Sharjah company is giving old clothes a new lease of life

Average 200 tonnes of recycled clothing a month sold in UAE.

Workers process waste fabric at Hands Industries fabric recycling plant in Sharjah. Sarah Dea / The National

SHARJAH // Fashions change with the seasons, as people’s wardrobes are regularly cleared of old clothes and restocked with new ones.

But now it is possible to give those old garments a new lease of life after they have fallen out of favour in the style stakes.

Within Sharjah Airport International Free Zone, the company with the largest loading-bay area is a clothes dealer and recycler, Hands Industries.

The 70-metre-long facility, where large lorries come and go all day long, is a testament to the fact that unwanted clothing does have uses, benefiting people in need or those in less affluent countries, providing job opportunities and, importantly, reducing landfill waste.

“Something of no value for you is of much value for the rest of the world,” said Nawaz Khan, sales manager of the company, who estimates that every day about 50 tonnes of unwanted clothes, shoes and toys are collected in the UAE.

The trend, he said, had picked up in the past two years with authorities allowing clothes collection boxes to be set up in communities. Mr Khan estimates that there are about 7,000 of these throughout the country.

According to company director, Mohamed Suleman, whose father started the business two decades ago in the UK, the collection points are set up on behalf of different charities, who own the deposited clothes. Items that are not deemed useful are sold on to companies such as Hands Industries.

“The collection is done in the name of the charity and then we buy it from the charity,” said Mr Suleman, adding that old clothes were usually bought for about Dh5 per kilogram.

The plant’s 20,000-square-metre sorting facility handles 100 tonnes of garments a day, out of which five to six tonnes are from the UAE, mostly from charities in Dubai and Sharjah. The rest arrives from Britain, Europe, the US and Australia.

Once the clothes reach the sorting facility, workers at several conveyor belts separate them into their different types – shirts, trousers, ladies’ and men’s items, children’s clothes. Altogether more than 150 grades are picked out, Mr Khan said.

The clothes are then baled and sold on to wholesalers, who transport them to Africa and Asia.

Udochukwu Ogbonnaya, from Nigeria, has been in the wholesale business since 1993. He imports up to five containers a month for shops in his home country, as well as Togo, Benin and Ghana. He was in Sharjah to oversee a shipment of men’s, women’s and children’s clothing, as well as lightweight household items.

Clothes that are not wearable, as well as heavy woollen items that are not in demand in Africa and Asia, are cut into pieces and used for cleaning cloths. This takes place in an adjacent area in the free zone where workers manually segregate the fabric into 13 grades, such as white cotton, T-shirts, towels, jeans and others.

The clothes are first checked with magnets to ensure there are no metal objects attached. If these are found, they are cut out and sold separately to recyclers in India. The remaining fabric is cut manually.

“It has been used in industry, hospitals, the aviation industry, oil industry, even a lot of big malls use it for outside cleaning,” Mr Khan said.

On average, the company sells 200 tonnes of recycled clothes a month to companies in this country. Another 50 tonnes is sold around the region, while a further 250 tonnes a month is exported to Australia, the UK and Japan.

“You are throwing out your old clothes, you have no use for them, but look at the process after that,” Mr Khan said. “It goes to the charity, they make use of it, it goes to the freight companies, customs and then it comes to us.

“There is a life after that and so many people depend on this used clothing.”