The data tells a layered story. Most Londoners — across all four behavioural personas in the research — do dispose of clothes through some route other than general waste most of the time. The headline disposal split shows charity shops at 56%, collection banks at 35%, friends-and-family at 27%, and online resale at 27%. General waste sits at 20% overall. So the system isn't broken at the macro level. The problem is what happens at the margins — and the margins are where the volumes are growing.

Look at the four clusters. The Accumulator (17.5% of the sample) buys frequently, retains heavily, and when they do dispose, they default to general waste at 27% — the joint-highest rate. They are aware of the accumulation — "I'm a big, maybe too big of a shopper" — but the path from awareness to action stalls at the disposal moment because there's no route that fits their inventory.

The Pragmatic Replacer (41.8% of the sample) is functionally identical at the disposal end — also 27% to general waste — but the reason is different. They'd recycle if they had a batch worth dealing with, but a single t-shirt isn't worth researching a route for. "You can be lying if I said I did," said one participant when asked whether they recycle individual items. This is a friction problem, not a values problem.

The Ethical Keeper (12.7% of the sample) is the values-aligned cluster — high environmental and ethical drivers, lowest general waste rate at 13%, heavy users of charity shops and Vinted. But there's a hidden contradiction: this cluster has the largest secondhand acquisition gap, buying secondhand at much higher rates than they sell. The platform that enables their best behaviour also enables a quieter version of churn.

The Seasonal Clearer (28% of the sample) has the lowest general waste rate of all (8%) — reframing them as low-throughput rather than disengaged. They're rhythmic, not random. One participant's frustration that "the Oxfam bank is frequently full" and her walk uphill with heavy bags is the structural failure that turns a willing donor into a black-bin user. "I feel kind of shy going to the charity shop to donate" adds an emotional dimension the quant can't see.

What stakeholders add to this picture is system-level honesty. A sorting warehouse where reusable rates have fallen from 35% to 27%, where the trader price for sorted stock has dropped from £800 to £100 a ton, and where councils have flipped from paying collectors to charging them. Trust erosion isn't just a feeling — "a little bit of bad advertising has negative impacts across the board." EPR legislation the Treasury is unlikely to approve. The ceiling of design-led solutions: "trust me, people can't be bothered."

Where the system makes things hard is at the moment of single-item decision (no route that fits the friction), at the listing step for resale (high effort for low return), at the cultural-aesthetic margins (clothes that don't fit the dominant secondhand template), and at the trust layer (people don't believe their donations matter). The post-disposal infrastructure — collection, sorting, processing, market — is straining under volume and quality decline simultaneously. It is, as one stakeholder put it, "like Blockbuster video" — functional but on borrowed time.

Where we need to intervene: not in the major flows that already work — charity shops, online resale, collection banks. The system doesn't need another channel. It needs to capture the volume that currently leaks: the single garments that go to general waste because there's no friction-appropriate route, the wardrobe inventory that stays bagged up because the listing effort exceeds the perceived value, and the routine moments where capture would be invisible to the user. That's where the briefs need to point.