Recycled Clothes
My life has fallen into a few stages.
As a child, I lived in Box Hill when it was village. I then became pastor to the slums of inner Melbourne for eight years. I was then a country parson and a teacher at a one teacher bush school out at Jackson Creek in Western Victoria and then for 13 years, I was a suburban minister in one of Australia’s largest suburban ministries.
And then, for more than 27 years I’ve been Superintendent in Sydney of Wesley Mission, Australia’s largest church ministry.
I’ve told you stories of people in each of these places.
Tonight I want you to come with me into the heart of the city.
I had always seen the advantage of recycling clothing. During my days as a suburban minister in Cheltenham, Victoria, that large church where I was senior minister developed a real sense of compassion for needy and underprivileged families. So strong was my constant encouraging of people to give second hand clothing to the church so we could distribute it among needy families that before long we even bought a house into which we placed all of the clothing, separated and made available on racks in each main room of the house, so that underprivileged people could come in and choose clothing according to their needs. In the front room, for example, we had racks of women’s clothing, in the second bedroom, racks of men’s clothing, in the third bedroom, teenage girls clothing, in another room, teenage boys and so on down to children’s clothes. We gathered and distributed thousands of garments every month to help underprivileged and needy people.
When I came to Wesley Mission I was pleased to see that we had a warehouse and five shops where second-hand clothing was sold at low cost to help needy people. The problem was that the shops entailed a lot of energy in collecting the clothing, and the prices were so low that even selling clothing cost us substantial amounts of money.
I realised that we needed to develop a new approach to recycling second hand clothing. We had the right staff person to head it up; Mr Cliff King had been with us for quite a number of years and was an extraordinarily dedicated man. All he needed was the right program. Our general manager at the time, Stan Manning, had the idea that if we became much larger, we would reach an economy of scale and not only help more people, but should be able to make a surplus out of the sale of second hand clothing.
I have been involved in recycling clothing now for 25 years, and we still haven’t made a profit!
Our first move was just after I was appointed, and in 1979 we started expanding the work dramatically. We negotiated for the purchase of a large warehouse where Cliff and his wife Ena and a group of staff—mainly young ladies from our Tongan congregation—could provide the leadership on our clothing recycling. We moved into the big new premises at 33 Railway Crescent, Burwood. Within the first month at Burwood, production doubled. In our old premises at Parramatta Road, Concord, about 18 tonnes of clothing were packed for export each month. Now more than 35 tonnes were produced monthly and our plant was only working at 60 per cent capacity.
We were exporting clothing at no cost, or at little cost, to wherever there was need overseas—very largely to Fiji and Tonga, where devastating cyclones had wrecked house and home. While the people had lost all of their clothing, we sent in bales and bales stuffed full of second hand clothes, some of which the Fijian Christians wore and the rest they sold to raise money to buy roofing iron and timber to help them in the building of their new homes.
In the new factory, we developed a mechanised turntable, a conveyor belt, and high chutes where our sorters separated all the garments according to the sex of the wearer and the type of material in the clothing, which then fell down the chute into bales where someone else did the packing. The very best of the clothing was kept for resale in our second hand shops. I had the idea that we might make a surplus to aid our other charitable work such as Lifeline, if we could become more efficient in the sale of clothing.
Cliff had worked as the business manager of our warehouse and Opportunity Shop in Croydon for many years. It was a typical, dusty, junky place the first time I visited it. I knew there was no future for us in this centre. There were second hand books piled everywhere, magazines, records, no longer wanted cupboards, wardrobes and beds. Smelly mattresses piled up to the ceiling. Cliff was an ideas man for working in the junk shop. He had been a very active Methodist person up in Maitland, and whenever he came down to the Mission, he always marvelled at the work that we did because he could see that through second hand furniture and clothing, we could help many people in need. He used to drive an old truck around to pick up peoples excess furniture, or furniture that was being thrown out. Of a night-time, he used to go out with the Lifeline Trouble Team to handle personal emergencies such as fights between marriage partners or suicide attempts out at the Gap. We didn’t receive much clothing in those early days when he started to work for us. Two days a week was enough for him to pick up the clothes from generous donors, and the rest of the time he helped some of our centres with maintenance work.
One of our plans to expand our work was to introduce large steel clothing bins, putting them into shopping complexes and public car parks. That experiment increased our input immensely overnight. We immediately had to purchase four trucks and two vans, and soon the trucks were working two shifts a day, emptying out the 450 bins.
I always remember the night I received a call from a very anxious lady. Her young son, at 2am in the morning, was trapped inside a bin. We had been suffering thefts of clothing from the bins for some months. Someone small was managing to get inside the bins through the narrow chute at the top and undo the lock on the door from the inside, and the clothing was being systematically stolen. Some time after 2am in the morning, my phone rang, and a very anxious woman told me her little boy was locked in one of our bins. I realised that the woman talking to me was one of the thieves. I asked her how old her boy was, and she told me he was 4 years of age. I commented, “I wonder what a 4 year old boy is doing up at 2 am in the morning? He must be a very smart little chap, because the chute for the bins is 6 foot above the ground. He must be very tall for his age to be able to get in to a bin like that through the top clothing chute when there is no place where he can place his foot in order to get up.” The woman was becoming more and more desperate on the other end of the phone. “Please, please come and get my child out of your bin. He might die there. He is crying.” What she hadn’t realised is that we had been gradually replacing the locks on the bins so that they were deadlocked and could be only opened by a key. They could not be opened from the inside. She had dropped her 4-year-old son in through the chute, down onto the clothing that was on the bottom of the bin with the instruction that he would be open the lock from the inside. Then she and her partner would take out all the clothes, stealing from Sydney’s underprivileged and poor, and slam the door after them. Now our change of locks had her 4 year old locked inside.
I played along for a little while, getting the exact address of where she was and what her name was. She was becoming increasingly desperate, but I was increasingly angry that such a woman should steal from the most underprivileged people in society whom our charity was helping. Just to annoy her, I said, “ Don’t worry madam. We will get you little boy out. Our man with the truck will be around to unlock the door next Thursday afternoon.” Of course, we went around shortly afterwards to release the little fellow and return him to his mother. But I made quite sure that she learnt from now on there no point in putting her little boy in the clothing bin.
I also learnt about that time that people put other things in charity clothing bins. Like the lady who was seen posting her dead dog. Or like the lady who rang me again late at night to tell me that she had places two parcels of good quality clothing in our bins and as she was putting them in the bin chute, to make sure then went down, she extended her arms to her full length and her diamond rings dropped off her finger. She was anxious that I should come and open the locked bin in order to recover her diamond rings.
We also picked up furniture, and often found there would be a family attached to the furniture. They had been evicted, and one of Cliff’s jobs was to buy them bread, milk and food and find that family overnight accommodation.
One day a man walked into our clothing-recycling factory, dishevelled and spattered with blood from head to feet. He was carrying a heavy sugar bag. Cliff offered to wash him and help him, but the man had brushed off his offer with words, “I just set a detonator off. I didn’t throw it far enough and it got me. I have got gelignite in this bag and if you don’t give me all the money you have got, I am going to touch these two wires and blow this place sky high.” Cliff talked the man into having a cup of tea and suggested he should ring for a doctor. By using some cleverly coded words, the doctor understood what was happening and not only came, but called the police as well and the man was arrested.
The more second hand clothing we collected, the more it cost Wesley Mission to handle it. We had to buy new trucks, lease new shops and develop better systems of collection. This involved paying more staff. The only answer seemed to be to get bigger.
One year later in October 1980, the Prime Minister of Australia, Mr Malcolm Fraser, officially opened a much larger new warehouse at Burwood. We now had 5,000 square and a staff of 57. It was the largest warehouse for recycling clothing in the southern hemisphere. We were collecting more and more from our 459 bins on the street, and by now we had 12 shops. We sold the best of clothing in the shops, found hundreds of people were coming to us for free clothing because they were very poor and underprivileged, and we had been asked by the Commonwealth Government to be the official suppliers of clothing wherever there was a flood or a bushfire in Australia, and had bales of clothes on standby for every Pacific Island community that was devastated each year with cyclones.
We also found an interesting outlet for some of our very ragged articles. Woollen goods, for example, were shipped to Bangladesh where poor people earned income unpicking the woollen jumpers and arranging it to be wound into skeins. These skeins were sent to England, where the wool was recycled into expensive men’s suits and women’s high fashion gear, which in turn was exported back to Australia for sale in some of our better-know stores. We made money on selling the garment, the people of Bangladesh made money unpicking the wool, the knitting mills of England and Italy made money on designer clothes, and the stores back in Australia made money selling the goods to people who could afford them. Who would ever have thought that recycled second hand woollen garments would come back to Australia as first rate men’s suits and women’s garments?
But the old problem was still here, namely, it was costing us money, sometimes, $100,000 a year, to provide garments to poor people that had been given to us free by people through our bins. The only answer was to grow larger. Some years later, we opened another new warehouse at Milperra, which still operates to this day, and we have about 15 shops now dedicated to selling the best of clothing for people who want to have the retro look. We developed a bridal shop where clean wedding dresses and bridesmaids frocks could be purchased at low cost. Our men’s evening suits became in high demand at the end of the year as young people prepared for their school formals. All of our shops are spotless, and the garments are pressed, steam cleaned and looking near to new.
Over the year it’s always been a particular desire that families with limited income could walk into one of our shops, and buy enough clothing to outfit their children for the next school year and not spend any more than $20 or $ 30. That still continues to this day. Recently, 4,500 kg’s of clothing were sent to Fiji to assist the victims of a cyclone. The Prime Minister of Fiji and the Consul General of Fiji indicated how significant were these donations of clothing.
The Rotary Club of Sydney have made a point of collecting jeans and t-shirts for young street kids, and all of this free clothing that comes to us is distributed free in turn. The result—a lot of poor people get good quality clothing, a lot of underprivileged and homeless people get free clothing, a lot of people suffering from the NSW floods and bushfires have been freshly fitted out. And as for money? We are still not making any profit out of recycled clothes!
I know that other organizations get clothing from people through their bins, and there are a number of private operators who collect and sell clothing at markets and make a good living out of it. But not Wesley Mission.
When it comes to making a profit from second hand clothing, we are not very good because the profit isn’t our first aim. Our first aim is to help people with real need get back into decent clothing. The people of Sydney have for the last 25 years supported me in this aim of getting recycled clothing to most needy people in the community and to those in emergency following bushfire flood, free, or else at such a low cost, we don’t make any profit from it.
The city of Sydney would grow to be one of the world’s great cities and Wesley Mission would grow to be one of the world’s great churches and I was privileged to spend each day in the heart of both.
