One Man’s Trash Is Another Man’s Trash, Infinity

Garments that make it into the Salvation Army thrift stores have exactly one month to sell. Then, they’re pulled from their hangers, tossed in bins, and end up back in a room such as this one.

In the rag-cut room, two men were silently pushing T-shirts, dresses, and every other manner of apparel into a compressor that works like the back of a garbage truck, squeezing out neat cubes of rejected clothing that weigh a half ton each… The Quincy Street Salvation Army builds a completed wall made of 18 tons, or 36 bales, of unwanted clothing every three days. And this is just a small portion of the cast-offs of one single Salvation Army location in one city in the United States.

*Pours some out.* Find out where your icky T-shirts go next in this excerpt from Elizabeth L. Cline’s book, Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, over at Slate.