It doesn’t occur to many of us to recycle our clothing.

Whether we’ve worn it to shreds or not at all, it’s more likely than not that we’ll bin it rather than donate it to charity. Clothing even comprises three per cent of all the stuff we throw away.

But at least half of all of it can be re-worn or re-used, according to WasteOnline. And bras, interestingly enough, are some of the most valuable items to come out of our trash.

You might wonder who on earth might want your old bras. The answer is Africans, says Tony Clark, manager of Wastesaver, a West Yorkshire factory which sorts out clothing, shoes and textiles that couldn’t be sold in any of Oxfam’s 700 UK shops. More than 120 tonnes – 15,000 bin bags – of clothing are delivered there every week.

“African buyers are looking for fashionable and colourful items and bras are that kind of item,” explains Tony. “They’re very expensive to manufacture new and difficult to replicate with local textiles, so the market for them is huge.”

But what else ends up at the factory?

“Out-of-season stuff like anoraks that we don’t have enough room to store, or Primark-type clothing that retails new at £3.99, so we can only sell it for £1 and not earn any profit – that comes through here a lot,” says Tony. “And sometimes we get designer stuff too, Vivienne Westwood or Firetrap or Diesel jeans. We cherry-pick through it all and send the best stuff back to be resold in the UK markets, and the rest goes abroad.”

The 22,000 sq ft factory in Huddersfield acts as a sort of trade intermediary between the UK and the rest of the world, where jeans, blouses, swimsuits, shorts and colourful ‘summer’ styles (including bras) are sold on to sub-Saharan Africa. Warmer styles of heavier trousers and jumpers go to Eastern Europe and the cheaper-priced items go to Asia or the Middle East.

Textile recycling originated in the Yorkshire Dales about 200 years ago, and Wastesaver is helping to keep that tradition alive.

The clothes arrive, and leave, in black bin bags. It’s like the ultimate recycler.

So what if you don’t donate to Oxfam, or you still think that old tracksuit really is best suited to the bin, rather than any charity? There’s still a place for it to go – and it’s not the dump.

Synthetic clothes don’t decompose, whereas woollen garments do, but produce methane, a greenhouse gas, while doing so.

According to WasteOnline, if everyone in the UK bought one reclaimed woollen garment each year instead of buying new, it would save 371 million gallons of water and 480 tonnes of chemical dyes.

So how can you get recycling? Your options consist of putting textiles – usually household linens, shoes, clothing and sometimes handbags or purses – into clothes banks. You could also take them to your local charity shop or have them picked up for a jumble sale.

Clothes are given to the homeless, sold in charity shops or in developing countries in Africa, the Indian sub-continent and parts of Eastern Europe.

Nearly 70 per cent of items from clothing banks are reused as clothes, according to WasteOnline, and any unwearable items are sold to industry to be shredded and used in products such as fillers in car insulation, roofing felts, loudspeaker cones, panel linings, furniture padding, or mattresses. Clothes can also become wiping cloths, or reclaimed to turn into yarn or fabrics.