Top 10 most donated items in Portugal — and why they matter

Munara is still in its early days, so this isn't a leaderboard of what our own users have donated yet — that data will exist once the platform is live, and it'll be genuinely interesting to see how it compares. What follows instead is a look at what the secondhand economy tells us more broadly: which categories people give away most, drawn from published market research (primarily Savers' 2024 Thrift Industry Report and Portuguese textile-recovery data), and why some categories matter more environmentally than their volume alone suggests.

Clothing dominates everything else

Across almost every study of secondhand behaviour, clothing is the runaway leader — not just among donated categories but among things people buy secondhand too. In the US, roughly 30% of people bought at least one secondhand clothing item in the year to mid-2024, more than any other category by a wide margin.

What happens to donated clothing afterward is more interesting than the volume itself. Data from Humana Portugal, one of the country's largest textile-collection networks with over 800 donation containers nationwide, shows a clothing donation typically splits three ways: about 19% is resold directly in Portuguese secondhand shops, 40% is shipped to preparation-for-reuse centres in Spain and Bulgaria to be resold there, and the remaining 41% goes to textile recycling and reuse companies rather than being wearable again. In other words, less than a fifth of donated clothing in Portugal is resold locally — most of it either travels a long way to find its next owner or gets broken down as material rather than reused as a garment. That's not a criticism of donating; it's a reason to also consider giving specific, still-wearable items directly to someone nearby who wants them, which is exactly the gap a platform like Munara is built to close.

Books, furniture, and home goods make up most of the rest

Once you set clothing aside, a 2024 industry survey found the next most commonly donated categories were books (46% of donors give books), furniture (34%), home decor (33%), electronics (29%), and kitchenware (28%). Furniture and books are worth pausing on individually because their environmental profiles are so different from each other despite both being common gifts.

Furniture carries an outsized environmental footprint relative to its donation volume. A secondhand sofa has been estimated at roughly 10 kg CO₂e versus around 100 kg CO₂e for a new one — a 90% reduction, because the bulk of a piece of furniture's emissions come from manufacturing and materials, not from sitting in a living room. A single donated sofa or wardrobe genuinely keeps a meaningful chunk of embodied carbon out of the "replace it" cycle.

Books, by contrast, have a modest individual footprint but an unusually long useful life — a donated book routinely passes through several owners before it's recycled, and Portuguese students spend a real amount each year on required reading, so a well-stocked secondhand shelf has direct household budget impact as well as an environmental one.

Electronics are a smaller share, but the stakes are higher

Electronics account for a smaller share of donations (around 29% of donors give them) but deserve outsized attention, because e-waste is one of the few donation categories where mishandling causes active harm rather than just missed opportunity. Portugal officially collects only around 5.8 kg of e-waste per person — one of the lower rates in the EU — while the EU as a whole puts about 32.2 kg of new electrical and electronic equipment on the market per person each year. That gap between what's bought and what's properly collected is where devices end up forgotten in drawers, informally scrapped, or landfilled with the toxic materials they contain. A working phone, laptop, or tablet that gets donated rather than drawered is one of the highest-leverage donations there is, precisely because so few devices are being captured properly at end of life.

What this means if you're deciding what to donate

The honest takeaway from all of this data isn't "donate more of everything" — it's that categories differ enormously in how much they matter once you look past the headline volume. Clothing is donated in the greatest quantity, but most of it needs to travel or get recycled to find a second life, so specific, still-good pieces are worth offering directly to someone nearby first. Furniture and electronics are donated far less often, but each individual item carries a much heavier environmental footprint, which makes them disproportionately valuable to keep in circulation. Books and home goods sit in between — genuinely useful to pass along, without the same environmental urgency.

Once Munara has real usage data of its own, this is exactly the kind of pattern we'll be able to check against an actual local community rather than published industry averages — and we'll publish that data the same way, honestly and with sources, when it exists.

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Wondering what to do with a specific item sitting in your hallway right now? Browse the categories on Munara and see what's already being listed nearby.