In my experience, they wind up for sale in street markets all across Africa for extremely low prices. In 35 countries I saw American clothes in HUGE piles for sale.. many still had the goodwill tag (or other donation brands) still attached.

I bought plenty of shorts and t-shirts from these vendors :)

Oh yeah, mitumba, something that has thoroughly wrecked African textile industries - hard to compete with "almost free"

Ironically, "fast fashion" may finally bring an end to this, since this low quality stuff in donated (and thus almost destroyed) form isn't worth being shipped over to Africa, whereas "fresh" FF clothing from Asia is as cheap as mitumba was before.

I'd assume much of that was new, as cloths regularly fail to sell.

I know some of it is preemptively-prepared clothing for things that don’t happen, like commemorating championship wins of teams that end up losing. The stuff for the finalists is ready to sell for the day the winner is decided, the actual winners stuff is sold and the rest is dumped overseas.

> the rest is dumped overseas.

Or worse, shredded outright. In Germany alone, 230 million pieces of clothing (or 10% of the year's offering) are shredded without ever being worn (https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article203216646/Bekleidung-H...).

Based on the condition, at least 99% of it was used, heavily.

One of my favorite used clothing stores is The Garment District in Cambridge, MA. It’s actually an outgrowth of a recycled fiber company that makes janitorial wiping cloths. The good stuff goes to the vintage clothing store upstairs, the somewhat-junky stuff goes to the “dollar-a-pound” floor downstairs, the leftovers get made into rags.