Inside America’s Fast Fashion Graveyard

LAREDO, Texas –– Every day, thousands of trucks and railcars shuttle back and forth into and out of the Port of Laredo. Mostly, they’re bringing goods in from Mexico or overseas, from chemicals to packaged foods to auto parts, destined for factories, grocery stores and warehouses across the US. But there’s one product that’s more often than not headed in the other direction: vintage clothing.

Laredo is home to approximately 46 ropa usada – Spanish for “used clothing”– warehouses. Each is approximately 10,000 square feet in size, housing piles of vintage and secondhand apparel that can reach up to 10 feet high. This is the final destination for much of America’s discarded Shein hauls, closet cleanouts and charity donations. Sometimes, the clothing is sorted and sold to buyers from Mexico. Often though, their next stop is the dump.

That’s what Heather Garcia discovered soon after moving to Laredo in 2022. She and her husband purchased a house approximately a mile away from the local landfill, and Garcia began to notice transport trucks carrying mounds of clothing every time she pulled out onto nearby Highway 359.

Curious, she decided to follow one all the way to the dump, and inquired about its contents to the driver. He told her the truck was carrying approximately 7 tons of clothing from one ropa usada warehouse to the landfill. Horrified, Garcia began to think of how to divert some of these garments from the garbage. She founded Laredo Thrifting Tours in 2023.

For between $15 and $30 a day, Garcia shuttles visitors from warehouse to warehouse to sift through the piles, or pisos, for discarded treasures, which can be purchased for $0.25 to $1 a pound. It’s akin to turbo-thrifting, featuring a similar risk-reward ratio of visiting a local secondhand fashion store, albeit at a much larger scale.

Thrifting a ropa usada is not for the faint of heart. Each pile contains a staggering assortment of textiles, ranging from bathmats to individual socks to bras. Also embedded in the tightly-packed piles are more surprising and alarming debris: wigs, balls of packing tape, metal hangers and shards of broken glass.

Still, Garcia said she always comes away from a visit with something valuable, or at least interesting: she’s found an Elsa Schiaparelli rabbit fur coat from the 1930s and Gunne Sax prairie dresses from the 1970s. Sometimes she resells what she finds on Etsy, but much of it she keeps as inventory for the brick-and-mortar vintage store she someday dreams of owning.

“I’m running out of room in my house and I can’t take everything home, so I thought if we bring people down it would help give the warehouses business and bring more money to the local economy,” she said.

Garcia’s tours are a tiny portion of the ropa usadas’ business, and the warehouses are themselves only a small portion of the complex and tangled web that makes up the global secondhand clothing trade, according to Dr. Anika Kozlowski, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin who studies the used clothing supply chain.

Though there’s virtually no way to accurately assess how much is thrown out, a 2018 statistic from the US Environmental Protection Agency suggests that 11.3 million tons of textile waste end up in US landfills every year. Used clothing broker Bank & Vogue claims it moves close to 90 million pounds of goods in a single year.

After someone donates an item to a thrift store, if it isn’t sold after a few months, it is packed up and sold to a commercial used-clothing broker. Most clothing dropped off in charity bins in parking lots doesn’t end up at a thrift store at all, instead going straight to the brokers. Most brokers run “rag houses” that have an existing relationships with vintage dealers and allow them first pick of the goods, before they’re condensed into bales weighing between 700 and 1000 pounds, and resold onwards to the Laredo warehouses or foreign markets like Chile or Ghana.

Adriana Alvarez De Mendoza, the owner of Adri’s Ropa Usada, said most of the clothing she processes arrives from thrift stores in Dallas or Atlanta. Her customers are primarily Mexican buyers who cross the border to sort through the bales, picking out new and brand-name clothing to sell at local markets or to family and friends. Importing used clothing into Mexico is technically illegal, but the small quantity of clothing each buyer carries back rarely attracts the notice of border agents.

All discards are thrown onto an ever-growing piso, which anyone can go through. Eventually, once the pile reaches a critical size, De Mendoza will call up a truck and pay between $200 to $400 to take the remnants to the landfill. The Laredo discards are sent to the landfill instead of being baled up and resold, because there’s a good chance the clothing would end up in the same supply chain and the warehouses could end up unintentionally buying the same garments over and over again.

On a recent visit with Garcia, sorting through the piles was simultaneously an exhausting, frustrating and exhilarating experience. “When we’re digging, we probably only reach the first layer,” she said. Mixed in with the Eeyore costumes, MAGA hats and stained mall brand clothing are 1930s vintage quilts, 1960s beaded sweaters, and 100 percent wool fair isle sweaters — items that would go for hundreds of dollars at a vintage store in any major city. Most items are wearable aside from some small imperfections: stains or rips that could be easily fixed. Other items, like a Bart Simpson sleeping bag from 1994 or a stained embroidered linen handkerchief might not be worth much on their own but constitute as suitable raw material for upcyclers.

Every so often, Garcia is overcome with emotion and has to take a break from sorting to compose herself.

“I just want to save it all,” she said. “There’s not a day I come here that I don’t feel overwhelmed. Why is this stuff regarded as trash? Why can’t I help more?”

Since she began offering them two years ago, Garcia has only led six tours, mostly to fellow vintage resellers. Admittedly, sorting through gargantuan heaps of garbage might not be everyone’s idea of a dream vacation. And even for the few who are compelled by such a scenario, the reality of the warehouses can be bracing. Many of the items are heartbreaking: embroidered baby blankets, handmade clothing with tags reading “Made for Andrea by Mama.”

But extreme thrifting, as it’s known, is becoming an increasingly popular hobby, with users like @stuart.bkk documenting his haul from the Dong Tac Market Vietnam and a viral Tiktok from @nicolemarriana captioned, “if you need a new hobby in LA you should buy 1000lbs of clothes for $50 and go through it with your friends.”

Still, it’s unlikely to substantially reduce the sheer volume of waste produced every year. Kozlowski said that in order for something like a thrifting tour to make a sizable difference in the amount of discarded clothing sent to the landfill, the entire secondhand supply chain would have to rearrange the way it operates. “The fact is, there’s just too much being made at too fast a pace and not enough of an appetite for [the secondhand clothing] out there because so much of it is stained and needs repairs,” she said. “There’s no simple or easy answers. If there was, we’d be hearing them.”

The only true solution for the clothing waste problem is up to fashion companies to simply not produce as much, she added. France’s fast fashion bill that tacks an environmental surcharge onto all fast fashion purchases and banning fast fashion advertisements — though not from European companies — is a start, but still only addresses a fraction of the issue.

Garcia said she hopes to one day open up her own nonprofit warehouse in Laredo, where she can accept castoffs from other warehouses to prevent the clothing from going to the landfill. She’d have piles open to the public, a curated vintage store attached and community space where she can host events like sewing classes, repair cafes and community swap meets.

In the meantime, she’ll have to settle for storing everything in her overloaded garage, which is beginning to resemble a piso itself.

“I can’t really keep going, I’m running out of room” she said. “I see potential in pretty much everything.”