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
Bales of imported clothing are wheeled into the Gikombo Market in Nairobi, Kenya.
Sarah Elliott for NPRThe 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.
View our T-shirt's journey at planetmoney.com/shirt.
And listen to more our T-shirt podcasts here.
Note: Today's show is a rerun. It originally ran in December 2013. To learn about how we tracked down the original owner of the bat mitzvah T-shirt we found, here is the follow-up radio story from December 2013.