Page 54 - bne_Magazine_February_2019

54 I Central Europe bne February 2019
the east – to embrace the “slow fashion” movement, buying less and shopping secondhand or from sustainable design- ers. This issue was raised by Moldoveanu too, who says that as well as buying used items she now sells whatever she no longer wears “to reduce waste”.
“The best creamy layer”
Across the Balkans in Albania, the tall white apartment blocks of Porcelana grow steeply out of the foothills of Mount Dajti at the end of a long bus route from downtown Tirana. The suburb that was the location of paranoid communist era dictator Enver Hoxha’s personal nuclear bunker (recently converted into an underground museum and modern art gallery) is now home to young families, whose children play in the rocky ground between the buildings and dodge under the racks of jackets and fur coats outside the dozens of second- hand clothing shops that have opened in this out of the way district.
Most of them are nameless, and the clothes have no price labels, the vendors selling by category – in one, any type of women’s dress, for example, is priced
at ALL400 (€3.33). The majority of garments crammed onto metal racks
or piled in heaps on tables bear Italian labels, not surprising given the strong commercial links between Albania
and its neighbour across the Adriatic. Comtrade data shows that Italy was
the source of over $8mn worth of used textiles (mainly clothes) imported by Albania in 2017, four-fifths of the total,
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while Germany accounted for just over one-tenth ($1.1mn).
Most of the secondhand clothes that end up in Eastern Europe and other parts of the developing world were originally worn in Western countries then, when their owners tired or grew out of them, given to charities. Like the exports from Italy to Albania, other countries in the region also import directly from western countries they share close trading links
Romanian suppliers at first, but some- thing the Hungarians and Bulgarians say is rubbish, here they call bun [good], so we buy our clothes from wholesalers in Bulgaria and Hungary.”
The explosion in clothing consumption in recent years – in 2014 the number of clothes the number of clothes purchased globally passed the 100bn mark – has led to a correspondingly huge increase in the volume of clothing donated or thrown away. Some of this is sold in local charity shops, but this is estimated at only around 10% of the total, and a thriving industry has grown up to sort donations and determine whether they will go for local sale, export, industrial rags or landfill.
Clothing wholesalers and sorters have sprung up across Eastern Europe, and western recyclers have also been moti- vated to move some sorting operations to the region to take advantage of the lower costs and knowledge of the local markets. This has resulted in a multi- million dollar trade within the region, with the largest intra-regional flows being from Poland to Ukraine ($49mn
“As malls and fast fashion stores started to proliferate, people decided they wanted to be more individualised”
with; for example, much of the cloth- ing imported by the Baltic states was donated in Scandinavia. However, there is also a massive intra-regional trade.
Imports of used clothing within Central and Eastern Europe over $1mn in 2017. Data source: Comtrade
Many of the clothes MyDressing sells were originally worn in the Nordic coun- tries, but Stoican buys them from the wholesalers that have sprung up across Central and Eastern Europe. “Second- hand clothes are collected from differ- ent countries and arrive in a factory [in Eastern Europe] where they are split into categories according to quality. Those factories must be good: in Romania they are terrible,” she claims. “We tried with
in 2017 according to Comtrade’s figures on Ukrainian imports), Lithuania to Belarus and Latvia to Ukraine.
Writer and historian Lucy Norris describes how when clothes are sorted for export, the “best creamy layer” of clothing that is either unworn or “really good styles” is skimmed off for the East European market. Then there is the next layer of regions like West Africa which “also have very discerning buyers”, and finally the lower tier of “people who have less ability to choose and have to buy poorer quality clothing”.
Similarly, a 2014 report from the Nordic Council of Ministers likens the reuse and recycling of textiles as “a cascade in quality and value that spreads from rich