Editor’s Note: Textile recovery implementation will be featured in sessions at the 2027 Textile Recovery Summit, March 1-3 near Washington, D.C. Register now!
On a webinar Tuesday, panelists from the textile recycling space discussed the potential disruption to their industry as the international Basel Convention weighs changes to the way used garments are handled across borders.
“Recent developments under the Basel Convention could end up reshaping and destabilizing the textile circularity system as we know it, just as policymakers and industry are trying to strengthen it,” said Jessica Franken, vice president for government and external affairs with SMART, the Secondary Materials and Recycled Textiles Association. SMART co-hosted the webinar with Resource Recycling’s Textile Recovery Summit. It was entitled “Used Textiles in the Global Circular Economy: Research, Realities and the Basel Convention.”
Franken explained that the Basel Convention is an environmental treaty adopted in 1989 to regulate the international shipping of hazardous waste. The convention has 191 signatories worldwide, but the US isn’t one of them. Still, the treaty “matters enormously” to the US because most of its trading partners are signatories, said Franken.
Textiles are listed under Annex 9 in Basel, for non-hazardous waste that is outside the convention’s control. But the convention is studying whether to move textiles to a different level that would require prior informed consent (PIC) before shipping. That means the exporting country would have to notify the importing country, and in some cases the transit countries, and then those governments would need to consent before that shipment could proceed. So it would result in additional documentation and tracking requirements.
“In other words, PIC controls can make cross shipments slow and administratively burdensome in ways that can really grind a trade to a halt,” said Franken.
The Basel Convention parties are meeting in April 2027, at which point a decision on how to handle textile waste may be announced. Any decision could have a big impact on the textile reuse and recycling industry, said Franken, stifling a high-volume, low-value industry and even leading to bans or de facto bans in some countries on importing used clothes.
Panelists noted that the driver behind the Basel Convention’s work is the fashion industry’s growing footprint. “Textiles and clothing production use significant raw materials, water, energy, and a wide range of chemicals that can be problematic,” Franken said. And fast fashion, overproduction and shorter product lifespans are contributing to a glut of material worldwide.
Alan Wheeler, the CEO of the Textile Recycling Association in the UK, said, “realistically, about 85%-90% of all clothing ever produced does not get a second life, or does not at least find its way into our collection systems.”
In addition to the Basel Convention’s ongoing work, a number of governments have been taking aim at textile waste, from the European Union to California, with a range of extended producer responsibility, eco-design requirements, digital passports and other rules. The end result of these policies should be more garments collected, said Wheeler, with the question being what happens to them next?
Domestic markets in the US and Europe can usually only absorb about 20%-30% of the clothing that’s collected in those countries, said Franken. “So that really makes access to international markets where there is demand and need for quality secondhand clothing particularly important,” she said.
Wheeler agreed. “If those markets disappear, the materials don’t magically become recyclable in Europe,” he said.
Global exchange
Large shipments of donated clothing are thus routed to Latin America, Africa and Asia, in a global trade that saw 10.1 billion pounds moved in 2024, said Jennifer Wang, founder of Full Cycle Resource Consulting. Additional sorting often takes place at hubs in Guatemala and Pakistan, among other places, before garments reach end markets. Wang said any changes from the Basel Convention could disrupt the sorting models of the trade.
“Lower-grade textiles that aren’t able to be reused oftentimes are converted into things like industrial wiping cloths, fiber insulation, and other recycled products, meaning that very little of this material that’s being shipped ever ends up as true waste,” said Franken.
In fact, in new research, Wang found that only 1.3%-1.5% of the textile material sold into Tanzania was not sellable at all, and could therefore be considered waste. An additional 3.4%-3.5% of the material was sold as rags. The rest was reusable clothing of different grades. Wang found a similar result in Uganda.
Jobs and income
The international second-hand clothes market also creates critical jobs and income, said Marlvin Owusu, an executive member of the Ghana Used Clothing Dealers Association. In Ghana, the business supports two million people, he said, the majority of whom are women.
“Ghana is not an endpoint for unwanted clothing,” said Owusu. “It is part of a regional reuse and redistribution system.”
And that system provides good quality used clothes at reduced prices for millions of people in Ghana and beyond, said Owusu. In his country, the majority of people wear used clothes, he said. “That is why it is very important not to switch off the supply line.”
Apostle Teresiah Wairimu, the chairperson of the MCAK Mitumba Consortium Association of Kenya, agreed. The second-hand clothes trade supports 2 million jobs in her country, she said, which works out to 7.58 jobs across the supply chain for every ton of material imported.
“Without mitumba (used clothes) there are people who will be walking buck naked,” said Wairimu.
Owusu added, “the evidence does not support the idea that imported second-hand clothing is predominantly waste.” Instead of going the PIC route, regulators should work to strengthen the circular system that already exists with used clothing, said Owusu.
Wairimu agreed, adding that the Basel Convention decision “needs to be evidence-based, data-driven and consistent with the realities of the used clothing value chain.” Regulators should pay particular attention to end-market countries and instead focus on upstream production, product design and consumption patterns, she said.
Franken said, “because textile to textile recycling does not yet exist at sufficient scale, the free flow of these goods across borders really does remain essential to being able to continue this as a circular economy.”
