always altered.


I often used to wish that people could stay the same weight all their life as they would have saved time for a future generation to earn from their unused clothing.....but that sounds a bit mean written down.


Anyway, all the yards (except 1) I used to visit are shut down now as the cost of the sorting ended up costing far more than the recylced product could get. The majority goes into landfill now.

The one that still exists is Oxfam Wastesaver in Huddersfield...and yes, they are VAT registered. Used to get great stuff from there...the stuff that the Oxfam shops binned. I think they do tours now if anyone fancies a day trip. It is a lot smaller than the ones we used to visit in USA, Holland and Ul North but sameish business.

If anyone wants to knwo more where things went o.I can zzzzz you with more info.

Guess what is unrecyclable..always?
Underwired Bras and Fibre Glass fabric (1950's /60's Curtains usually).

Also Lycra/Elastane destroyed the acrylic recycling process (in India) as the elastane jarred up the machines. It's in everything nowadays.

The processing plant, in a remote village in India, employed small kids to sit around the inported bundles of waste knitwear and ping them between their teeth to see if it had elastane in. True tale from the boss of the place I used to buy from.

lostinrates

fc123 wrote: »

If anyone wants to knwo more where things went o.I can zzzzz you with more info.
.

you never zzzzzzzzzzzzzz me, I love the way you write and the sense of the ''thereness'' of it all.

fc123

lostinrates wrote: »

you never zzzzzzzzzzzzzz me, I love the way you write and the sense of the ''thereness'' of it all.

The textile waste business is a strange one as it was always so hidden unless one was directly involved.

It's also the hidden casualty of the the cheap imports, price deflation and mass move off shore for manufacturing.

Always fancied writing about it but thinking should be more of a setting for a story (that informs) rather than a long rant....like Two Caravans which had amazing background info as part of the story.

misskool

fc123 wrote: »

I


Guess what is unrecyclable..always?
Underwired Bras and Fibre Glass fabric (1950's /60's Curtains usually).

Also Lycra/Elastane destroyed the acrylic recycling process (in India) as the elastane jarred up the machines. It's in everything nowadays.

Many thanks for the fascinating insight. I try not to own so many clothes but modern day pressures of work exist.

Guessing a lot of modern clothes aren't recycleable as they are made from polyester or poly blends. I hate those with a passion and it takes me forever to buy any clothes because I have to buy things that are all or mostly natural fibres and real leather shoes.

The only thing that fails at is underwear. There's no way I could go without underwired bras

lostinrates

misskool wrote: »

Many thanks for the fascinating insight. I try not to own so many clothes but modern day pressures of work exist.

Guessing a lot of modern clothes aren't recycleable as they are made from polyester or poly blends. I hate those with a passion and it takes me forever to buy any clothes because I have to buy things that are all or mostly natural fibres and real leather shoes.

The only thing that fails at is underwear. There's no way I could go without underwired bras

if fleece is plastic bottles, can it not be remelted etc?

I oftrn wonder with recycling how green it is: I mean, its a lot of energy, a lot of transport. I wonder if reusable isn't more key.

fc123

misskool wrote: »

Many thanks for the fascinating insight. I try not to own so many clothes but modern day pressures of work exist.

Guessing a lot of modern clothes aren't recycleable as they are made from polyester or poly blends. I hate those with a passion and it takes me forever to buy any clothes because I have to buy things that are all or mostly natural fibres and real leather shoes.

The only thing that fails at is underwear. There's no way I could go without underwired bras

As far as I can recall, the only garments that were minced up and re-woven/spun were knitwear (any but not socks..they were waste), wool felt cloth (like coats, jackets)...I think they also became car seat stuffing.

Everything else was sold as a garment...any no good were then destroyed by the end user.

West Africa was a huge importer of used lightweight clothing...all sold in markets out there. Tricky trade though. Thye also took most of the shoes and trainers...after we had pulled the rare vintage Nike ones.

E Europe would take all furs and sheepskins.

Old stained tees, poor condition shirts/blouses and towels went for 'Wipers' to be used as rags for mechanics etc.

Lower grade clothing went to India..they make the rag rugs from old tee shirts knotted together...they used to sell in the UK for £1 years back. Labour cost must have been pennies.

fc123

misskool wrote: »

Many thanks for the fascinating insight. I try not to own so many clothes but modern day pressures of work exist.

Guessing a lot of modern clothes aren't recycleable as they are made from polyester or poly blends. I hate those with a passion and it takes me forever to buy any clothes because I have to buy things that are all or mostly natural fibres and real leather shoes.

The only thing that fails at is underwear. There's no way I could go without underwired bras

Clothes are just a much smaller part of our budget today I guess as they are more affordable...or we are, indeed, much wealthier...even though we don't feel we are.

Pobby

All this talk recycling makes me giggle. It is if it is a new thing.
When. as a child in the 50`s, we had a rubbish bin, all pealings and used tea and stuff went onto the compost heap and I remember a sack that salvage went into. That was mainly cardboard and that also was put into a seperate part of the bin bag.

Worn out cotton garments became useful as cleaning rags. Wool products I remember we took to an old terrace house , long torn down, where the guy sat down with a pair of scales in an other wise empty room and paid out a bit of cash once he established how much they weighed. I remember a black board with how much different metals would fetch.

These days, Gordon Stalin will fine you if you get anything wrong with recycling. Funnily enough I was chatting to a bloke that works out our local tip. I turned up with a load of cardboard and he said sling it in the rubbish as the cardboard container was full. He intimated that don`t believe all you hear about recycling.

treliac

bluey890 wrote: »

Why was he not permitted to offload the stock elsewhere? It seems like the supplier may have been subject to unfair contract terms...

fc123 wrote: »

Because it had their brand label in it, was made to their spec/design.

Couldn't they just cut out the labels and sell them like factory outlets do nowadays?

dopester

treliac wrote: »

Couldn't they just cut out the labels and sell them like factory outlets do nowadays?

Good idea imo. At school... not proud of it now... sold fake lacoste & ellesse ect iron-on cotton labels.. Iron the back, heat up the glue, apply to non-branded top... push, hold and wait. Did quite a trade in them. Could do the same to those tops.. except with an iron-on label design of your own.

Possibly they could be held to `design' but depending on the item, maybe that too could be adapted.