You know the bag. It went in after a growth spurt and it is still there.
Everyone has an answer for it. Keep a few pieces. Sell them. Donate them. Cut them up into a quilt.
Three of those are good answers to a different question. The keepsake box takes the four things you cannot part with, which was never the hard part. The quilt takes a weekend you do not have. Selling takes an afternoon. None of them touches the other forty things in the bag, and the bag is mostly other things.
Selling it
Consignment sales are the honest version of this. You sort, you tag, you price, you haul it to a church hall on a Thursday, and a check arrives weeks later for a fraction of what the pile cost new. The work goes in before anyone knows what it will pay.
Online resale is the same trade spread over more days. Photograph, list, answer questions, package, ship. It works beautifully for one dress from a brand people search for. It does not scale to a bag.
Donating it
This is where most of the bag goes, and it is a reasonable place to send it. I want to say what happens next, because almost nobody has been told.
A donated garment gets about four weeks on the shop floor4. That varies by region, because every Goodwill is independently operated, but four weeks is roughly the window. Around half of what arrives is judged good enough to sell in a store or online5 at all.
What does not sell there goes to the outlet, where clothing is priced by the pound instead of by the piece. Goodwill SF Bay runs two of them, in Oakland and South San Francisco.
What does not sell at the outlet is baled. Goodwill San Francisco Bay packs eight to twelve bales of clothing a day, and one bale holds roughly 1,300 garments5. That is the unit your daughter's cardigan is measured in by the end of the week.
Where the trail stops
Past the bale, nobody can tell you anything.
The EPA does not count clothing sent to charities for reuse1,2. In 2024 the GAO told Congress the national data is too thin to work with3. So "it gets reused" is a hope rather than a measurement, and the people doing the baling cannot tell you which of those 1,300 garments found a kid either.
I went looking for that number and could not find it. That is its own story.
