Knee-deep in vintage shoes, he examines each pair before tossing the keepers – at that moment, it’s beat-up leather cowboy boots and a pair of open-toed pumps – into adjacent cardboard boxes.

The manager of a vintage- and used-clothing store in Kyoto, Japan, Hidaka visits the Savers Inc. distribution center a couple of times a year. He spends two eight-hour days sifting through shoes that thrift stores were unable to sell.

“I just look for stuff that feels right,” Hidaka says. “I look for clothes that are refreshing to my eyes.”

Hidaka is one of several used-clothes buyers who visit the Savers distribution center, part of a 13-center recycling network operated by the Bellevue-based company around the United States and Canada. Hundreds of millions of pounds of used goods – the majority used clothes – pass through these centers each year, most eventually exported to developing countries.

The trade of these clothes represents a $267 million export business in the United States. It links nonprofit organizations with for-profit companies, employs people from sorters in Fife to traders in Zambia and feeds a growing a demand for used clothing in countries where secondhand goods are the most affordable option as well as locations where vintage American cowboy boots might be the newest style.

Behind the boxes where Hidaka mined for shoes are 1,000-pound bales of unsorted clothes stacked to the ceiling. The clothes are bought by businesses – called graders – in the United States and abroad who sort the clothes into smaller shipments, such as women’s skirts or men’s shirts. They sell those bales again to buyers, many in foreign places such as Africa or India.

But the journey of someone’s used college T-shirt to a market overseas starts at home.

Someone cleans a closet and donates a bag of clothes to a nonprofit organization.

Nonprofits with attached thrift stores then try to sell the items at their stores. At Tacoma Goodwill, Susan Martensen, director of marketing and communication, said used clothing stays on the racks for a maximum of three weeks. If not sold, the clothes have a second chance at the Goodwill outlet store, where garments cost $1.39 per pound.

“If it doesn’t make it there, then it moves into the salvage market,” Martensen said.

That’s where Savers steps in.

Savers’ stores buy items from nonprofit organizations, including the Dyslin Boys’ Ranch, ARC of Washington-Pierce County and the Northwest Center for the Retarded.

The company’s core business is selling these used goods at its 200 thrift store locations, including Value Village stores in Tacoma, Puyallup, Lacey, University Place and Kent.

Six years ago, the company started exporting or reselling used clothes and items that didn’t sell in its stores.

People have criticized the business relationship between charities and for-profit companies. They question whether the profits should come from items that were donated to charity.

In Tacoma, Goodwill puts the money earned from the clothes’ sale back into its programs, Martensen said. Most other nonprofits do the same.

Savers won’t disclose its profits or how much it pays to the nonprofits for clothing. As a private company, Savers’ financial records aren’t available to the public.

In a story published a year ago, The Toronto Star reported that Value Village was paying its nonprofit partners about 20 cents more than other buyers.

Little waste, lots of recycling

At the 90,000-square-foot distribution center in Fife, every corner is filled with used items the company could sell to be reused or recycled. Workers dump toys from cardboard boxes onto a conveyor belt. They toss out pieces of garbage and send the stuffed animals on to be compressed into 800-pound bales of soft toys. Forklifts buzz around 1,000-pound bales of unsorted clothes ready for shipment to graders. Bicycles are stacked in one corner. Workers sort shoes in another.

Tony Shumpert, Savers’ director of recycling and logistics, is proud of his company’s work. Less than 10 percent of the goods end up as waste.

“We’ve been able to find a market for these items, rather than them going into landfills,” Shumpert said.

Clothes too damaged to wear are recycled into rags, filler material or fibers made back into thread and fabric. Damaged shoes are sent to recyclers, who break them down and reuse the rubber. Even the plastic sacks people donate goods in are recycled.

The U.S. used-clothes industry started about 60 years ago, said Bernie Brill, executive director of SMART, the industry association for used-clothes exporters. The industry expanded in the 1980s as liberalized trade regulations provided more opportunities for exporters.

The business is growing both in volume and value, according to the federal Office of Textiles and Apparel. Last year, the United States shipped 1.23 billion pounds of used clothing overseas, worth $267 million. Washington exported $9.1 million worth of used clothes last year, a slight decrease from 2004.

These bales of compressed clothes go around the world, to places such as Canada – where graders sort and export the clothes from there – sub-Saharan African countries, India and Japan. Savers ships to 50 countries, including India, Pakistan and United Arab Emirates.

The trade is not without controversy.

Debate over dignity, jobs

Almost 30 countries have banned the importation of used clothing. Others have restrictions, such as high tariffs or expensive licenses, that make it too expensive for companies to export clothes there, Brill said.

The reasons vary:

 • Last month in Bolivia, local clothing manufacturers and critics protested a government decree allowing used clothes to be imported for six more months, Reuters news service reported. Critics say secondhand clothes are an offense to their dignity and take jobs away from domestic manufacturers. The potential competition is a common concern of countries that ban the clothing importers. Bolivian supporters of the import say the garments help people who can’t afford new clothes.

A Bolivian-made shirt costs 60 to 70 Bolivian pesos, while a secondhand shirt can cost 5 pesos.

 • Health concerns also have lead to restrictions. Cameroon wanted to ban the import of clothes five years ago, with the government citing the spread of HIV/AIDS and skin infections as reason for the ban, the U.S. Office of Textiles and Apparel reported. The country relented to a ban on used undergarments after discussions with the U.S. government and the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control in Atlanta.

Pietra Rivoli, a finance professor at Georgetown University, studied the second life of clothing for her book, “The Travels of a T-shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade.”

In many developing countries, the domestic manufacturers are making clothing for e xport, she said, leaving local consumers with few inexpensive options. “The Travels of a T-shirt” led her to Tanzania, a country whose top import is used clothes from the United States.

“This is good for a great majority of the people,” said Rivoli, who will speak at the University of Puget Sound next month. “Before this trade was liberalized, it was very difficult and very expensive for people who were poor to dress nicely.

“If you compare the benefits most get from the clothing, on the balance the winners kind of trump the losers.”

Half a world away

Forklift drivers packed a shipping container tight with bales Tuesday. Buyers want the containers full – and the bales as compressed as possible – so they get the most out of what they pay to ship a container overseas.

On the other side of the world, Karen Tranberg Hansen has watched the bales of clothes unloaded by wholesalers and traders in Zambia. An anthropologist from Northwestern University, Hansen researched the effect used clothing had on Zambian culture.

The shipments arrive by truck to the landlocked African country. By then, they’ve passed through graders who have separated the 1,000-pound bales into smaller, more specific bales, perhaps of cotton dresses or men’s pants.

The unsorted clothes cost 7 cents to 10 cents a pound, Shumpert said. With each new handler, the price is marked up for profit.

In Zambia, Hansen estimated the traders buying the individual bundles from wholesalers were paying $100 for 50 kilograms – or 110 pounds of clothes, at about 90 cents a pound.

The traders haul the bales back to their stalls in the country’s open-air markets.

“They cut the plastic straps open, usually on the spot, then it all spills out,” Hansen said. “They will start to count jackets, set things aside that are damaged or set a beginning price.”

The shoppers, from families well off and poor, hover over the garments, she said. Zambians call the used clothes “saluala,” which means “to select from a pile,” and consider them new because they have just arrived in their country.

“They have stripped the clothing of its prior life as our old clothing,” she said. “(Saluala) stresses the abundance of clothing and plenty of choice.”

The clothes might be American, but Zambian shoppers make them their own.

In one trip there, Hansen saw a young boy wearing a purple gown from Catholic clergy – “not for religious purposes, but because of the bright color and shininess of the fabric,” she said. “People make sense of them on their own terms.

“That means stories about these clothes will be different from Ghana to Zambia. It’s hard for Western observers to see this because they just see the piles of clothes that come from here.”

Supply and demand

At Savers in Fife, the piles of goods and used clothes arrive daily.

Shumpert said the demand keeps increasing and the supply is constant. He laughs when buyers ask him to “send everything” he can get of one item.

“I tell them that they don’t know how much I can give them,” he said. “That’s part of the challenge; (the supply) is just so massive.”

Kelly Kearsley: 253-597-8573

kelly.kearsley@thenewstribune.com

Staff writer Eijiro Kawada contributed to this report.