This stuff has value. It's a business opportunity. If you're doing it to feel good, or to make people feel good, then what you're doing will not scale.
Different industry, but similar story: https://discardstudies.com/2019/05/06/adam-minter-how-things... (covered here on HN recently)
There could be some deliberate behavioural psychology at play as well to curb growing awareness around waste in fashion. A background feeling of guilt of buying new by the shopper is negated in the immediate act of returning old clothes or by a future consideration of the act.
Before you say I should buy Second Hand: many kids clothes simply break by daily use. It is already common to give old children's clothes that are still OK to friends with smaller children, so it is not like the clothes are wasted by excessive consumerism.
What's $20 for a box of old clothes going to bring me?
On the topic of sustainability it's probably warranted to call them "the beast". Fast fashion companies are a big part of the problem if you look up how much water and resources are needed to produce a single piece of clothing. Of course having cheap clothing is great for the consumer in the short-term the same way that flying short distance instead of taking the train is comfortable, or commuting with a car instead of public transport.
Their clothing recycling program falls under the definition of green washing. https://observer.com/2018/03/hm-sustainability-conscious-exc...
Fast fashion - it depends on how much gets thrown away at the end of the day? Just because clothing has a heavy toll on the environment, doesn't mean companies producing it are evil. Toll on the environment or not, people need clothes.
It sounds like you are taking this for granted and something that can't be changed. In fact there are a lot of initiatives and companies that work on reducing the footprint, using sustainable sources of cotton, paying fair wages, using less harmful dying methods and filtering the water used in production. If you are interested in the topic I'd suggest to start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_fashion.
As for the green washing, there are probably better sources ([1], [2]) for that but you'll find enough if you do a little research yourself.
[1] https://ecowarriorprincess.net/2018/08/can-hm-ever-be-sustai...
[2] https://wellmadeclothes.com/articles/HMConsciousCollectionIs...
In any case, if you decide on that logic, everybody who shops at HM is evil, too.
At very basic level: have these "sustainable fashion" people figured out a way to grow cotton with less energy and less pollution? If not, they don't really have a solution for anything. If they have, they will probably prevail on the market anyway, without the "fair" marketing.
And the use of "fair" usually just implies that some people want to make the rules. I honestly don't care for that label, at least when it is used in marketing. In my opinion fair prices can only be determined by markets (with externalizations being paid for via laws).
This mostly works for children's clothes because children tend to outgrow them well before they wear out. It might not work so well for adult garments. I tend to keep my clothes till the patches start overlapping, then I turn them into rags for the local maker space.
It is nice to have such initiatives, but I am not yet convinced that they would be enough to make retailers of clothes superfluous.
Perhaps this has to do with the "fast fashion" push to always be churning out new clothing. Sell something that loses significant value in a few years, Get the customer to return it to you for (basically) free, and the Customer buys more clothes (more profit).
Forever21, Zara, Express, and H&M are all in the "fast-fashion" store bucket now.
> H&M's noticeable drop in clothing quality over the last decade
I have observed similar quality decrease with H&M, GAP and other brands. Technically (chem.eng.), it would make sense - but one has to look into the actual process in order to get clear insight.
My grandparents camp has a washing machine and fridge from the 1950s, still going strong. Meanwhile I’m on my 3rd washing machine in this house since 2010.
In the US I can typically sell my clothes for a decent return at my family's yearly yard sale. Anything that wouldn't sell such as old towels or items that didn't sell I can just take to h&m since they literally accept anything that is fabric.
It was even better when I was in Japan. My family always did yard sales or donated our old clothes but over there there really isn't a culture of getting things second hand, especially if they aren't in near mint condition like what you would find at BookOff or they have been specifically curated and put in a trendy store in Harajuku. My ex would just throw her old clothes in the trash until I did my research and found she could donate to H&M for that coupon. I think that's an overall net positive.
The problem here IMHO is that nobody else is seeing an opportunity to pay more than zero and make a correspondingly larger gain on the other end.
Waste is a strange thing. On the one hand, it's a physical thing. But it's also a stance about that thing. Once we label something as waste, it loses a huge part of its value in our eyes. Yet in practical terms, it never lost anything. That difference between perception and reality is a huge business opportunity.
You had a great point, but then you had to go full Homo economicus...
It's possible to combine good business or operational strategy with a value system that manages to include things beyond just dollars alone.
Sure it is, and that's fine. But the moral framing of the issue (recycling/reusing as a "good thing to do", as opposed to an economic opportunity waiting to be tapped) has the perverse effect of negating (in our head) the actual market value of the things we throw away.
To the point where Western consumers see a vast portion of the economy as intrinsically unviable and in need of support to sustain itself, when in fact (much of the time) it is not.
TBH, when it comes to this topic, I think Westerners would benefit from putting on the Homo economicus hat a lot more often. That's how most of the rest of the world thinks about it.
The market dynamics are one consideration that affect the moral evaluation of the situation, but there are usually others as well. If there are important aspects that the market, along with existing regulations, haven't fully integrated -- which is usually the case to one degree or another -- then one can make a moral case to not blindly follow the market's incentives alone.
If the incentives are particularly strong, the dicey part may be figuring out when and how when individuals can effectively subvert these systemic incentives or modify the system itself. I don't have clear or concise thoughts on that right now, other than believing it does occur from time to time.
It sounds like part of your argument is that the current moral values around recycling aren't fully reflecting the reality and what people actually care about (which is a larger set of things than the market fully captures). I think there is truth to that.
However, narrowly arguing about the market dynamics alone doesn't seem like the best path to me, given that we know market dynamics have their limitations.
So education (basically - changing the wants, satifying needs less destructively to the environment) is a good way to affect these things, too.