Tales of Bales: Mediating Power, Value and Transparency in the Global Trade of Secondhand Clothing

This article takes the “bale system” – the strategic bundling of individual garments into compressed units for export – as an analytical lens through which to examine the politics of power, value, and transparency structuring the global trade of secondhand clothing. Specifically, drawing on Appadurai’s regime of value (1986), it examines how the bale enables the construction of a transnational regime of value that both regulates and exploits the trade. This article argues, in the process of value transformation facilitated by the compressed bale, an immense quantity of used clothing is transported across continents, creating conditions through which waste and value are co-produced. Further, based on visits to five sorting factories in Guangdong, China, the article conceptualizes the bale as a site of contestation, where transparency is negotiated through control over the production and process of baling. Lastly, the article concludes with two open-ended questions on whether the transfer of “waste” is an inevitable or intentional outcome of a trade structured around the bales? Beyond calls to ban the import or export of secondhand clothing, are there other ways forward?