How clothing sorting and grading works

Clothing collected from textile banks, charity shops and kerbside schemes arrives as credential: unsorted, as collected, usually bagged. Some suppliers sell it like that; others pick out the best pieces first and sell the rest as originals. Either way, a sorting house has to open every bag and every bale before the clothing is worth its full value.

Large sorting houses, including the export processing units in Karachi, work to well over a hundred categories. Smaller ones work to fewer, broader grades. The steps are the same.

Workers separate the stream into clothing, footwear, bags and accessories, household textiles (bedding, towels, curtains) and anything that is not a textile at all. Non-textile contamination is removed here, because it costs money at every later step.

Each garment is judged on condition, style and brand and put into a grade. The common three-grade scale is:

• Grade A (cream / premium): clean, wearable, close to new; resale-ready.
• Grade B (standard commercial): wearable with light, visible wear; the volume grade for wholesale markets.
• Grade C (utility / low grade): worn or damaged but usable, or suitable for wipers.

Grade words are not standardised across the trade. One seller's Grade A is another's B, which is why a written definition in the contract matters more than the label on the bale. See what grade A, B and C mean.

Graded stock is split again by garment type, gender and age band, by season (summer, winter or mixed) and by fabric. This is what lets a buyer order Grade A men's winter jackets or Grade B children's summer mix rather than a generic mixed bale. Browse the categories on our bale shelves.

Items that cannot be worn again are kept out of wearable bales. Cotton-rich textiles are cut into wiping rags for industry; the rest goes to fibre recycling for insulation, felt and fillings. Shoes that cannot be paired or repaired are processed separately.

Each category is pressed in a baler into bales of a set weight, commonly 45 kg, 55 kg or 100 kg, strapped and labelled with grade, weight and a bale number. On a Ragtrail trade the label, the packing list and the loading photos have to agree, so the sort report on arrival can be checked against what was loaded. Watch it happen in the 3D warehouse tour.