Is Thrifting Actually Sustainable? Fast Fashion and Textile Waste in the Philippines, by the Numbers

“Shop smart, shop sustainably” is on the Google listing of Cebu’s biggest thrift shop. It’s the pitch of the whole scene. Buy second-hand, save the planet. We run a second-hand marketplace and we’d like that to be true. So we went looking for the numbers, and the picture in the Philippines is more complicated than the slogan.

This is a guide to what the data actually says about fast fashion, textile waste and second-hand clothing here, with sources, and to what a shopper in Cebu can do that makes a difference rather than just feeling like one.

The claim, and why it needs checking

The sustainability case for thrifting is simple. Making a new garment costs water, energy, chemicals and carbon. Wearing an existing garment instead costs nothing new. Every second-hand piece bought is, in theory, a new piece not made. That’s true as far as it goes. But the Philippines is not a country where thrifting means buying your neighbour’s old shirt. It’s a country where most of the second-hand clothing on sale arrived in a pressed bale from Japan, Korea, the US or Australia, and where the unsellable third of that bale ends up in a Philippine landfill. So the question is not “is second-hand better than new?” It’s “which second-hand, and what happens to the rest?”

The Philippine numbers

• 267,711 tons of textile waste a year. That’s the figure from the DOST Philippine Textile Research Institute (PTRI), cited by Enviliance ASIA, and it’s about 1.6 percent of the country’s municipal solid waste. Most of it, Enviliance notes, is “mixed with general solid waste” and goes to landfills or open dumpsites, because textiles have “a low recycling rate” and the country “does not yet have a dedicated national policy” for textile waste.
• ₱232 billion on clothes and shoes. Household spending on clothing and footwear “reached nearly P232 billion” in 2023, per the Daily Tribune’s report on a DOST-PTRI event.
• 29 percent discard after one wear. A 2017 survey cited by Enviliance found “about 29% of Filipino adults discard an article of clothing after a single use”.
• 16 tons from one brand. Bayo Manila, a mid-size local label, told the same PTRI event it generates “around 16 tons of textile waste annually”. Bayo is one brand.
• US$1 billion in used clothing a year. The Freeman’s 2025 piece on ukay imports puts the global flow of used clothing to developing countries at “over a US$1 billion worth” a year, with the Philippines among the destinations. In March 2025 the NBI seized 228 bales bound for Cebu from South Korea in a single operation.
• 2,544 tonnes of carbon saved. Carousell’s November 2024 report calculated that second-hand purchases on its platform in the Philippines that year saved “the equivalent of 2,544 tonnes of carbon emissions”, with women’s fashion the top category and the Philippines driving “over 30% of regional transactions” in it.

The global numbers

The Philippine figures sit inside a much bigger problem. The Global Fashion Agenda’s widely cited estimate is 92 million tonnes of textile waste produced globally every year. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation found that between 2000 and 2015 clothing production roughly doubled while the number of times a garment was worn fell by 36 percent. The UN Environment Programme puts fashion at “two to eight percent of global carbon emissions” and calls it the second-largest consumer of water. The Daily Tribune’s report on the PTRI event added that global textile production grew “from 58 million tons in 2000 to approximately 109 million tons in 2020” and is projected to keep rising towards 2030.

Those numbers are why thrifting became a movement. They’re also why the used clothing has to go somewhere, and where it goes is the part the movement talks about less.

The ukay paradox

Here is the uncomfortable part. Ukay-ukay is both a solution to fast fashion and a symptom of it. Every bale that lands at Leon Kilat is clothing that a richer country produced, wore briefly, and exported rather than dealt with. The Philippines banned commercial imports of used clothing in 1966 (Republic Act 4653) “to safeguard the health of the people and maintain the dignity of the nation”, and sixty years later the trade runs anyway, through a relief-goods loophole and inconsistent enforcement. Legal scholars have a name for the pattern: waste colonialism. The Freeman’s 2025 column against legalising imports put it bluntly: the Philippines should not aspire to be “the world’s trash bin or receptacle”.

And the bale itself is not clean. Guides for would-be ukay sellers put the unsellable share of a typical bale at 25 to 40 percent: stained, torn, dated, wrong for the climate. Those pieces don’t go back to Osaka. They go into the same Philippine landfills as the ₱232 billion of new clothes, minus the tax revenue. Our ukay explainer covers the law and the debate in full.

What second-hand actually changes

None of that cancels the real benefits. It just puts them in order.

• A worn garment displaces a new one. If you buy a thrifted Uniqlo shirt instead of a new one, the new one isn’t made. That’s the whole mechanism, and it’s real. Carousell’s 2,544 tonnes is a measurement of it.
• Local preloved has no ocean in it. A dress worn once to a wedding in Mandaue and sold to someone in Lahug travels eight kilometres, not eight thousand, and produced no reject pile. This is the category with the clearest benefit, and it’s the one Dara exists for.
• Longer wear is the biggest lever. The Ellen MacArthur number is the one to remember: garments worn 36 percent fewer times. Doubling the wears of what you already own does more than any purchase.
• Ukay keeps clothes in use that would otherwise be waste somewhere. A Japanese bale that becomes a Cebuano’s five-year work shirt is a better outcome than the same shirt in a Japanese incinerator. The trade has value. The reject share is the cost.

What it does not change

• Buying more. A ₱50 tee bought and worn twice is fast fashion at a discount. The Simpol.ph piece on ukay culture notes prices “up to ten times higher” for pieces resold online, and a thrift haul of twenty pieces you don’t need is still twenty pieces.
• The upstream problem. Thrifting in Cebu does nothing about 109 million tonnes of new textiles a year. Only buying less new does that.
• The reject pile. Every bale imported adds to Philippine landfill, whatever happens to the good pieces.

The price problem

There’s a social cost too, and Cebu is living it. As sorted thrift shops and online sellers pull the best pieces out of the bale and price them at ₱300 to ₱1,500, the stalls that clothed the city for ₱25 a piece get the leftovers. Simpol.ph’s 2025 essay on ukay gentrification quotes an anonymous buyer: “Mahirap na maghanap ng ukay na maganda ngayon kasi halos lahat hino-hoard na ng online sellers bago pa makarating sa amin.” (It’s hard to find good ukay now because online sellers hoard almost all of it before it reaches us.) Sugbo.ph’s July 2025 piece on Cebu’s changing ukay culture made the same point from the vendors’ side and ended with a line worth repeating: “Development without INCLUSION is just DISPLACEMENT in disguise.”

A Frontiers in Sustainability study published in March 2026, which interviewed 17 ukay entrepreneurs including two in Cebu, found affordability is still the “gateway” motivation for Filipino second-hand buyers, with environmental awareness one of seven drivers rather than the main one. Sustainability that prices out the people who thrifted from necessity is a partial kind of sustainability.

What the government is doing

• Republic Act 9003 (2001), the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act, is the general framework. It doesn’t single out textiles.
• Republic Act 11898 (2022), the Extended Producer Responsibility Act, makes large companies responsible for plastic packaging waste. Not textiles, yet.
• The Philippine Action Plan for Sustainable Consumption and Production was adopted in 2023.
• A textile sector roadmap was announced as being drafted in 2024, per Enviliance.
• Quezon City’s Textile Sustainability and Circularity Ordinance, approved in December 2025, set up a programme of “circularity hubs” for collecting, sorting and upcycling textile waste. It’s the first local textile-waste law in the country. Cebu doesn’t have one.
• Senate Bill 1778 (2023) would legalise and tax ukay imports. It hasn’t moved, and the sustainability argument cuts both ways on it.

DOST-PTRI, meanwhile, is working with brands like Bayo to turn fabric scraps back into yarn, which is the kind of thing that eventually makes the reject pile worth something.

What a shopper in Cebu can actually do

1. Wear it more. The 36 percent number. Every extra wear of a garment you own is the cheapest carbon saving there is.
2. Buy local preloved first. A neighbour’s dress has no bale, no ocean and no reject pile. Dara and the Cebu Facebook groups are where that market lives. Our buying guide covers how to do it safely.
3. Buy ukay to keep. The ₱25 Carbon tee is sustainable if you wear it for five years. Our quality check is about buying pieces that will last that long.
4. Repair and alter. A ₱100 hem or a ₱150 zip keeps a piece in use. Our tailors guide has the prices.
5. Don’t bin it. Sell it, give it away, or donate it to a drive. The one thing worse than a bale is a wardrobe in a landfill. Our selling guide compares the routes.
6. Wash cold, line dry. Cebu has the sun for it. Cold washing and no dryer cut a garment’s in-use footprint sharply, and our washing guide is built around exactly that.
7. Buy new fewer times. When you do, buy natural fibres in a cut you’ll wear for years. The most sustainable garment in the Philippines is still the one that doesn’t get made.

So, is thrifting sustainable? Buying second-hand instead of new is. Buying second-hand from someone in your own city is more so. Buying twenty ukay pieces you’ll wear twice isn’t, and neither is pretending the reject pile doesn’t exist. The slogan on the shop sign is half right, which for a slogan is not bad. The other half is up to what you do with the clothes once you get them home.