CLOTHES RELIEF LTD: Leading Textile Recycler and Second-Hand Exporter

Company overview

Clothes Relief Ltd is a licensed British door-to-door textile collector with a sorting depot in Essex. It states thirty years of industry experience, collects on behalf of named charity partners, and resells the material to buyers in Asia, Africa and Europe. Its cash-for-clothes arm trades under the name Clothesbuyers.

This is not a bale exporter's entry in the ordinary sense. It is the entry that shows you the bottom of the British supply chain, which is why it is worth reading even if you never buy from this company.

Contact runs through [email protected]. Note before you plan around it: no street address and no telephone number appear anywhere on the site, and the line that should carry a phone number prints the email address instead. Two placeholders on the collections page were also never filled in, with collection times reading as "from hours to hours". None of that says anything about the depot, but it does mean everything operational has to be confirmed in writing.

The published purchase price is the useful part

Through Clothesbuyers, the company pays £5 in cash for every 10 kg sack, with no limit on quantity, provided the contents are on its accepted list. That is 50 pence a kilo paid at the door for unsorted household clothing.

Almost nothing else in this directory tells you what the collector paid. Everyone quotes what they sell for. Knowing the purchase price at the bottom of the chain lets you sanity-check every British price you are quoted above it, because the collector's cost is a floor, and on top of that floor sit collection labour, a fleet, fuel, a depot, sorting hours, licensing and margin.

Use it as a check rather than a formula. Cash-for-clothes rates differ by operator and by region, and a collector who runs charity bag rounds is paying for material in a different way again. But if you are offered British-collected unsorted original at a price that does not comfortably clear a purchase cost in this region plus handling, the sensible question is where the goods actually came from: a different country, a different stream, or a grade that has already had the best of it removed.

Two licence numbers you can actually check

The company publishes a waste carrier licence, CB/JN5717XV, and a waste management licence, EE5931YC.

That matters more than any claim about experience, for a simple reason: in Britain and across the EU, used textiles move as a controlled waste stream until they are confirmed for reuse. A collector without a carrier registration is not lawfully moving the material, and a cross-border consignment can be held up on exactly that point. Published licence numbers can be looked up on the public register, which makes them one of the few statements on a supplier's website that a buyer can independently verify in a couple of minutes. Thirty years of experience cannot be verified at all.

Ask for the equivalent registration wherever you are buying. It is a routine question to a legitimate operator and an awkward one to anybody else.

The bogus collector problem, and the question it hands you

The site carries a warning about fake charity collection bags being distributed and about filled bags being stolen from doorsteps by people impersonating collectors. This is a real and well-documented feature of British doorstep collection, and it has a direct consequence for a buyer several steps down the chain.

Material gathered in a charity's name without that charity's permission is a legal and reputational problem attached to the goods, not just to the collector. Clothes Relief describes the controls that answer it: the designated charity is printed on the bag together with its registered charity number and a contact number, permits are obtained from the local council, drivers are vetted and carry identification, and collectors wear uniform and drive marked vans.

So the question to put to any collector-supplier is narrow and answerable. Which charities do you hold written permission from, and can I see the council permit for the areas you collect in? A house that has the paperwork will send it. Buyers working through second-hand clothing suppliers should treat a vague answer here as the end of the conversation rather than a detail to sort out later.

What is collected, and why the list is really a specification

• Accepted: men's, ladies' and children's clothing, sleepwear, paired shoes with the pairs attached, hats, belts, bras, handbags, bedding, household linens and soft toys.
• Refused: carpets, toys other than soft toys, books, CDs, DVDs and video games, and anything soiled, damaged or excessively worn.

Read that as a grading rule applied at the front door rather than a courtesy notice. Two parts of it change what arrives in a bale.

The first is that damaged and heavily worn items are refused at the point of collection. That means the depot receives cleaner material than raw original, and the yield of wearable goods should be correspondingly better. It also means this is not original in the strict sense, and the same honest caveat applies here as to any collector who screens before sorting: you lose the lottery, but you do not pay freight and handling on the worst of it. The company adds that every item is then inspected at the depot for stains, tears, snags and holes, and that anything failing inspection is recycled.

The second is the instruction to attach shoes in pairs at the door. Unpaired shoes are close to worthless in retail and are a standing problem for every collector, so a house that solves the pairing problem at source rather than at the sorting table has a genuinely better shoe line. It is worth asking any footwear supplier what happens to their odd shoes, because a specific answer is a sign the pairs are real.

Alongside the doorstep rounds, the company states that it donates a minimum of £10,000 a month to its charity partners, named as Cancer Care Trust, Beat Breast Cancer and Donna's Dream House. Its contributors include families, schools, businesses and community organisations. The account of how sorting houses handle incoming material explains what happens after the van gets back, and the standard grade vocabulary is what a wholesale buyer needs before agreeing anything with a house that publishes no grades of its own.

Frequently asked questions

What does Clothes Relief pay for used clothing?

Through its Clothesbuyers scheme it pays £5 in cash for each 10 kg sack, which is 50 pence a kilo, with no limit on quantity for items on its accepted list.

Where does the company sort?

At a sorting depot in Essex, where every item is inspected for stains, tears, snags and holes before it goes out.

Is Clothes Relief licensed?

It publishes a waste carrier licence numbered CB/JN5717XV and a waste management licence numbered EE5931YC, both of which can be checked on the public register.

Which items are refused at collection?

Carpets, hard toys, books, CDs, DVDs, video games and anything soiled, damaged or excessively worn.

Where does the collected clothing go?

The company states that it resells to buyers in Asia, Africa and Europe, and that items failing inspection are recycled rather than landfilled.