Mr Thate, in your company a good 200 employees sort what ends up in the used clothing containers every day. How often do you clean out at home yourself?
At Christmas I stood in front of the wardrobe to create order.
I ironed my shirts and found that I no longer wear them, even though I haven't bought anything new in the last two years.
Here's a pair of pants or a T-shirt, that's it.
I like to dress well, but I buy wisely.
If I muck out two or three times a year, it goes into my textile sorting.
Before you founded your company Geo-Tex, you ran a second-hand shop in Amsterdam and ran a vintage wholesale business. Then why old clothes?
We actually wanted to find what we already knew as merchandise from the vintage shop: for example, clean, pristine white table linen, embroidered, crocheted and decorated with lace.
It quickly became clear to us that we only got what was no longer needed in the household.
This included inferior, broken, dirty clothing.
Everything that fits through the hatch of a container was in there, including rubbish.
We were faced with a large pile that had to be processed somehow.
That was in 1991.
At that time, the Germans said goodbye to house and street collection, the container collection system came up. An extremely opaque system. Have you experienced that too?
Companies called textile recyclers like me and asked about our work structures.
They listed me as a certified recycler in the chain, were roughly checked, and were never heard from again.
Nobody knows what happens to the goods afterwards.
To date, no municipality has reassured itself with us as to whether the dealer who submitted our certificate for his award sold the purchased quantity to us in full, in part or not at all.
What are the reasons for those responsible for the old clothes containers not to send you the donations?
If the goods go abroad, especially to non-EU countries, the plant operators have to meet less stringent requirements than we do here, for example.
There are fewer costs for safety, employees and disposal.
It is incomprehensible where the proportion of waste ends up.
Can municipalities do anything about it?
It has gotten better, only a few orders go to such dealers.
Nevertheless, proper monitoring is missing.
We were amazed when we talked to people from the Environment Ministry;
there was no data.
There is no official place in Germany where the data come together to determine the nationally recorded amounts.
According to a somewhat older study by the RWTH Aachen University, the figure is around one million tons per year in Germany.
If I estimate the contingent of the domestic sorters I know, I come up with less than a thousand tons per day.
If I extrapolate that over the year, that covers about a fifth of the presumably recorded volume of one million.
The rest ends up abroad.
At least as far as third countries are concerned, no one can say exactly what will happen to them.