Midsummer tends to be a slow time for eBay sales. This two week period was especially slow because I haven’t listed anything new since my move. This partly due to garbage fatigue and needing to settle in to my new place, but it also hasn’t helped that I haven’t had the internet for a month. It should arrive soon, mercifully, but it’s a lot harder to get in a listing groove when you have to do all your work at cafés. Still, I made a couple sales and boosted my income by selling off some gold and silver scrap.
1. Gold and silver scrap: Sold to a local antiques dealer for 595$. The sterling pieces I found in NDG provided the impetus for my trip – they alone made me 140$. The rest of the money came from jewellery that was either broken or not worth the effort of listing online.
2. Vintage Tiki volcano bowl: On eBay for 45$. Found November 2014 in NDG.
3. 14k gold Bechtel pin: On eBay for 55$. Found May 2015 in Mount Royal.
Total: 695$, 11382.50$ since the new year began.
Hi, Martin!
You’d replied to my comment back in your “Garbage Fatigue” post, asking about how the Thrift Store where I volunteer recycles unsaleable clothes.
My friend Julia did a bang up job answering your question, but I did a little more digging about Canada and thought you’d be interested:
1. Canada is an international hub for the commercial import/export, grading and sorting of used clothes:
better clothes are resold in richer places (Central America); lesser clothes get sent to poorer nations (in Sub-Saharan Africa) or torn up for industrial use
–per wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_trade_of_secondhand_clothing
Canadian sorting businesses buy from Thrift Stores and import used-clothes from the USA, where there is a glut:
“AM Export Limited [in Scarborough, Ontario–outside of Toronto] … helps several charity organizations by buying their used clothes collections with generous prices.”
–http://www.amexportltd.com/aboutus.shtml
2. Scarborough is the hub of the used-clothing trade in Canada, (or it was in 2004), but it turns out, right there in Montreal is one of the world’s largest grading & sorting & exporting businesses:
“Golden Impex Enterprises Inc. of Montreal, Quebec, is Canada & USA largest centers for exporting used. Since 1996, our distribution center specializes in collecting second-hand goods, which are then graded and exported to various countries across the world. ”
–www.goldenimpex.com
–Interesting article on used-clothes trade (centered in Scarborough):
http://articles.philly.com/2004-12-21/news/25387271_1_clothing-immigration-laws-immigration-expert
3. In the USA, our little store’s practice of reselling used clothes for pennies on the pound to resalers who export it is the norm:
” Most secondhand clothing donated in the United States will be exported to another country. In fact, used textiles rank as the eighth-largest U.S. export”
–http://www.planetaid.org/our-work/recycling/global-trade
Goodwill and Salvation Army officials say they sell where they can get the best price.
(Salvation Army operates in Canada too, I see. Value Village/Savers too, I think?)
“The Salvation Army is still able to generate funds from [unsaleable] clothing donations and divert them from local landfills by selling them to cloth graders. The cloth graders re-sort the materials; turning some into rags, selling other parts for the fibre content used to make things such as upholstery stuffing and carpet padding, or resells the items in foreign markets.”
4. Looks like this happens in Canada too–people were dismayed to learn that clothes they donated to charity bins were being exported for profit:
“In 2010, Canadian exports of worn clothes were valued at $174 million.” (Canada’s population = 36 million; USA = 316 million)
–cbc.ca/news/canada/clothing-donation-bins-spark-turf-war-in-ontario-1.1246132
Whew!
Have a great week! Thanks for your blog, which is such fascinating glimpse into human behavior (and stuff!).
I really should blog more about my experiences at the store… I have some posts labelled “Thrift Store”, here–mostly anecdotal:
http://gugeo.blogspot.com/search/label/thrift%20store
Nice little haul.