Oxfam and Marks & Spencer Move To Boost Donations

Oxfam and Marks & Spencer have announced a new program where people who donate their old M&S clothes to Oxfam will get a 5 pound ($10 dollar) voucher good against purchases of clothing, home furnishings and beauty products over 35 pounds ($70). The popular M&S food shops are not included. They say they aim to limit the amount of clothing going into landfills -- "some 1 million tonnes of clothing is discarded every year in the UK alone, a lot of which is of good enough quality to be re-sold or recycled." Of course sooner or later these clothes will end up in landfills too, just after they've been worn a couple more times. Somehow encouraging people to buy more new stuff with vouchers seems like the wrong way to go about upping donations. Shouldn't the point be to encourage people to buy less -- and when they do buy, to buy the used goods at Oxfam instead of new stuff at M&S? It seems to me that the biggest problem Oxfam faces is convincing people to buy used clothes when new clothes are so darn cheap. I also wonder how the Oxfam managers in Notting Hill feel about the initiative. I wrote before that they have been refusing donations from discount chains like Primark and H&M because they couldn't re-sell them at a price worth paying. □