No One Wants Used Clothes Anymore
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I keep telling her I’ll someday fit into that favorite heavy metal T-shirt from high school; don’t throw it out.
Jeans, t-shirts the likes... 200-300 USD for a pair of jeans is quite common (above also exists). You can get dirty cheap, but men are stupid (me included) -- and to be fair the quality is pretty decent.
I don't really shop in the US, because quality sucks.
I looked very hard for the article I read recently about a woman (in US) who just straight up stopped buying clothes gendered for women because they fell apart immediately. I am extremely curious whether there is a similar cost/construction problem in Europe.
Obviously, women can also get highend, quality stuff. But for men it's either highend or the supermarket, there's few things in between.
In the US my experience is that high-end stuff is being VERY high-end, and low end is becoming very low end... likely as a result of incoming inequality.
In the US, the easiest example to take is the three tiers of fashion produced by Old Navy, The Gap, and Banana Republic. As far as I'm aware, it's always been the same ownership, but each brand is clearly marketed to different price ranges. And also as far as I'm aware: all three brands use offshore sweatshop labor. Right now, rough prices for jeans:
Old Navy: starting at 25USD The Gap: 40-60USD and up. Banana: starting at 120USD
If I had to pay 200-300USD for one pair of denim jeans, I would make damn sure it's because it was machined by a highly paid local artisan. (I don't really care that they're local. I'd still have to think about the cotton sourcing, I guess. Everything about the supply chain is problematic.)
You're right that income inequality is shaping the market, but I think the reverse is true too. The only go-to-market strategies anyone seems to use are: 1. dominate the market with razor thin margins (or even at an initial loss), 2. well differentiated luxury products at outrageous margins. Changing the subject from cloth, Apple is the only company that doesn't seem to operate barely above margins for their low-end products. But of course they benefit from fierce competition on margin with their suppliers. And electronics recycling is a lot more profitable than clothing recycling. I don't know, I guess I was never talking about clothes anyway, and always talking about Late Capitalism.
I had also multiple times had to buy something so that I wear something appropriate (for wedding, job interview, classical dancing or other official occasion) and when similar occasion happened again, they did not fit anymore. Guys can do with same official outfit for all these occasions.
I don't even think that's an overgeneralization.
I wouldn't be surprised if studies and stats show that men buy less clothes and reuse existing clothes more often than women, as verified by the fashion market size.
If I go to my local mall which has a mixture of high and middle end in the world, I might find a handful of stores which sell only men's clothes, but they are both rare and tiny. In comparison, the stores which sell only women's clothes are extremely common and take up a huge portion of the mall.
Furthermore, it's rare for me to see a women's only brand also sell men's clothes, but invariably nearly every men's only brand I know of eventually expands into women's.
All the clothes I own would fit in a single bin bag, I can nearly wash everything in one wash cycle.
Just never seen the point in more, I buy good stuff that lasts and that's about iy.
Hobbies sometimes benefit from different clothing - playing sports, hiking activities, water activities, layers for UV protection or heat insulation, 'work' clothes for getting dirty in a garden or painting a house, etc.
I do have some cycling gear but that's specifically cycling gear.
Ok, it sounds like I was pretty close.
You sometimes cycle but otherwise don't have any hobbies which would benefit from specific clothing and your climate seems moderate enough that you can get by with 3 shirts. I admire the simplicity!
All my clothing now fits into a single army surplus duffle bag.
The problem is the clothes that no one wants and end up in the landfill, and thrift stores don't fix it.
They kind of are, and it's a role they seem to have embraced. In other words, a good % (50%+?) of the intake volume of clothes is not fit for secondary garment sale, and is instead sold "downstream" (in bulk) to tertiary markets ("poor countries", to use Bloomberg's parlance) and recycles to use as raw material. This is a source of revenue, too.
In other words, most thrift stores play an important role in the recycling chain. Otherwise, clothes would go into the garbage. After all, I can't put them in the green recycling bin with my cans, jars, and plastic.
However it's still not enough.
* More bins for more specific TYPES of plastic
* Better, machine readable, (BIG) labels
* Financial incentives (carrot and stick)
There should also be a push towards the use of glass and metal and paper over plastics. Sturdy glass bottles can be cleaned, thermal blast smoothed and re-used or broken down and recycled completely. Similarly metal lids and cans can also attain a new life with ease.
I agree we should incentivize use of more recyclable materials (in place of non-recyclable or more expensive to recycle materials) in general.
They also take away car batteries, car oil, small appliances, batteries etc
In an effort to not have to go to the dump with them, as I didn’t have a car at the time, I actually chopped up two entire sofas with an axe and a knife and recycled them over the space of three months too :)
And for sofas that aren't in unsalvagable condition there are furniture recycling projects around the country that will collect old furniture, give it a bit of a sprucing up, and sell it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_paper#Fiber_sources
> "But recently, Americans decided they liked jeans that stretched, so jeans companies began adding spandex to their fabric. Money with spandex in it wouldn't be money anymore, which means much of Crane's time is now spent on a global search for waste cotton that wasn't used to make elastic pants."
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a24292/benjamin-hundred...
Recycling Chaos in U.S. As China Bans 'Foreign Waste' | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15888827
... China doesn't want recycling anymore!
I don't know the best way to recycle used clothes (for any definition of best). It is likely that a used-clothes donation center does. If that donation center can make a profit, even better.
It's a particularly American approach to recycling to assume that the onus on sorting / separating should not fall on the individual generating the trash. Other countries don't take this approach - instead, they place a high premium on disposal costs of unsorted trash, and require that anything you try to recycle be carefully sorted.
However, in our current scheme (at least in the US), when you don't sort your garbage, the cost of that is mostly just distributed across everyone else - both in terms of the cost to process the garbage, as well as the environmental costs of things like improperly disposed of batteries that end up in landfills.
There's efforts to automate the processing of mixed-stream recycling, but they're not widely available yet.
It's entirely possible that we'll see single stream recycling end here in the US soon, because the places we used to send it for processing (like China) no longer want to do it for us due to the environment problems. At that point, we'll either have to start doing a better job separating it ourselves, charge more for garbage and single-stream so we can pay for processing, or fill up our landfills even faster.
If we're going to subsidize forms of recycling that aren't cost-effective, I'd rather we subsidize forms of recycling that also aren't annoying to the end user. Forcing people to separate Plastic #1 from Plastic #5 when it's cheaper to just dump both plastics in a landfill in the first place strikes me as Kafkaesque.
Even glass has become questionable in terms of recycling economics[0] based on current fees, partially because Americans generally fail to clean the containers properly.
"It's cheaper to dump it in a landfill" is frankly, a lame approach that ignores the environmental costs and short-sightedness of creating more landfills. Do you want to live on a landfill, or next to one? They're basically a toxic waste dump.
The obvious answer is to do what other countries do: charge a lot for disposal of non-recycleable/non-compostable garbage, charge much less for recycling properly (and that includes cleaning and sorting), and use the fees from the garbage to subsidize the cost of recycling. This results in 1) less waste in landfills 2) more recycling 3) less pollution and 4) less use of non-renewable resources.
[0] http://www.waste360.com/glass/focusing-economics-glass-recyc...
In some ways, recycling should pay for itself. Consumers generate raw material for free, which through aggregation, sorting, and rectification (de-generating into raw-er materials) gains value for recyclers.
It's easy to say recycling should "pay for itself" but if you're going to do that, you need to consider the entire economic picture, not just how much value is generated from the recovered goods. There's also landfill savings, protection of the environment, reduced usage of energy (both in disposal and generation of new materials), etc. Given all of those, it can be entirely rational for a government to subsidize recycling heavily, because the overall impact is still "cost effective."
I think a lot of the fill in punching bags is some sort of garbled/blended fabrics of some mixed variety.
Maybe, but there's a pretty good chance it's treated with flame retardants before use, and cotton fabric generally doesn't really burn that well - or at least not fast.
There's a reason people working with hot glass wear long cotton shirts/pants for it.
Especially when we were first learning, it was easier than you might think to spill or splash 2000F liquid glass on the ground when gathering it out of the crucible, and that'd turn synthetic clothes into napalm.
That's a lot of jeans!
Depends, in SF you now can now put unfit fabrics in the blue bin[1]. For usable, they suggest place like USAgain.
[1]https://www.recology.com/recology_news/sf-accepts-new-recycl...
You have to wade through a lot of crap to find the good stuff, though. Unless the source is an estate sale, donated pants are almost always at the end-of-life and shoes are always a joke.
Out of style clothes in good shape seems to be the worst issue for thrift stores. Once the crappy clothes are turned into rags and the modern/stylish good clothes are sold, you're left with racks and racks of out of style/out of date clothes no on wants which is why it was donated in the first place.
Goodwill (supposedly) provides important job skills training, including for many immigrants and refugees.
In Seattle they specifically instruct everyone to give your worn out holey socks and underwear to Goodwill and DO NOT put them in the garbage.
What's so bad about dead peoples clothes? I used to buy lots of clothes at estate sales and I still have a few overcoats from them. I have a barely worn leather jacket and camel skin coat that I bought for a few dollars each, plus maybe 10-20 for dry cleaning. Women would buy clothes at these sales so dresses and women's coats would be more expensive, but for some reason I was the only one purchasing men's clothes. These coats have lasted me much longer than new coats that I buy from stores because fashion today is so disposable.
It seems like there are "scalpers" (can't think of another word for them) who semi-professionally go through thrift stores buying up the good things, and then reselling them on ebay. I've definitely seen this with sports equipment.
(My fiance and I like going to thrift stores looking for art project supplies, and I always look over the golf clubs seeing if there is anything interesting in there [I am actually a golfer]).
Finally, the scanners don't know if you can price "accurately", so if you can, they're just occupying space and blocking ways for no benefit to anyone.
If scanners don't find anything to resell (because you've already scanned and correctly priced, or even listed online yourself), they'll leave soon enough.
Then again, for a homeless person who brings net negative value to the business bu being there and their time is worth $0/hr... you can't pay a clerk $11/hr or $15/hr or whatever the new minimum wage demand is, if you're competing against homeless who repel the regular clientele.
They're one of the many resellers on Amazon now; there's no point in visiting their local store anymore, because anything worth more than the fuel value of burning it is being diverted to Amazon so by definition the store has nothing left in it that's worth reading. Its also faster and easier and better selection to find anything worth reading on Amazon rather than going to the store. They're trying to branch out into selling weird trinkets kinda like how Barnes and Noble is less than 50% books. In the long run they're on the downward slope of all retail to sell only urgent convenience store swill and spontaneous gifts.
I don't know if it's still a thing though. It was painfully irritating when they'd do it in the library.
Now me, as a customer? I walked out of one shop here in brisbane when I found a treasure (architects drawings from pugins practice, neoclassical sketches of British buildings) and they refused to honour the written price which was (I acknowledge) undervaluing the book, but none the less reflected what somebody had thought the book was worth, righ up until I decided to buy it. Yes, this is strictly illegal. its also impossible to police in practice. I should have reported them, I just decided never to shop there again.
Ex seller of huge numbers of books (we're kindle now. books are dirty and feed roaches in the tropics) -I salt the valuable ones in amongst the trash, because I want you, the book buyer, to buy the box not the ones you want of high worth. There have to be a lot of high worth books, to make it worth my time to sort them out, and I'm left with the remove-the-trash problem I was motivated with in the first place.
This is the deal: you buy all my books and I accept I get less than high water mark price for the jewels, but I do get my shelves emptied.
sounds like arbitrage to me.
I appreciated that there were actually clothes my size at thrift stores, but even at thrift stores there isn't a huge selection of them. Do they really not sell that much at thrift stores?
But please only to local homeless shelters/refugee assistance organizations, and only after checking if they actually accept the kind/size of clothes you want to bring, as most of them only have limited space. This is also valid for stuff like sleeping bags or food.
The "donation boxes" you see all over the streets in Germany (or those at charity organizations) are in fact often the worst of the worst - the charity organization may get money, yes, but the price of that money is the total and utter destruction of African textile industry. The "creme" aka first-class clothes goes to second-hand stores, the not-so-fine-anymore goes to Eastern Europe and the rest goes to Africa... and for local dealers it's hard to compete. Of course, the trade creates jobs, but the price of the countries not being able to produce anything locally and making them totally dependent on donations is enormous.
For the African exports, sure - "mitumba" is the African word for "donated" clothing. If you speak German, public TV station ARD has a documentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djXkFedpTrE (and newspaper Zeit has a short text, based on that documentation: http://web.archive.org/web/20120822083146/www.zeit.de/2011/4...)
For homeless/refugees: at least this is what the Munich organizations regularly state within their calls (and especially during fall of 2015, where people brought in way too much stuff for the refugees and there were severe shortages of space and sorting manpower). Besides, asking someone if he can use donations before getting on the road is always better ;)
In American the store was huge and sold so many different things, I spent at least an hour or so wandering around!
Notice that this is in the Opinion column. None of what's said here is even close to true.
Plenty of people shop at their local Goodwill or Salvation Army, where clothes are vastly cheaper than buying them new. Not only are they cheaper, but the clothes are often better quality.
Saying used clothes cost as much as new clothes and then citing an Indian blanket mill competing with Chinese manufacturers as evidence of this is disingenuous.
Today i donate my stuff to them. Even if they have holes, they can be recycled.
I recall some guy in college who bought used clothing and shipped it to some guy who sold it somewhere in the Balkans, iirc. Do even if there isn't a local market, there probably is an intl market.
I'm arguing that what the author is saying is largely false.
Your counterpoint to the authors claim that nobody wants your used clothes anymore seems to be that a handful do, which is great but is a drop in the ocean compared to the amount of new product being churned out, consumed, and ultimately dumped - albeit in some cases via a donation bin or even a cycle of reuse - via the fast fashion chains.
One example local to me is a local sports store used to have a thriving second-hand section. A few years ago they got out of it because it wasn't profitable. Selling used ice hockey gear made more sense when most of the new stuff was made in the US, Canada, Finland, etc. compared to China. And, of course, eBay has shifted more toward new things from big sellers.
Also another HN'er commented that recycled denim is used in insulation. Linus Tech Tips outfitted their server room with fireproofed denim insulation.
The amount of high-quality pieces of clothings bought and sold is staggering. For baby clothes, in particular, pieces that have been worn once or twice, easily worth 15-20 euros selling for 50c a pop.
I compare this to the experience of my siblings raising their kids in the US and the general difference in mentality to second-hand clothes is shocking. I'll admit to being (culturally) shocked when my partner first suggested buying "used" clothes on our newborn but we've must of easily saved 1000s of Euros on children clothing, without sacrificing quality. It blows my mind. This mass flea-market system should be much more prevalent imo.
I doubt the US is very different from most Western European countries in this regard.
I wouldn't say no one.
[0] https://www.valuevillage.com/
[1] http://www.diabetes.ca/ - They're often responsible for the bin placement and even neighbourhood pickup of donated clothing and toys.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/retail/state-ag-sues-v...
The owner has a giant estate on Mercer Island near Seattle that's second only to Paul Allen's.
You can just do more good with the same amount of effort by finding distributors who aren't pocketing the bulk of the benefit. It is a small thing, and maybe not worth it to you; my general outlook here is that if it is worth the effort for me to take old stuff somewhere vs. tossing it, it is worth 10 more minutes to find the address of the local Quaker outreach, vets assistance group or some other honest nonprofit.
At least with Value Village I can see that people are being helped. f I donate elsewhere the benefits are difficult (if not impossible) to see.
To that end, I also donate items to the Salvation Army who also makes a visible positive impact on lives and communities. They operate on a non-profit basis.
Take for instance the Red Cross and Haiti as one of the most visible recent examples. They received half a billion dollars and achieved next to nothing. 25% [1] of that half billion was spent on "internal expenses." And they have very little clue or accounting of how the remaining money was even spent. Most of it was not even directly spent but instead donated to other nonprofits, who in turn took their cuts, and accountability quickly breaks down. According to that reporting from NPR, the "ambitious plan to build housing resulted in just six permanent homes" from that half a billion dollars.
That sort of waste and lack of any accountability is something that would rarely fly in any for profit business. Would that money in Haiti have been better spent by entrepreneurs looking to create housing/food and other necessities with open intentions of profiting in the long run? Maybe not a fair question since they'd have had to have tried hard to spend it worse, but that's the whole point. Aligning a good service with a good profit is, in my opinion, the true soul of capitalism. It's just such a shame that today it's often easier to make more money in less than ethical ways.
[1] - https://www.npr.org/2016/06/16/482020436/senators-report-fin...
Sending me home with half a trunk still full of stuff that VV is happy to accept doesn't encourage bothering to go to the Goodwill. I just want to drop my old stuff, easily, at one location reasonably near my house, where it won't completely exit the value chain like it would in a landfill.
And Goodwill is even worse to its employees. Many of their workers are paid well under minimum wage, under the FLSA exemption for disabled workers. Their CEO makes over $400k though.. (The Salvation Army is quite good on a costs ratio, but has political positions I can't support.)
5-7% of garbage is textiles, and could be diverted away from a landfill.
Markham has a lot of trash sorting rules (organic, recycle, textiles, trash, etc.), which we complained about when they were implemented. Honestly, i can't imagine not having them anymore. You'd be surprised how much of your waste (by weight) is organic and can be composted. Best part is, i throw it away like trash, but the city does the whole composter stuff most people can't be bothered to.
My girlfriend and I have taken up being more strict with our sorting and we almost never through out a bag of actual trash anymore. We don't often dispose of textiles, as we reuse old shirts (ice skate rags, and other cleaning) or donate other clothing.
I didn't know about Markham's textile recycling program, though. That's great.
IIRC, a local study showed that fluids account for 50% of the weight of trash.
Then keep the compostable separate.
Finally, let the recycling sorters do there their thing, because do a better job and the curb side logistics are more simple.
Separate handling for specialty stuff like sharps, rechargeable batteries, prescriptions, hazardous waste, etc, of course.
The local university's sustainability advocate group examined the campus' waste stream. IIRC, ~50 of the weight of the waste in trash cans was from liquids. From coffee cups, water bottles, soda cans.
Preventing this liquid from being bagged would reduce costs, weight, labor, etc.
My sole silly notion was a) put trash cans near sewers b) place a cup grinder / crusher on top of each can c) there's some kind of clever spout that diverts fluid into the sewer drain d) cup somehow falls thru to the can / bag.
Not very practical.
But maybe if it was made fun, like a big crank to manually turn, people would do it for kicks.
Of course, wealthier individuals will purchase and discard more as a result, and the refuse can simply be thrown into the ground. We are not running out of space to discard things.
http://www.waste360.com/operations/regional-landfill-capacit...
“Nationally, Staley says he estimates that the U.S. has about 62 years of landfill capacity remaining in its current facilities.”
Also, I firmly believe that our future technologically-more-advanced selves will have automated processes for reprocessing landfill waste, so this isn’t even a permanent state of affairs.
There isn’t much reason to have more than 60-80 years capacity for anything. Technology changes too much to develop more.
Just trust future us to deal with the fallout, no need to take any action now. Buy buy buy.
1) You have an initial difficulty managing environmental stressors.
2) As a coping mechanism, you vilify individuals who possess things you desire that seem unattainable.
3) You look for broadly-supported arguments supporting this vilification -- e.g., "things aren't made like they used to be" and "I want people to be treated well".
4) You adopt and repeat these broadly-supported arguments -- nobody would give you airtime for the underlying drive of "I want your resources/rewards, give them to me."
5) This repetition leads your mind to emotionally believe isolated arguments as fact, independent of their actual merit or relevance to the situation.
6) You gradually become blind to the underlying unfulfilled desires (including reduction of environmental stressors) that started this whole process, and adjust your identity to include rigid belief in your adopted arguments.
7) You are emotionally compelled to respond to anything that threatens your belief.
I'm excited that we're now able to break down the psychological mechanisms for maladaptive behavior, which inspires possible interventions.
For example, I'm encouraged by current trends promoting healthy ways of managing stress early in life, and interest in mindsets of loving compassion and open investigation of authentic desires; I suspect that these approaches and similar are likely to increase overall coping skills and self-reflection, which can lead to better outcomes for humanity.
'For anyone reading this with an open mind' - well, anyone could write that before any comment. It's a code phrase - people who agree with you are defined as having an open mind, etc? If not then, oh, you have a closed mind. I've heard that one before. Nice work if you can get it.
You talked past the person you responded to like they weren't a person at all. You are just 'excited' 'we' can treat maladapted close-mindeds like them? I can see nothing loving in that, nor healthy in your initial comment. Maybe we both (mis)understood it; I thought you must have been joking, but it seems not.
I dunno about the parent comment, but _I_ am excited about the chance to indoctrinate future generations more quickly and efficiently. This should cut down on needless obstruction of Progress.
Perhaps one way to break the cycle is to demonstrate and maintain empirical results well beyond expectations, decreasing the validity of the pessimistic interpretation.
I suspect that this system exists and proliferates because the men with guns also generally enforce a fuzzy minimal standard of honesty and civility in society, leading to some degree of stability and general prosperity, which most people seem to desire.
It’s fascinating to watch what’s happening with digital currency, specifically the degree of market manipulation and social engineering driving people into outright scams.
I think that humans have a general tendency to exploit other humans, when they have the opportunity to do so. Of course, the degree of this exploitation varies widely, dependent on many factors.
One of the big factors affecting the degree of exploitation is how much social connection you have with a given individual — someone is unlikely to sustantially exploit their best friend, for example, (and this is why it’s so shocking and unsettling when it does happen) but clearly more likely to exploit a random internet stranger.
This applies to group identities as well — I’m more likely to treat members of my organization well than random strangers.
National cohesion has a similar effect, where it exists.
It might be interesting to promote social cohesion between economic classes, and pay close attention to the details of any difficulties encountered.
My high school friend's mom had a "business" where she would buy truckloads of used clothes, some donated to go to Eastern Europe, some "diverted" from Africa and she would resell them to smaller distributors, who would setup shops in local markets or just on street corners. Compared to other people I knew they were fairly "successful" based on revenue from that "business".
I am sure people in abject poverty could use clothes. The problem is that it's not the lack of clothes, it's corruption why they don't have access to them. Same goes for food as well.
One a different note, try going to a local thrift store in a nicer part of town, I had luck finding nice used clothes there.
Goodwill does pretty good even in bad parts of town, because unlike independents where the store is also often the sole permanent donation center, Goodwill often operated separate donation centers, generally in more affluent areas, recognizing that supply and demand for used clothes are often not geographically aligned.
If they take clothes that were donated to a particular cause, and then resell them instead, that's not a valid business operation. That's a scam.
There are problems with the article itself though:
> new clothes are becoming as cheap as used ones
You can find $30 - $40 t-shirts from the GAP, and $3 - $4 t-shirts from Goodwill. The Goodwill shirts also have more cotton in them and so will probably last longer.
Most of my t-shirts are hand-me-downs or old t-shirts from Goodwill, and several are over 10 years old and among my favs. (Back then I only paid $1 to $1.50 each for them!)
There are cheap new t-shirts though: I once bought some at Wal-Mart and regretted it. They came in a bag so I couldn't try them on or get a good look at sizing, and lo and behold they were weirdly shaped around the shoulders and I couldn't really wear them. Just a waste of cotton.
Hell, Goodwill even has a fitting room.
Side note: it's fascinating how Goodwill manages to improve the community while having low prices, whereas Wal-Mart appears to impoverish it.
/s
1. Secondary Clothes Market - As trends move faster and clothes get cheaper, used clothes a) aren't as much of a deal and b) aren't what you want anyway. Moreover, as new clothing prices drop, quality drops as well. That means that fewer used clothes are fit for the secondary market in the first place—as they're less able to stand up to wear and tear.
2. Recycling Market - It appears we're in a glut right now, so "new" material can be manufactured almost as cheaply as "recycled" material. The cost savings with recycled material are offset by slower supply chains, lower relative quality, and fewer options. So why recycle, other than social good? (Which, it's worth noting, is an increasing buyer value.)
I expect the market may correct, likely in rising costs of new materials. In the interim, it's a race to the bottom for recycled material.
I do grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies, and many people misunderstand the extent to which nonprofits want money, not goods—especially used goods—or volunteers: http://seliger.com/2014/04/20/volunteers-nonprofits-really-w... . It's nice to see a mainstream outlet cover this underappreciated fact.
The most frustrating thing is the tags are not detailed enough. "Cotton" may describe the material but not the weave or the gauge of the thread.
Example (click details); https://shop.outlier.nyc/shop/retail/nyco-oxford.html
What you're looking for furniture wise is kiln dried solid wood, full-grain (not top, etc) leather, etc. You'd pay $5-10k for this quality of furniture in most stores.
Personally article.com is too mid-centry for me which is unfortunate. I haven't found anything like them that are more modern.
Joybird.com is kiln dried hardwood as well but they don't mention what type of leather they use so I've just assumed it's not high quality. They're mid-century as well.
I'd love suggestions if anyone has some. I need new furniture.
edit: Ok joybird is top-grain. That's more resistant to stain (has a finishing coat applied) but it's lses breathable and doesn't develop a patina. Also it tends to be shinier due to the coat/scraping off of top hide. https://joybird.com/leathers/
Another great US manufacturer is Labonville, out of Gorham, NH. They make fantastic work boots and other heavy-duty outdoor gear. Their logger boots are the most comfortable and durable footwear I've ever owned, and my wool jacket is going on ten years of heavy use, and looks like brand new.
We donate our children's clothes to friends (even if 30% is used by them its worth it). Also children grow so fast!
If we decide to discard them ourselves we do the following, in order.
* we each keep 1-4 sets of "paint" or "work" clothing
* long sleeve button down shirts are worn backwards as children art smocks
* a single t-shirt cut apart becomes 4 rags for cleaning, working
* a single t-shirt cut into about 20 strips becomes perfect in the garden to hold tomato plants to stakes, etc
* a whole bunch of old clothes gets vacuum sealed and stuck between studs in the shed to act as a great insulator (I dust borax on the layers of clothes to act as a flame retardant).
This seems like wishful thinking. H&M already operates programs where they accept old H&M clothes and give you a discount, working as both a guilt-reduction mechanism for those that want it and a customer retention strategy.
For example last week, I found an almost new suitcase near a trash bin. Out of curiosity I gave it a look. Inside were brand new clothes, new shoes in their box with still the price on it (around 250€).
I don’t know what people thinks...
Perhaps those countries are not that poor anymore then?
Surely it would be cheaper to keep it all local, right? Well, I saw a television program about a North Carolina company that is taking local-grown cotton, dying it with Indigo (also grown in NC), weaving it here, cutting and sewing it into a finished pair of blue jeans. Price? More than $200 per pair.
That $20 pair of cheap jeans at walmart (there are several brands to choose from) looks a lot more attractive to my budget.
added: What works for me is to get the $200 pairs from the local flea market for basically free.
(1) relatively low capital to get started due to the relative simplicity of the equipment and the age of the industry and equipment designs
(2) mostly low skilled, meaning that the government doesn’t have to invest a ton in training or wait a long time for enough folks to get the needed skills
(3) safer than most industries
(4) more or less guaranteed domestic market (everyone needs clothes)
Besides that, if you stop soaking up the supply by accepting imports, you certainly aren't going to be able to export competitively.
In my opinion, third world countries should be sending their folks to Delaware to study corporate law, and to various island nations to study offshore banking. After they have the principles down, pass legislation that turns the country into a sweatshop/boiler-room for intellectual property lawsuits and tax avoidance schemes.
The current state of the world is that you have to be rich to get rich, so if you pretend to be rich for long enough, you have a decent chance of either making that real or collapsing in a boneless pile of fraud. And if the latter would happen anyway, there's really no point in actually doing anything useful or productive to keep up appearances.
Basically using it as the first step towards industrialization.
Why textiles? Because its the easiest thing to manufacture. Clothing is light. So textiles are often made wherever there is cheap labor. They'd rather get a factory making iPhones, but that isn't happening.
At some point, the contents of category Y start looking a little thin on the ground.
I'm not sure why. Could it be the costs imposed on businesses — corruption, less-educated labour force and so on — are higher than in China?
[1] The remaining men and most boys wore cheap western clothes, mostly printed t-shirts. I saw lots of "X conference 2017" shirts, European and American football shirts, and company shirts. They were in good condition, so I assume they are either rejected or returned stock.
[2] http://madame-tay.blogspot.dk/2014/01/know-your-wax.html
Somewhat ironic, in context.
It's one of the most amazing rackets I've ever come across, taking $20 items from a yard sale, applying $25 worth of paint and lacquer, and selling it for $500.
I skip the marked-up resale shops and hunt for the stuff myself. It takes forever and a lot of the time the junk you find is truly junk. And that's having it pretty good, with plenty of furniture discarded on the streets of New York City and yard/garage/stoop/estate sales happening constantly.
But there article is about the current difficulty of finding someone to take things that can't be upcycled---the specific case are mills in India that can no longer evonomically recycle cloth into emergency blankets.
(If we didn't machine-dry our clothes they'd last a lot longer, but that's a different story.)
Or kid's clothes go either to friends or family with younger kids, or we give them to our cleaner who takes them to an orphanage in Ghana.
But with low manufacturing costs (no doubt driven by sweatshops and child labour), it's possible that recycling has become a lot less relevant than reuse. (Also: don't give away clothes with holes for reuse. Nobody wants that.)
The article isn't really talking about that market though, it's talking about the market for recycled textiles. If it's as cheap to manufacture new textiles as it is to use recycled material, then it's harder for recyclers to compete. If those recyclers go out of business, then rubbish clothing has nowhere to go but the landfill.
I couldn't believe the prices in the U.S. when I visited, I knew it was cheap intellectually, but seeing it in person was something else. And I don´t mind at all wearing an in-store return or using an open box or whatever gets me a cheaper price :) ... a lot of refurbished items make their way to Uruguay where they're sold at an U.S. new price...
I visited the local Kinkos to try to Fedex them, and I was told that Canada does not allow used clothes.
We will need newer better ways for recycle fabrics.