Angelus News | July 16, 2021 | Vol. 6 No. 14

Heather King is an award-winning
author, speaker, and workshop leader.
Gentle Transitions, makes a living
clearing out the living spaces of people
who have permanently moved on. “I
went through pics of safaris, animals,
his whole life,” she observes of one recently
deceased gent. “I told his family
they should take them. They said no.
1-800-JUNK came, and it broke my
heart.”
Many people drive up from Nogales,
Mexico, to the Tucson, Arizona, Goodwill
stores daily to comb the wares
and bring them back over the border.
Though technically the practice is
illegal, U.S.-to-Mexico second hand is
a booming industry.
There are people in the U.S. who
spend their workdays running old
T-shirts and hoodies over the whirring
blades of a machine specifically
designed to make rags — rags being
another (who knew?) huge business.
Minter travels all over the world: the
U.S., Malaysia (his current home),
Benin, Canada, Japan, talking to the
people who wholesale, ship, and sort.
AMAZON
In 2016, second hand was a $16
billion industry in Japan. (People there
often die alone and undiscovered for
days if not weeks or months in their
high-rise apartments, which gives rise
to another niche business).
“Before the 1960s, Japanese had
a feeling of ‘mottainai,’ a difficult-to-translate
Japanese word that
expresses a sense of regret over waste,
as well as a desire to conserve,” reports
Rina Hamada, editor of Japan’s Reuse
Business Journal. But that was before
the living standard in Japan shot
sky-high. Now people are way more
acquisitive, though they’ll buy second
hand if it’s of high quality.
Humongous warehouses around the
globe house used goods destined for
global shipments. Hamaya Corporation
operates out of a small city 35
miles outside of Tokyo. Refrigerators
and washing machines stacked three
high are bound for Vietnam; pallets of
knitting machines will go to Nigeria.
Electric keyboards, PCs, boomboxes,
chainsaws: the appetite for such goods
is insatiable.
In Ghana, Minter learns that in some
parts of the world used electronics and
appliances fetch a higher price than
new: the used items are often of better
quality (because they’re older) and
they’re more repairable.
In fact, the decline in quality of goods
across the board is one reason for the
enormous growth in the secondhand
trade.
(Apple, by the way, purposely renders
their products unrepairable, gluing
them in such a way that they can’t
be pried apart without destroying the
phone or tablet; using screws that
require a special, impossible-to-find
screwdriver.)
Clothing, for example, is now universally
acknowledged to be of such poor
quality that it’s essentially disposable.
At Used Clothing Exports in Mississauga,
Ontario, as much of one-third
of the used clothing generated in the
U.S. and Canada is sorted, priced, and
shipped by “graders.”
Panipat, a town in northern India, is
home to the world’s largest concentration
of clothing recyclers.
There’s something peculiarly Western about the notion
that your person, your belongings, and the space you
inhabit are a burden on the rest of the world.
The implications reach far beyond
what we might grab from our closets
any given morning. The secondhand
clothing industry has almost completely
wiped out the African textile
industry, in particular the manufacture
of kente cloth, the beautiful fabric that
was once the pride of Ghana and its
craftspeople.
But as Minter acknowledges, “Simplistic
explanations built on what seem
like logical correlations — used must
undermine new! — don’t do justice to
the complex, very human reasons that
individual consumers make specific
choices.”
German theologian Dietrich von Hildebrand
observed: “All possessions …
that have real value, that in themselves
are honorable, excellent, significant,
that fall like dew from above and
ascend to God like incense, achieve a
higher and new radiance in Christ.”
So I say hang onto the things you truly
love. After you’re canonized, people
will want the stuff for relics.
July 16, 2021 • ANGELUS • 31