You cleaned out a closet and filled three bags.
You drove to the donation bin, felt slightly virtuous, and drove home.
And in your head, a picture formed. Someone who needs a coat finds your coat. A kid gets the jeans. The system works.
Here is what actually happened.
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Most of what was in those bags never reached a thrift store shelf in your town. A minority of donated clothing gets sold locally. The rest enters a global commodity trade you have never heard of.
It gets sorted by machine and by hand, graded, compressed into bales weighing hundreds of pounds, sold by the pound, loaded into shipping containers and sent to markets thousands of miles away.
Some of it becomes insulation. Some becomes industrial rags. Some becomes carpet padding.
And a meaningful share ends up somewhere it cannot be used at all.
None of this means you should stop donating. Donating is still better than a landfill.
But the bag you dropped off is not a gift. It is an input to an industry, and the industry has an economics problem that is getting worse every year.