THE GRADING PROCESS
The First Sort
The first step is to separate the textiles according to the following categories:
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Re-useable summer clothing and household linen (54%)
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Re-useable winter clothing and heavy household linen (16%)
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Recycling of damaged clothes and shoes (5.6%)
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Leather goods and shoes (8%)
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Waste (0.4%)
This is more of a pre-sort, our graders are not looking for item quality at this point.
The Second Sort
The pre sorted items are then sent to sorting stations. The items will now be checked closely and graded in to over 140 different categories. These categories are sorted by:
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Gender
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Age
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Material type
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Quality of item
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Colour
Any items that don't meet the requirements above will be collated.
Packing
Once we gather enough of one type of category we send the items to the baling machines. When they have been baled they're wrapped with our signature Orange strap and then put in to storage, ready for shipping.
Shipping
We sell our product by the container and typically we load 450 bales of clothing at any one time. Each bale is weighed to 55 KG for the West African market which equates to circa 25,000 KG of product per load. To put this in to context this is around 200,000 individual lightweight items.
Our customers will receive their products in around 30 days depending on what shipping lines are used.
