Episode 502: The Afterlife Of A T-Shirt
Bales of imported clothing are wheeled into the Gikombo Market in Nairobi, Kenya. Sarah Elliott for NPR hide caption
Part of the Planet Money T-shirt Project
Charities like Goodwill sell or give away some of the used clothes they get. But a lot of the clothes get sold, packed in bales and sent across the ocean in a container ship. The U.S. exports over a billion pounds of used clothing every year — and much of that winds up in used clothing markets in sub-Saharan Africa.
On today's show, we visit a giant used-clothing market in Nairobi, Kenya to see what happens to American clothes (including, presumably, some Planet Money T-shirts) after Americans are done with them.
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