Unpacking

via GIPHY

Getting the bale

Most Americans know Goodwill as a mediocre, ubiquitous thrift store regularly frequented for cheap and affordable wardrobe re-ups or spontaneously for random, clever, or ironically dated apparel. Some bargain hunters and die-hards might even know about “the bins,” the infamous antechamber of Goodwill’s surplus stock, where you can dig through a series of large blue plastic bins hoping to find a strange new floral blouse, while hoping not to find something worse, something gross.

Indeed, “the bins” was about as deep as my knowledge of Goodwill and other textile recyclers went before I began this thesis project on textile waste and material accumulation. First as an artist, then as an anthropologist and archeologist, and now as both, I’ve always had a keen interest in textiles: the aesthetics, creative and natural processes, social and political histories, and global impacts of one of the most recognized materials on our planet. It’s perhaps dangerously blunt and simple, but textiles and humans go way back. Elizabeth Wayland Barber (1994) describes what it must have meant for people in Upper Paleolithic (about 25 to 35 thousand years ago) to employ the use of string:

"We don't know how early to date this great discovery--of making string as long and strong as needed by twisting short filaments together. But whenever it happened, it opened the door to an enormous ways to save labor and improve the odds of survival... Soft, flexible thread of this sort is a necessary prerequisite to making woven cloth. On a far more basic level, string can be used simply to tie things up--to catch, to hold, to cary. From these notions come snares and fishlines, tethers and leashes, carrying nets, handles, and packages, not to mention a new way of binding objects..." (Barber 1994, 45)

Whether I have had the words for it, I have always been fascinated by this entanglement. Textiles are such a cross-section of technological innovation (from Paleolithic humans to the contemporary world--think military innovations) and aesthetics. I regularly find myself gravitating toward the stashed-away textile exhibits in major museums, wandering into weaving and yarn stores in new cities, haunting thrift shops and swapping clothes with friends. So, when given the opportunity to explore critically and creatively my own textile interests, it made perfect sense to look, as they say, right outside my own front door, at what I think of as a hub of contemporary American textile use: the thrift store, Goodwill.

The ebay listing

The clothes and textiles that don't get sold at the Goodwill's thrift shops end up as an accumulated mass of compressed clothing packed with cardboard on two sides, tightly wound with wire, and measuring about four feet wide, three feet high and five feet deep. They call this impressive cube a bale. It weighs approximately half a ton and is merely one of many blocks that are regularly stacked in towering rows throughout the back section of a Goodwill Outlet’s warehouse.

I had to order my bale on eBay. The Goodwill of San Francisco, San Mateo, and Marin Counties, has an eBay page where they mostly list high-quality items, such as designer brands, wristwatches and sneakers. They also sell goods like bags full of assorted jewelry, boxes of assorted accessories, and, indeed, bales of what they call “mixed lot outdates.” The “mixed lot outdates” are the clothing that either hasn’t sold on the floor or was in poor condition to begin with, and that is then randomly clumped and compressed into compact half-ton cubes. There is no free delivery for this half-ton bale and you have to schedule a time to pick it up with the warehouse manager.

The Goodwill Outlet is in Burlingame, California, just south of San Francisco, in a nondescript warehouse, next to the 101 Freeway, tucked behind a bright orange storage facility. When I arrived, the sky had just cleared from an otherwise rainy morning and the way the steam was rising from the pavement made me feel like I was entering a kind of dystopian flea market. This gave way to a scene of five-foot tall boxes full of random household junk on wood pallets scattered around the parking area. A couple was manically searching for electronics while 90s R&B blasted from a car stereo. Everyone else seemed to either be on a forklift or driving a truck. Other than the forklift drivers buzzing around, it was difficult to tell who was an employee and who was looking for their next household steal—their actions were essentially the same: sorting, picking, moving things around in some form or another.

There was no front desk or clear entry point to the building, so I entered the first door I came to and walked down a short linoleum corridor that opened up onto an enormous room with more forklift drivers than I’ve ever seen or conceived of in one place. The drivers were busy loading and unloading docked semi-trucks from rows packed with boxes of junk towering at what seemed like fifty feet high. There was a din of motors running, and lifting and clanking sounds of boxes being shuffled around. Was this stuff coming or going? It was hard to tell. In some elaborate charade, maybe it was all actually here to stay.

Stacks of bales

Walking down the side of the warehouse, I came to a wide roll-up garage opening that reveals the infamous “bins,” that series of blue plastic bins on casters where mounds of clothes are waiting to be sorted through and bought by the pound. This is where dedicated thrift connoisseurs and vintage fashion up-sellers from San Francisco come, ready with gloves, handcarts, and garbage bags to haul away their cache. Behind the bins are walls of stacked compressed blocks of clothing that make my half-ton bale look minuscule in comparison.

After flagging down one of the many forklift drivers, I was directed to someone who coordinated getting my bale and loading it on to the rented U-Haul truck. I could feel the difference of the newly added weight in my truck as I drove away. The bale, in its compacted form, looks like such a complete unit. It’s hard to image there are hundreds, maybe thousands of discrete objects contained within it, until you notice the familiar form of a black bra dangling out the back or, as I noticed out my side mirror on the Bay Bridge back to Oakland, the leg of a Spiderman pajama pant flapping in the wind behind me.

What is familiar? Clothing, wearing clothing, throwing out used or unwanted clothes, buying more clothing, rinse, repeat. What is not familiar is seeing where and how this clothing accumulates or is compacted together. My bale ended up weighing 1,030 lbs. The council for Textile Recycling (2009) estimates, “the average U.S. citizen throws away 70 lbs of clothes annually,” making my bale about 14 people’s worth of annual textile waste. Or, alternately, my own potential waste over 14 years.

Although I’ve done research and read the related literature, actually physically navigating the Goodwill outlet, transporting my bale home and unloading it became a profound exercise in comprehending scale. One can be passionate about something without becoming entangled in it, but I wanted the latter as well. There is a haunting way that large amounts of things can make you feel incredibly small—or, conversely, in this case almost cartoonishly large, as the material impact of humans becomes suddenly very tangible and overwhelming. The experience of simply facing the bale by myself to begin the unpacking, sorting, and cataloging process was physically overpowering. And, as I unpacked what was at one point an intimidatingly indiscernible cube, pulling on shirtsleeves and pant legs and bra straps and whatever other threads materialized from the crushed mass, its volume spilled over my driveway and nearly tripled. Nevertheless, my single bale, this half-ton textile morass, was actually the tiniest fraction of what was at the Goodwill Outlet that day, an even smaller fraction of what moves through the Goodwill during the week, or through the hundreds of Goodwill Outlets and other post-consumer clothing and textile collecting entities across the country and the world.