Most clothing in this top category goes to domestic op shops and second-hand stores, while most of category B is sent to lower-income countries in Europe, such as Poland or Romania.

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Items of the lowest quality are mainly exported to countries in the global south, including the Pacific.

Global supply chains are highly complex and often opaque. Given almost 90 per cent of Solomon Islands’ clothing comes from Australia, Ferrero-Regis says it made an ideal case study.

Each used-clothing shop in the country’s capital, where new clothing is rare, receives about 50 bales of clothing, as often as weekly, each weighing between 50 and 500 kilograms, according to the documentary.

Dorothy Togara, a retail assistant at one used-clothing store, says that when she started working there in 1996, bales imported from Australia were of high quality.

“Sometimes we put it in the budget bales … but if this is too much, not very good, we just throw it [into landfill],” she says.

Haydee Villaranda, a second-hand clothing distributor, estimates 50 per cent of what she sorts through is unsellable and goes straight to landfill. “When we touch the clothes, it breaks. It’s not very good,” she says.

Much of the imported clothing is also inappropriate for the country’s tropical climate and cultural norms and needs to be upcycled or thrown into landfill.

Waste systems

Honiara’s growing population and increasing issues with textile waste are putting a strain on its fragile waste infrastructure.

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The city’s council estimates 4 per cent of its waste comes from textiles, which is sent to a four-hectare landfill site.

Hart says: “At the moment, it’s all intermingled into the one dump, and a lot of it is just getting thrown out by people into streams and the ocean, and therefore it’s ending up on the reef and becoming an ecological issue because most of the clothing is made of plastic.”

A proposal is under way to build a sanitary landfill site with systems in place to sort and better dispose of rubbish.

Ferrero-Regis says that with no affordable, national textile recycling scheme, the fate of clothing in Australia is not too different.

The Australian government’s clothing stewardship scheme Seamless is working to address this gap.

Waste colonialism

Australia is not unique in its dumping of waste on developing and lower-income neighbours.

Globally, 92 billion tonnes of textile waste is produced each year, much of which is exported by wealthy countries in the global north to countries such as Chile, Vietnam and Ghana.

Sometimes referred to as waste or toxic colonialism for the way some of the world’s biggest producers offload rubbish onto poorer countries incapable of processing it, the primarily synthetic waste can pollute waterways, damage ecosystems and occupy large areas of land.

One 2023 report found up to half of used clothing received by countries in the global south was unsellable.

“Why should other people wear what we don’t want to wear?” says Ferrero-Regis. “What kind of image do we have in our head about the people to whom this clothing goes?”

A complex issue

For retail assistant Freda Fremae, the burgeoning trade has been a way to support her family.

“I pay for school fees. Sometimes I pay for clothes for the family or food,” she says.

It’s also a source of community. “In this shop, you stay and help customers, meet a lot of friends. [It’s] awesome,” says Fremae.

Hart says the country’s second-hand clothing industry is a source of financial empowerment and independence for some women – a pattern seen in Indigenous communities across the Pacific.

“It’s not like I feel like we should be stopping the trade any time soon, but certainly I think Australia could do more in terms of selecting clothing that is of better quality,” says Hart.

Where to from here?

Good Neighbours’ makers hope the documentary will help push for better guidelines and standards on how waste is sorted and exported in Australia.

“We’ve made some connections with policymakers here in Australia,” says Mellick. “But the issue with sorting and the volume, there’s also a huge education piece. So understanding what particular garments are made out of is often very hard because a lot of care labels have been cut out of garments.”

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Ferrero-Regis says that while consumer education on sustainable shopping is important, responsibility should fall on manufacturers that overproduce.

She points to France’s fast fashion tax and the European Union’s circular fashion strategy, which includes a proposal to halve textile waste exported to non-OECD countries.

“However, in places like Honiara, where a local industry is minimal, second-hand clothing is a source of income for women. We should be more responsible about what we send,” she says.

Good Neighbours is not yet available for public viewing. You can find more information or stay up to date here.

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