“These are the thousand-pound bales,” Michael Zweig says, gesturing to towering stacks of multi-colored compressed cubes of familiar floral prints, stripes, plaids, and graphic T-shirts stacked at inhuman scale. It’s a hot summer day, and the un-airconditioned factory retrofitted as a used textile processing plant feels dusty and sticky at the same time. Wearing a yellow tank top and cut off shorts, Zweig puffs away on a melon-flavored vape as he explains how the clothes in the bales end up here. “People think if you donate your coat to a charity you’re giving it to a poor person,” Zweig continues. But it’s more likely to end up at a place like this one in Roselle, New Jersey.

The average American throws away 68 pounds of clothing each year. There’s just too much of it, more than anyone can give away or sell in charity thrift shops. While the sorting industry dates back to at least the 1930s, and the collection and resale of rags in America goes back even further, the recent increase in disposable fashion has created a demand for facilities to process used clothing. Organizations will sell donations to facilities like the one where Zweig works for around 25 cents a pound. The clothes are then sorted on an industrial scale and usually end up one of three places: recycled into rags and wiping cloths, baled and shipped to the developing world, or, for the items deemed the most valuable, sold to vintage and consignment stores.

Zweig runs the vintage department at Romerovski Corp, one of these processing facilities, called rag yards or rag houses. In one corner of the aging 25,000 square-foot former factory, Zweig heads a team of pickers—mostly Hispanic women working for minimum wage—who spend eight-hour days dividing Old Navy from J. Crew, concert t-shirts from hippie chic pieces. I watch Zweig scan through a pile of blouses. “Cheap, cheap, cheap, decent, good, cheap,” he chants as he sorts the items into their corresponding categories.

By far, the most common labels here that I see are Forever 21 and H&M, fated for the cheap pile. “Nobody is stupid enough to buy Forever 21 second-hand,” notes Zweig. No one in the developed world, anyway. Even so, quality and original ticket price aren’t the only criteria Zweig uses to judge an item’s resale value. “It has to do with how hip it is too,” he explains. Thinking about the clientele that shop at most of the vintage and consignment stores Zweig sells to, he knows that “people want to buy TopShop more than they want to buy Trina Turk.” And then there are the off-beat pieces that catch the eye of Zweig’s best pickers.

In the Torah, there’s a decree against garments mixing wool and linen—shatnez, in Hebrew—and likewise, the rag yard has a logic of sameness and difference to its operations. Denim is separated from sweaters. Cashmere is separated from blended knits. Polyester dresses are separated from silk ones. Even the employees are grouped. The Haitian workers in one department, the Hispanic workers in another. There’s a parking lot for the factory workers and another for the office staff. Zweig, however, is an exception with liminal status, capable of code-switching and moving freely through the factory’s various factions.