BEIJING (AFP) — Mountains of clothes donated to victims of China's devastating earthquake are being auctioned off, recycled into mops or left in warehouses because no-one wants them, state press reported Wednesday.
Relief workers had gone into the worst-hit areas of southwest China's Sichuan province to pass on the millions of items of clothing but the homeless said they did not need the help, the China Daily said, citing relief workers.
"Once our warehouses were full, we had to rent a badminton court just to store them," the China Daily quoted Li Huarong, a civil affairs official in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, as saying.
Li said 60 tonnes of secondhand clothes would be auctioned off on Saturday because authorities had run out of room to house it all, with the proceeds going to help quake victims in other ways.
"It has cost us a lot of money to launder and store the clothes, so we decided it would be better just to auction them," she said.
About 10 million people were made homeless or forced to relocate following the May 12 earthquake, which left 88,000 dead or missing.
Many of those who lost their homes have been living in camps throughout the quake zone, with billions of dollars already spent on immediate relief and reconstruction work.
But it seems that the money will not have to be spent on clothes.
"Just a week after the quake, we told people to stop sending us secondhand clothes, but they kept on coming," the China Daily quoted Zhao Linjiang, the head of the central donation depot in Chengdu as saying.
"People would just dump them on the ground and leave. We received as many clothes in the three months after the quake as we had in the past three years."
Zhao said his depot, which operates separately from the one planning the auction, had received about 2.5 million items of clothing since the earthquake.
Despite already being rejected, Zhao said the depot planned to clean two million pieces of clothes and distribute them to victims.
The other 500,000 pieces of clothes would be recycled for use in mattresses and mops, according to Zhao.
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