A Gildan 5000, the industry's default heavyweight cotton blank, wholesales at $3.06 in sizes small through XL at 500 units, and drops to $2.36 at ten thousand. One color screen printing runs about $1.95 per unit at 250 pieces plus a setup fee in the $25 to $40 range. A conference ordering 500 shirts is spending something on the order of four to five dollars a shirt landed. A nicer Bella+Canvas runs nine to twelve.

PPAI puts wearables at 26.6 percent of all promotional products spend. ASI puts t-shirts alone at 16.1 percent of the industry, about $4.3 billion a year in North America. Those two figures cannot both be measuring the same thing, since together they would make t-shirts 61 percent of all wearables including polos, outerwear and uniforms. The trade bodies do not reconcile their categories and neither audits the other.

Nobody publishes unit volume. At four to twelve dollars a shirt the arithmetic lands somewhere between 350 million and a billion shirts a year, which is a wide enough range to be honest about and still useful to hold onto for later.

Every conference shirt is a large. This is treated as a planning failure. It is a pricing structure.

At the same 500 unit tier, a 2XL Gildan 5000 costs $5.85 against $3.06 for a large. That is a 91 percent upcharge. A 3XL costs $6.93, up 126 percent. Hanes runs +68 and +118. An event planner working to a fixed per shirt budget who orders a size run matching the actual population blows the budget, so they do not. The vendor size charts that circulate as folk wisdom allocate about 5 percent to 2XL and nothing at all above it.

Christel and Dunn, working from NHANES anthropometric data, found the average American woman wears a size 16 to 18. By the apparel industry's own definitions she is plus size. The shirt was never going to fit her, and the reason is on the blanks price list.

There is also a denominator problem. ASI computes its third of a cent by dividing 3,500 impressions into a shirt costing eleven or twelve dollars. The conference shirt in this piece costs four or five. Run the industry's own arithmetic on the shirt the industry actually ships and the cost per impression halves, which is either very good news for the buyer or an indication that the metric is not measuring what it appears to.

ASI has published its t-shirt impression estimate three times in seven years. In 2019 it was 3,400. In 2023 it was 5,053. In 2026 it is 3,500. A 49 percent jump followed by a 31 percent reversion, with no disclosed change in methodology. These are not measurements, they are self reported wearing frequency multiplied by an assumption about how many people see you.

The industry's own consumer research is more candid than its marketing. PPAI surveyed 3,400 US consumers in 2026 and found 66 percent would rather receive fewer high quality items than more cheap ones. Among people who discard promotional products, 38 percent say the item was not useful and 27 percent say it was poorly made. The trade association asked, and the answer came back "please stop."

ASI's 2019 study, the last one specific enough to be useful, asked what people do with a promotional shirt they no longer want. 65 percent give it away. 18 percent throw it away. 18 percent keep it anyway, which is where my eleven live.

The industry treats "give away" as continuation of the impression. It does not distinguish handing a shirt to a friend from putting it in a donation bin, and the bin is the entrance to everything below.

Some charities will not take it. GreenDrop, asked directly by the promotional products trade press: "No, we don't, unfortunately. We can't take anything that has corporation logos or any kind of logo on it." Cradles to Crayons accepts major sports team logos and refuses local 5K and little league shirts.

The corporate donor is often the one insisting on this. Good360, the largest gifts in kind clearinghouse, contractually forbids recipient nonprofits from letting donated goods be sold at thrift stores, flea markets, yard sales or resale platforms, and monitors eBay to enforce it. SwagCycle, the reverse logistics firm built specifically for this material, states the reason plainly in its 2025 report: "Bad actors could use these items to impersonate employees, potentially gaining unauthorized access to secure areas or deceiving customers." Your badge holder lanyard shirt is a security artifact.

Goodwill, notably, takes it. Which is why almost all of it ends up there.

Goodwill affiliates run a colored tag rotation. A garment gets roughly four weeks on the floor, discounted to half price in week four and 75 percent off in week five, then it is pulled. Evergreen Goodwill in Washington takes in about 120 million pounds a year and sells about 58 percent of what it stocks, against an estimated 30 percent nationally. The Salvation Army is blunter. A major running an adult rehabilitation center in Anaheim told the organization's own magazine that "only one of three garments go into our stores," and officials there estimate about a quarter of all donations still end at the dump.

You will read everywhere that only 10 to 20 percent of donated clothing sells in thrift stores. I chased it. The traceable version is a flat 20 percent, in a peer reviewed paper by two NIST authors, and it rests on two popular press citations rather than a measurement. The operational figures from Goodwill and Housing Works run 30 to 58 percent. The honest answer is that three different denominators get quoted interchangeably and nobody has measured it nationally.

Pulled goods go to the outlet, which everyone who shops it calls the bins. Soft goods run $1.79 to $1.99 a pound depending on the region. The bins rotate on a 45 minute schedule. This is the last stage at which the shirt is an individual object with a price.

What the bins do not sell is baled and sold to salvage dealers at roughly 27 cents a pound. The Salvation Army's Western Territory recycled 27 million pounds over seven months in 2016 and 2017 for $6.6 million, which works out to about 24 cents. From the ballroom to here, the shirt has lost about 97 percent of its value in three priced transactions.

Graders sort on condition, not desirability. As one exporter puts it, "Grade does not guarantee style, brand or market demand." A 2019 conference tee that was worn zero times satisfies every criterion a grading line applies, because those criteria are all about stains, holes and mildew. It gets baled as wearable and shipped. (No published grading spec I could find names corporate logos as a downgrade, which is the point. The logo is invisible to the sorter and decisive to the buyer.) The resale system does not reject corporate swag. It certifies it and forwards it.

The United States exported 673,726 tonnes of worn clothing in 2024, worth $846.8 million. The largest destination by a wide margin is Guatemala, at $179.2 million and 116,116 tonnes, followed by Chile, Honduras and Mexico. Ghana bought $5.1 million worth, which is six tenths of one percent of US exports.

The mental image of an American conference shirt in a West African market is mostly a British and Chinese story. Of Ghana's used clothing imports in 2024, the United Kingdom supplied 42,000 tonnes and China supplied 33,600. The United States supplied under 5,000. If you want to find your own shirt, book a flight to Guatemala City.

One line in the trade data is worth staring at. India took 82,681 tonnes from the US at 56 cents a kilo, the cheapest large flow the country ships anywhere. India bars imports of re-wearable post consumer clothing, so those garments arrive pre slashed. That is not a clothing export. That is a rag export with a customs code.

NPR's Planet Money went to Gikomba market in Nairobi in 2013 and catalogued the t-shirt street. Among the inventory: a cancer charity fundraiser shirt, a weightlifting competition shirt from southern Montana, and a bat mitzvah commemorative from November 1993. Shirts arrive at about 15 cents. Tailoring, cutting and washing add another 44. A vendor buys the finished garment for $1.20 and sells it for two or three dollars.

The vendor interviewed evaluated shirts on condition, which she called smartness. The bat mitzvah was not a joke to her. It was stock.

At Kantamanto market in Accra, the OR Foundation puts arrivals at about 15 million garments a week and estimates that roughly 40 percent of an average bale leaves the market as waste, with at least a million pounds a week going to landfills around the city. Unsold textiles are burned at the market fringes or blow into the Korle Lagoon, which Ghana's president has called the most polluted spot on earth. A Greenpeace investigation in 2025 found discarded garments carrying Marks and Spencer, George at Asda and Next labels inside the Densu Delta, a protected Ramsar wetland and sea turtle habitat, with Zara, H&M and Primark items on riverbanks just outside it.

The Ghana Used Clothing Dealers Association commissioned a study in 2024 finding that under 5 percent of imports are waste. A GUCDA executive called the 15 million garments and 40 percent claims "highly exaggerated, misleading, and not representative of the realities on the ground." Both parties are trade bodies with money at stake. The reconciliation is that the numbers measure different things. Roughly 4 to 5 percent of what arrives is dead on arrival. Roughly 40 percent of what arrives never finds a buyer. Both can be true, and neither side has an incentive to say so.

The European Parliament cites this to a World Wildlife Fund web page. That page now returns a 404. The Better Cotton Initiative cites it to a WWF and National Geographic video. The underlying science is Chapagain and Hoekstra 2006, which computed a global cotton water footprint of 256 cubic kilometres a year and never states a per garment number. A 2026 cradle to gate life cycle assessment puts a 250 gram cotton shirt closer to 725 litres. The order of magnitude survives. The precision is theatre, and it varies fourfold depending on whether the cotton was irrigated.

This comes from a single AFP wire story in November 2021 with no methodology and no attribution. The UN Economic Commission for Europe and ECLAC, in a 92 page joint assessment published in 2024, put the Alto Hospicio pile at several tens of thousands of tonnes across roughly 300 hectares, accumulated since dumping began in 2012. That is a total, not an annual rate, and the viral figure treats a decade of accumulation as one year of flow. A widely repeated claim that the 2022 fire burned 100,000 tons exceeds the estimated mass of the entire site.

True of 2011. After Super Bowl XLV the NFL donated about 100,000 pre printed Steelers champions shirts, which the league valued at $20 each and critics called essentially worthless, to World Vision, bound for Armenia, Nicaragua, Romania and Zambia. The program now runs through Good360, and the NFL's Joe Ruggiero puts the current annual volume at roughly 1,500 pieces of apparel and 500 caps across both conference championships and the Super Bowl combined. Roughly 2,000 items, down 98 percent, because the league now prints to demand. The 2026 shipment went to Moldova, Latvia, Poland and Estonia.

Ruggiero's stated rationale puts the charity second. "We clearly want these products to be utilized, but we don't want the products to be popping up for sale on a platform, and we don't want to have a spotlight on the losing team in that way." The donation is a disposal method that happens to be generous.

Attributed to ING everywhere it appears, including by a university press office. No report, no date, no methodology, no link. I could not find an ING publication containing it. It may well be roughly right. It is not a citation.