For the American business journalist Adam Minter, the afterlife of our possessions is personal. His great-grandfather was a small-time junkyard dealer (“he did what millions of other Russian Jews did: he became a ragpicker”) and his father owned a scrap-metal yard. His grandmother, Betty, had a passion for collecting stuff and her basement was filled with things she’d either inherited or bought in a sale. As a child, Minter recalls her showing him antique lamps, US presidential badges (“If I Were 21, I’d Vote For Kennedy”) and a wooden drop-front desk: “I’m saving that for you.” We use the things we buy to build a picture of who we are.
Minter’s previous book, Junkyard Planet (2014), investigated the international trade in rubbish. This one looks at the globalised secondhand market. The idea came from the experience of dealing with his mother’s possessions after she died. Many of them ended up at a charity shop and he hoped that the things she had cherished “would be used in some way – not landfilled, incinerated, or recycled”. His book is an attempt to reassure himself that was true.
In the course of his research, Minter travelled across the world to wherever secondhand goods are “collected, bought, repurposed, repaired and sold”. Everywhere he was “overwhelmed” by the sheer scale of unwanted stuff. Between 1967 and 2017, the amount Americans spent each year on things – from sofas to smartphones – increased nearly 20-fold. A recent survey found that 90% of space in US garages is used to store unused stuff rather than cars. British wardrobes contain 3.6bn unworn garments.
Twenty years ago, China was a major importer of secondhand clothes; now it has become the world’s biggest consumer of new clothing and is exporting vast amounts of used clothing. As affluence increases around the world, people are switching to new products, and as the value of secondhand things falls, so the piles of unwanted stuff grow ever larger. Minter argues that the secondhand industry offers a potential solution to this flood of unwanted products.
He visits Goodwill Industries, which has 3,000 secondhand stores across the US and Canada, “the king of an American thrift trade that generated at least $17.5bn in revenue”. Charitable giving is, he says, “the past, and the future, of what’s left behind”. In Mexico he explores the booming trade in secondhand goods brought across the border from the US: “It’s one of North America’s most environmentally sustainable businesses.” From Mexico and west Africa, to Malaysia and Japan, Minter is impressed by the secondhand industry: “The desire to profit from castoffs creates innovation and livelihoods.”
But everywhere he hears a common complaint: new products suffer from poor quality. Globally the amount of clothing produced doubled from 2000 to 2015. But the average number of times a garment is worn before disposal has declined by 36%. This is a big problem for traders in secondhand goods. A shirt that pills after two or three washes or a set of particleboard shelves stuck together with glue can’t be resold: they’re dumped. The secondhand industry is both sustainable and profitable: its model of reuse predates “the environmental movement, the decluttering fad, and the oncoming flood of unwanted stuff from baby boomers”. Minter wants his book to shock readers into buying less stuff. But he also believes governments should promote initiatives to boost product longevity and repairability. US states and the EU are indeed considering consumer right-to-repair legislation, a step that may help the secondhand market by creating a reservoir of goods that can be sold and resold.
There is little hard data on the secondhand industry and Minter’s original and well-written study offers a truly international perspective on how old stuff can be given a new lease of life. As he writes, secondhand is “the green economy made real”.
