However, these organizations are facing the growing challenge of receiving very poor quality donations and thus the danger of turning into another landfill for someone else’s old, shabby clothes.

Since its establishment in June 2018, Jakarta-based Setali Indonesia has been working on finding ways to prevent old clothes from ending up in waste disposal sites.

Setali Indonesia creative and social media manager Vicky Destiawan said the organization received around 14,000 donated fashion items a month. However, about 80 percent is categorized as "rejected", or clothes that are not suitable for resale because they are torn, discolored or bear the logos of political parties or institutions.

“We still have a lot of [rejected clothes] in our warehouse. We are trying to find ways to reduce the amount,” she told The Jakarta Post on the sidelines of Setali’s garage sale in South Jakarta on Saturday.

With the mounting pile of unused clothes sitting idle in Setali’s warehouse, she said the organization had decided to hire a denim repairman to try and recycle them.

“We sew together old clothes to make new ones, but that can only be a solution for about 10 percent of the used clothes because of limited manpower.”

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