Charity shops are not given due credit for recycling our secondhand goods

By Ham&High reader Walter Roberts
Charity shops are playing a vital role in recycling textiles, garments and other goods some of which had been bought in moments of profligacy and impetuous haste, yet regretfully they have never been given the credit they're due. While most of us have been singing the praises of individuals and organisations involved in reducing our carbon footprint, little mention has been made of the thousands of altruistic and kind hearted people behind the collection, sale and recycling of second hand garments and goods most of them in pristine condition which would otherwise have been destined for the incinerator or a landfill site. Millions of sacks of textiles or goods from households are also collected from households each year leading to approximately 300,000 tonnes of garments being sold or recycled through charity shops each year.
If this has of late become a fraction of what is purchased from High Street department stores groaning under a glut of cheap garments and goods produced at the expense of poorly paid, malnourised workers in some far off third world country like India for instance; then it is perhaps owing to the fact that they cannot compete on an equal footing with the increasingly cheaper goods on offer in such stores courtesy of importers who rely on unscrupulous sub-contractors who are in blatant breach of ethical and moral standards. We on the other hand appear to be oblivious that many of the workers slaving in these sweatshops are children in indentured labour who never get to see the light of day but who eke out their miserable existence in a purgatory of the living dead which is de facto modern slavery at its heinous worst.
However there is hope yet that the forays charity shops like Oxfam ( which opened its first shop in Oxford in 1946) are now making into the fair trade sector will eventually make an impact on textile imports leading to some improvement in the lives of such workers. More recently MEP's have come to the aid of Charity shops by voting in new EU rules under Amendment 18 which allows for exemptions from the obligation to provide information and documentation on product risk and product origin for secondhand goods.
Ergo far from decrying the overt presence of such shops on our high streets as some are wont to do, we should be clamouring for their presence to be ubiquitious and prominent on every High Street bearing in mind that it is poor or considerate people who frequent them most and who in turn are least likely to leave a carbon footprint of any significance. Such shops were "green" decades before the word was coined in its present context.