Episode 502: The Afterlife Of A T-Shirt

Published August 26, 2015 at 4:07 PM MDT

Bales of imported clothing are wheeled into the Gikombo Market in Nairobi, Kenya.

The U.S. exports over a billion pounds of used clothing every year — and much of that winds up in used clothing markets in sub-Saharan Africa.

On today's show, we visit a giant used-clothing market in Nairobi, Kenya to see what happens to American clothes (including, presumably, some Planet Money T-shirts) after Americans are done with them.

View our T-shirt's journey at planetmoney.com/shirt.

And listen to more our T-shirt podcasts here.

Note: Today's show is a rerun. It originally ran in December 2013. To learn about how we tracked down the original owner of the bat mitzvah T-shirt we found, here is the follow-up radio story from December 2013.

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