Retail sustainability

Oxfam GB seeks to be a driving force in sustainable retail by continuously improving our understanding and management of the ethical and environmental impacts of our business.

Oxfam GB’s Retail Sustainability Strategy includes 4 objectives and key targets around waste, energy, and our Sourced by Oxfam range. The Strategy objectives are:-

1. Continually seek and assess opportunities that will reduce Retail’s carbon emissions
2. Identify efficient and ethical solutions to keeping unsold stock out of waste and further up the waste hierarchy
3. Keep all people safe and thriving across Retail operations and supply chain
4. Understand the human and environmental impacts in the supply chain to end use. Choose options with the least negative impact when purchasing goods

Progress on targets is included in our annual report and Environmental Sustainability Report.

The environmental impact of textiles consumption in the UK remains very high, according to the UK textiles pact annual progress update 2024-25, In 2024, brands and retailers placed 17% more textiles on the market than in 2019, leading to a 10% rise in total carbon emissions and a 7% increase in water use.

According to WRAP, each year up to 40% of all clothing manufactured globally is never sold. These 46 billion unused garments could provide one and a half new outfits for every person on the planet (or nearly 180 new outfits for each person living in the UK).

Oxfam encourages people to make the most out of their old clothes by reusing, selling, or recycling them. This not only generates funds to end poverty but also helps protect the planet by reducing clothing waste.

Donated clothing which we aren't able to sell in our shops is collected by third-party recycling companies, who aim to keep as many of the items as possible in use for their originally intended purpose. This includes exporting goods that might be unsuitable for the UK market but popular in other countries where they are more likely to be reused or repurposed.

We do not want textiles to be dumped in lower-income countries. However, we recognise that in some countries textile exports can be beneficial, and that people rely on them for their livelihoods. Everything collected by Oxfam or the third-party recycling companies we work with is sorted before being exported to ensure any waste is removed.

Some of the clothing that is no longer wearable is made into items such as mattress filling and car soundproofing.

We assess all of the third-party companies, and they must commit to adhering to our Textile Export Policy (659kb PDF). Our Textile Export Policy was created to ensure donated textiles are exported in a way that minimises the impact on human rights, local economies, and the environment.

As a minimum, all third parties must remove any waste before export. The companies should also sort the textiles or clothing to ensure that it is of a suitable standard for local markets before selling it on.

It’s an imperfect and complicated system and we are doing what we can (see Oxfam GB Ethical and Environmental policy, PDF) to make improvements. Our aim is always to find other ways of processing unsold clothes to reduce the potential impacts on people and planet, while honouring our commercial responsibility to the donors of the clothes.

In 2025, Oxfam and the ETI brought together brands, retailers, and stakeholders from across the apparel and textile sector for ReDress: Fashioning a Fairer Future – a focused discussion at the intersection of circular fashion and human rights.

Oxfam are also members of WRAP and signed up to the Textiles Pact a voluntary initiative supporting businesses and organisations within the fashion and textiles industry to transition to more sustainable and circular practices by the end of the decade.

Choosing second hand contributes to a sustainable fashion industry that doesn’t cost the earth. As per estimates from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, in the report A New Textiles Economy: Redesigning Fashion’s Future (905kb PDF) ...

• At present, 8 times more clothes are produced than are regularly worn.
• By 2050, the global garment industry is on course to produce 138 billion clothes each year that are never worn.

Wearing second hand clothing encourages reusing and recycling, saving our planet from harmful emissions and reducing reliance on raw materials.

By shopping more consciously, we can show that we want a more sustainable fashion industry.

Money that Oxfam raises through the sale of second hand clothes helps to fund Oxfam’s work tackling the injustices that fuel poverty around the world.

This includes supporting communities hardest hit by the climate crisis.

These funds enable Oxfam to work with partners and communities around the world to…

• Respond fast when emergencies hit, supporting people to uphold their rights and be resilient to future crises.
• Speak up against the injustices that fuel poverty and inequality, such as undervaluing and mistreating informal workers like those in fashion supply chains.
• Support activists around the world fighting the injustice of climate change.
• Campaign for sustainable economic policies that can halt rising temperatures, promote fair trade, and create an economy that encourages people to make conscious choices by opting for second-hand clothes over fast fashion.

The Sourced by Oxfam (SbO) team buys all the new products we sell in our online and UK shops. The SbO Ethical & Environmental Supplier Framework (645kb PDF) applies learning from Oxfam’s global programmes and engagement with businesses to guide our everyday retail sourcing decisions. The framework enables us to be more transparent about how we work with our suppliers and outlines what Oxfam considers good practice to deliver sustainable, positive impacts for the people working in our retail supply chain. The framework is helping us to learn from, celebrate and share good practice already demonstrated by our suppliers and we are using it to incentivize our suppliers to work with us to raise ethical and environmental standards in our supply chain over time.

As part of our commitment to transparency and to support us to be held accountable for the impacts of doing business in our value chain we publish our current list of retail suppliers.

Read more about what the Sourced by Oxfam range stands for

Read more about the 10 principles of Fair Trade