Many clothing donations end up in African landfills | Hacker News Reader

Many clothing donations end up in African landfills

expmag.com

268 pointsstereoradonc237 comments

> Today, the average American buys 68 new items of clothing per year.

> “You wonder, do people in America have so much money that they can just wear things once and then throw them away?”

I uh… I too would like to know. What scares me is that the use of whatever demographic is causing that average has to be way higher than the actual average, but this feels like it has to be bimodal.

And there are lots of these numbers in the news. The "average American" produces an obscene amount of food waste too, far beyond what I feel I actually produce, as best as I can estimate it.

I don’t believe that the average American buys 68 pieces of clothing a year. I’d like them to share the source of that. The author doesn’t offer one that I saw.

TBC, I think wearing something 3-4 times and discarding it is horrible.

I imagine they are counting everything, e.g. counting each sock as a separate item of clothing. Otherwise, there is no way the AVERAGE is 68 items per year.

Likely does include socks and underwear but the median is probably lower than the avenger age. I’m guessing this is a skewed distribution.

Now thinking about it, children—especially newborns and toddlers—go through clothes fast. They must be skewing the distribution.

Book this is extracted from and the passage is here...

https://books.google.com.ph/books?id=-4ODDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA3&dq=...

They don't seem to have a source. Not linked anyways. Sources might be listed at the end of the book.

ETA: Ah, they have the "source" in "notes." They are quoting a CEO of a retailer, so I guess they wouldn't ask sources. You would need to "fact-check" the CEO. ;)

I suppose you could just skip over all parts of the book which talks about numbers, because it's too much work to track those down to see if they are legit.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/rent-the-runwa...

> According to Jennifer Hyman, the C.E.O. of Rent the Runway, I am not alone. “Every woman has the feeling of opening up her closet and seeing the dozens of dead dresses that she’s worn only once,” she told me recently. Each year, as Hyman is fond of pointing out, the average American buys sixty-eight items of clothing, eighty per cent of which are seldom worn; twenty per cent of what the $2.4-trillion global fashion industry generates is thrown away.

So its probably a made up statistic so they can justify their business model of renting clothes.

On the other hand, if this number also includes socks, underwear, rain wear, winter wear, sports clothing, swim clothing, etc., it might be less absurd. And don't get me started on clothing for young children, of course.

Still, when you say "68 items of clothing", most people think pants, blouses, dresses, costumes, and the like. But that's the fun with statistics :-(

What about 1.5 pieces per week, including underwear? Seems more likely.

I've heard of people who buy new socks and underwear rather than wash them, but I doubt it's common enough to bend the average up.

Where I live, if you enter a random mall, perhaps 1/2 to 2/3rds of the shops sell clothing. And they live somehow and obviously attract enough customers - a cursory look will prove that they aren't empty.

There must be people who buy three or four pieces of clothing every week for years.

Kids grow out of clothing quickly and would shift the average number of new items up, but even then, I have trouble believing that it would shift it up by that much? Are they counting each socks individually too?

A lot of food waste happens in the supply chain before you ever get the chance to buy it which then gets attributed to the whole population.

I think there are quite a lot larger sources of waste than food or clothing in our economy where things could be engineered to last a lot longer and be more repairable but aren't so they will be purchased more often. (think heavy things: appliances, vehicles, tools, etc)

The most environmentally friendly thing I do is delaying replacing my totaled 12 year old car.

I think individual action like not buying a new car doesn't really save much in the production process (it saves only on the consumption side, like less gas being used in driving).

A car's required raw material is not going to be mined less because a few people decides not to buy a car - the iron ore and plastics are all going to have been mined at scale (thus, the marginal cost of a few more kgs of material is not a lot). The assembly/production line is going to run, costing energy and thus emissions. The car not purchased is going to sit in the lot - waiting for the next buyer.

only if a lot of people collectively drop their demand for a car would any real effect occur.

A lot of people are made of individual people.

You are assuming car companies always run their assembly lines at maximum capacity regardless of demand and you are wrong. Companies absolutely cut production regularly and have forever, not just in extraordinary circumstances.

An example from 2017, long before pandemic complications:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna775956

I'm curious what the source is as well. My growth these days amounts to growing wider and then thinner and I'm old enough to have clothes from both periods so there's no need to get more. So on one hand, 68 articles of is only imaginable if new socks are counted in the equation.

As someone with children, however, it actually seems low. Really young children will grow a couple sizes a year. Then you only cycle through an entire wardrobe (summer, fall, winter, spring, bathing suits etc) once every year or two. Eventually they get older but then there's activities, sports uniforms, girl scout uniforms, the latest sports star's jersey or ball cap, and otherwise start to care what they're wearing and want to be part of that decision making process.

So yes, while it's fun to paint Americans as waste engines who throw away clothes because they can't be bothered to wash them or wouldn't dare to be caught dead in something that's already been worn, I think the truth may be a little less sensational than that.

Thaats why hand me down clothes are a thing. Its most of what I wore, and my friends, and my siblings.

Living with my girlfriend really opened my eyes to how many clothes women go through. She even tries to be responsible about it and sell items to second hand markets, but I still think it’s a bit crazy.

- Women’s fashion cycles much faster then men’s. Office wear is a bit more stable but anything aimed as social settings like weddings may only provide a few opportunities to wear it before it’s out of style. Men can reliably wear a suit for years, but most dresses get only one or two wears.

- Women’s clothes have a much narrower size range. I can gain/lose up to 20lbs and still be in a similar size range. 10lbs for a women means most of her wardrobe no longer fits. Most mens clothes come in 4, maybe 5 sizes. Most womens have at least 6, maybe 8 or even 10 subdivisions. Most sizes are even numbers, so you might find an 8 or a 10, but at smaller sizes you may find 3s and 5s.

- Womens cloths just seem to be flimsier. Delicate fabricates and stitching mean they tear easier. Jeans have high elastic content so they wear our faster. Leggings rip easily. Knits are harder to care for than fleece or sweats.

I’m not trying to justify it, but I think many men, especially those who frequent this forum, probably have closets full of clothes that are 5 or 10 years old. Guys can wear a shirt for years to the point it’s vintage. If a woman does that, she will very often get judged by her peers.

Currently wearing a t-shirt I got in high school.

Did you graduate last year or 50 years ago? (Context is important)

Nearly 8 years ago now.

I still have a fleece top from 30 years ago and I still have boots from 35 years ago. I have a jacket that is probably close to 50 or more years ago. I have 1 suit, and it's probably also 30 years or more (I seldom wear it, it's basically just for formal events).

But yeah, many many items in the 5-20 year range.. plenty of ties 20 years, plenty of tshirts for sure 15 or more years, etc.

It's crazy how many clothes women have. Multiple closets worth. I have no idea how they can afford to just keep buying.

> I have no idea how they can afford to just keep buying.

Clothes can be exceptionally cheap these days.

You might think a basic suit costs $250 and a top quality suit $2500 - but you can actually get a suit for $25 [1]. You too can afford a large wardrobe of clothes that probably won't last very long!

[1] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000529996955.html

At the office several of my coworkers use a service in which they rent cloths. Kinda oike Netflix was for DVDs. You pick a few you like, they send them over and next month you send them back. All for a monthly fee.

Someone once told me the average piece of cloth only gers worn 7 times before being disposed of. Dont qoute me on that though :)

In a Bloomberg businessweek article this week on Rent The Runway the figure they give is that they rent the articles an average of 20 times before retiring them.

> If a woman does that, she will very often get judged by her peers.

True. We all reach an age eventually where we care little for the opinions of our peers on such matters. Wisest are those who make that realisation earlier rather than later!

That would limit career prospects in many fields.

So how do we tackle that, because that's bullshit.

So does calling out sexism and being socially conscious in general. It still has to be done.

It’s definitely true. I’m basically a T shirt and shorts guy and my son once told me it is a “flex”. I was surprised, and it really opened my eyes.

>It’s definitely true. I’m basically a T shirt and shorts guy and my son once told me it is a “flex”.

as opposed to what? having to wear a suit and tie?

Basically any activity-appropriate clothing (per social, not practical, rules). In most cases I can’t be bothered figuring out what clothes to wear. I mean sure, a wedding or a funeral I know, but otherwise? A fancy restaurant? Lawyer meeting? Giving a talk? Who cares?

I go to board meetings in my normal clothes, and with my dog, and until my kid said something it didn’t even occur to me to do otherwise.

I do remember buying a car years ago and my wife commenting, “At home [europe] they wouldn’t even let you in the door”. In the Vally they just want to do business.

> I do remember buying a car years ago and my wife commenting, “At home [europe] they wouldn’t even let you in the door”. In the Vally they just want to do business.

Doesn't match my experience. I assure you they'll happily sell you a car regardless of your attire over here.

Maybe I live in different environment. I see women wearing yoga pants and tank tops at official environment, and cheap plastic dresses at evening. Men are expected to wear expensive suits, watches, leather shoes and splash cash all around.

> Guys can wear a shirt for years to the point it’s vintage. If a woman does that, she will very often get judged by her peers.

I'm a man, in my early 40s, got recently lauded by a total stranger (younger kid, mid-20s I'd say) for wearing a 15-year old t-shirt which had become vintage in the meantime (an Emerica t-shirt, bought when I was in my mid-20s and when I thought that wearing skate clothing even though I wasn't doing any skating at all was cool). My feminine SO probably wouldn't have received the same reaction had she worn a 15-year old piece of clothing.

That said, there are some vintage clothes that women can also wear without being judged, but we're not talking about clothes that are worn on a regular basis, I'm talking about "that blouse my mom used to wear in the late 1980s and which is cool to wear in more hippy-ish environments from time to time".

When I was still going through life as a man, I had two dozen white dress shirts (12 short, 12 long sleeved...), three pairs of pants, a suit and summer and a winter jacket. The shirts would still be fine after wearing and washing them a hundred times or more. I replaced them at a rate of four a year...

After coming out as trans, getting a new wardrobe was fun, but... It's been a year, and some dresses really fall apart after wearing them a dozen times. Some actually cannot be washed and will lose all shape immediately. And that dress might have cost 80 euros or more. I also got some white, short-sleeved shirts because, habit, and after a couple of washes, they are gone!

And what you say about sizes is spot-on, too. Of course my shape is changing, and compared to this time last year, I've lost a lot of weight. Pretty much nothing I bought early on still fits.

Would gothy-style, belt-heavy designs work well here? I imagine Victorian women didn't rotate clothes at the rate implied here. This seems just ... bad

There's no benefit in producing robust clothing that can be washed and worn over many years if the populace at large is unwilling to pay for that robustness.

You'll just spend money to get provide a feature very few people actually care about and you'll hurt your competitiveness.

Much of the population was trained to be good little consumers and that's just what they are doing.

That’s not what I asked. I asked if gothy-style belt-heavy clothes would work to handle the vast array of bit of clothing might be obligated to handle, while still looking its intended style.

Consume or we spend the money on the military complex and start killing each other ;)

My wife actually buys her clothes from places like Aloria or Celtic Web Merchant, where you can get good, solid cotton and linen dresses. These can keep going for many, many years. But the medieval style doesn't suit me. I want to show off my legs :P

(The first dress my wife gave me was one of those, a large, red early medieval style dress. It is incredibly solid, but it makes me feel like an extra from Handmaid's Tale.)

Guy running shorts often have draw strings, but I guess then the pants aren’t vacuum formed to your thighs, so that may still mot be what you want? Or… bunches up waistline fabric, bleh.

My wife spent the past two years not buying new clothes, or donating things to offset any essential purchases. She buys almost exclusively from used/vintage clothing stores and at one point had a very small wardrobe.

(I think the term is "capsule wardrobe"?)

But I guess this stuff varies an awful lot depending on your occupation, and activities. She works in the medical field so she never wears her own clothes at work, for example. I suspect if you get a uniform of some kind, like that, then you don't need to worry quite so much about fashion..

My teenage daughter, whose fashion sense runs to the eclectic, gets basically all of her clothing second-hand online. She also wears a number of my old Hawaiian shirts that are still going strong after nearly 40 years of (admittedly occasional) use. So it is possible to source responsibly, but it helps if you don't set too much store by the judgements of the hoi polloi.

I can confirm, as a guy, I still wear 20 years old clothes. I only ever buy new ones when the older ones tear and I don't have anything else to replace them with already.

Some of my female relatives truly believe that no outfit should be worn twice, even for men. A piece might be worn a few times with different things, but never the same thing twice.

They have even criticized me for wearing the same tie two says in a row or not refreshing my t-shirt colours regularly. And I should have two suits in case I go to a two day event.

Much of the men's style stuff I see is about trying to find high-quality, neutral articles that can be worn over and over again, and in different contexts. They talk about things like "cost per wear" and "capsule wardrobes" and the like.

I couldn't imagine throwing out some of my favorite pants, shirts, or jackets until they were beyond repair.

Yeah, seems insane to me. When I find a piece I like I often buy it in multiple colors. Best of both worlds: Same great clothing and still some variation.

Meanwhile my most recent clothes purchase was 6 identical plain black t-shirts.

I'd drive your relatives crazy.

>>Meanwhile my most recent clothes purchase was 6 identical plain black t-shirts.

I do slightly better, find a shirt I like, then buy identical set in 5 colors, and I am all set until next years shopping 'spree' of $60 (5x$12)

I do try to use a few more colours, but black is my default "I can't be bothered to think about clothes today" colour... But absolutely for buying identical sets. I'm never ever again just buying one of something when I find something I really like, because I hate shopping for clothes, so whenever I decide I like something I go back and buy several more.

The answer is "yes". This is part of what makes America (and the rest of the world) so rich compared to the past. A while ago I was looking to buy a small knife for the kitchen and I found a whole pack of them. The average cost of each knife was 60 cents. The meal you prepare with that knife is going to cost more than the knife itself. That just blew me away. Imagine showing this kind of wealth to somebody from the medieval period.

Food waste is fine though. It's a side effect of food being incredibly abundant. It is the only realistic mechanism to fight hunger. You want food to be so cheap and so readily available that people are willing to easily write it off.

> Imagine showing this kind of wealth to somebody from the medieval period.

modern industrial production is mind bogglingly large scale. It required over 200 years of continuous investment (in aggregate) to achieve, however, so it was not cheap. And we reap that progress today.

It also required a lot of customers. An 8-billion mankind produces much more demand for things than a 1-billion one.

Well the issue with that is overproduction and saturation of the soils its grown in, to the massive amount of nutrients going into the groundwater except for those things over production is good /s

What is your argument? The person you replied to explained why this is necessary while we don't have more sophisticated supply chains to prevent hunger. Would you prefer more people die of hunger to not saturate some grounds?

I recognized that ecommerce makes life "easier" and can make people shopping addiction. I can tell it's amazon. It's so easy to buy , it's so easy to return thing I don't like, it's so easy to find cheap things...

There is a voice inside my mind, "hey you can buy this doesn't cost much and let's save up later." Well I'm not an addiction but that voice actually came up in my mind, and I spent a bulk of $

I can't tell you what I bought. The good news is that I still use some clothes I bought 3 or 4 years ago. I feel guilty but I know they have been my best friends...

I think people should really talk about mass market fashion vs luxury fashion. Many people seem to think that buying LVMH clothes or other luxury brands is somehow more ethical when those brands can be even worse. Those brands just sell far fewer items so it's not the same amount. If 99.9% of clothes are fast fashion than 99.9% of left over clothes should also be fast fashion, it's actually more like 100% as luxury brands will just destroy unsold merchandise usually to prevent damage to the brand.

I'm a guy so clearly things don't change as much but almost every piece of clothing I own is "fast fashion" that I'll wear until it's ruined. Consumers are told constantly by the media, social media and brands that they need to continuously change or be out of fashion and "cringe" or "cheugy". I think fast fashion companies in general are one of the least to blame for these trends, they seem to just copy quickly what is deemed as good but others.

Kmart in Australia is a good example. Most stores sell crappy out of date stuff so you have to shop online but Kmart has heaps of good cheap stuff under the Anko brand. From $3.70 t-shirts with a good fit, to $50.00 air fryers to nice containers to store stuff in. IMO it's a big win for most people to have cheap good stuff to buy. If it wasn't for Kmart it would be far harder to not be "cringe" while being poor. If the coolness industrial complex decides that this stuff is not good then Kmart would need to get rid of stock to replace it with new cool stuff. Is that Kmarts fault? I don't think so.

I think a lot of it is that (I assume) you can re-wear luxury pieces with far less perceived social judgement.

I buy mostly luxury brands however there are quite a few tricks with it.

Buying luxury off the rack at a well known store is almost always a bad financial decision.

I stick primarily to lesser known brands that still maintain good quality. I almost always buy used with just a few exceptions.

For some reason it is hard for me to find good pants used or with any sort of discount.

Where do you find second hand clothing? I use Facebook Marketplace for furniture and electronics, but I find it uncomfortable to buy second hand clothing from there

For the German and French crowd I can recommend videdressing (more on the luxury side) and Kleiderkreisel.

Sellpy in Sweden: https://www.sellpy.se/

Vinted

Good pants for men are still not invented yet ..

Two words: Japanese Denim

Where can I buy that?

Hiut use Japanese denim - https://hiutdenim.co.uk/

JCrew has excellent Japanese denim at a reasonable price

Also 5.11 denim pants. I don't know if they're Japanese denim or what, but I've stopped looking for another brand after owning these.

They should try the Disney vault model where they keep unsold goods in a warehouse for an ultra pricey limited release. The difference is that there would be actual scarcity, but yeah maybe warehouse costs would offset any profit. It would be nice to see the experiment though.

The difference is that the Disney “vault” stores information. It can be a simple RAID array. (Or two at different locations to protect against fire etc)

Storing information is ridiculously cheap and easy compared to storing physical goods.

Unsold stock takes up valuable space and if you don’t pay enough to maintain the right circumstances they start to get damaged too.

This is usually not a concern and in modern operations clothing is considered “non-perishable” compared to food but you need to make sure pests and moisture and sun can’t get to them if you want to store it for decades.

> The difference is that the Disney “vault” stores information. It can be a simple RAID array. Storing information is ridiculously cheap and easy compared to storing physical goods.

Yeah, I know which is why I mentioned "warehousing costs" and "actual scarcity".

I still feel that there's an opportunity here, where everyone wins. Collectors and fashionistas get access to something extremely rare, the fashion houses get to keep their existing marketing image while being able to have a "new" offering, and there's less waste.

According to Sivio Gesell nobody will consider storing physical goods if the storage costs exceed the return on money which is guaranteed to be 0%. Hence it is better to have a summer sale and throw unsold inventory away because money beats goods.

In Ghana, imported secondhand clothes are called obroni wawu, dead white man’s clothes. In Malawi, they are kaunjika — literally “clothes sold in a heap.” In Mozambique, they are known as calamidade, calamity, for their historical association with disaster relief aid.

Fascinating article if only for such an interesting glimpse into Africa and African culture and how it is being shaped by its relationship to the larger world.

In the Philippines it's Ukay-Ukay, which originates from a term which means "to dig." So, they're digging for good finds. ;)

Here in Nigeria, they’re called “Okrika”. Pretty funny names.

Donations of clothes from the West can also undermine local clothing industries.

This also happened with "cheap" milk powder from the EU to (iirc) Ghana.

Ghana was helping to finance the EU's overproduction of milk.

Also chicken wings. In the EU, nobody wants to eat chicken wings, just the bigger chicken meat parts. So the chicken wings end up for almost free in Africa and also destroyed every chicken farm, because the where more expensive than the chicken from EU.

Looking at the Chinese cuisine one starts to wonder about other parts. Wings are relatively popular, but what about things like feet, neck, head and organs? What we do with all of them? As clearly they are not even on the full birds.

Same goes for pigs. You can buy some, but the ratio is entirely off.

A lot of it is turned into processed meat and sauces (burgers, sausages, jars of pasta sauce). A lot of what is left over after that actually becomes animal feed again! Since BSE (mad cow disease) we need to feed animals to different animals though, so we no longer feed cows to cows, but e.g. turn cows to pig or dog food.

The parts which are thrown away are usually mandatory for hygienic reasons. The spinal column, remaining gut contents, ...

Source: worked at a pig abattory.

Yes. Meat recursion is a difficult area.

Chicken entrails are traditionally used in Europe too, but just like other entrails they have been slowly phased out of the average person cuisine.

Chicken feet used to be a standard chicken soup ingredient too.

Honestly I don't even see "chicken backs" much in Europe, tho they're still easy to find at butchers here in Hungary.

Interesting factlet; in Thailand chicken feet sell for over twice the price by weight compared to chicken breast (which is the cheapest part!). Despite a tiny amount of that weight being actual edible meat.

I have also seen them sold in supermarkets in Portugal, to my surprise.

IIRC China imports chicken feet from places like Australia at a premium, which I think started with lack of supply due to a bird flu. This required the foreign chicken farmers to dramatically improve the conditions of the chickens so that their feet were in good enough condition to sell.

All the chicken gets used, even if just turned into stock powder or fertilizer or chicken feed. I imagine the same goes for all the pig heads.

Ok but then don’t make a chicken farm, there are numerous other animals you can farm and it provides a baseline of food for the poor.

I have heard that chicken necks and feet are exported to China from EU Same for pig feet.

I reckon more pig feet end up in cat and dog food than end up in a recognisable form in Chinese cuisine.

In the West, people eat a lot of pig feet too! It's just sold as mince.

This is an important point. Establishing a clothing / textile industry has historically been the first step on the rung to industrialisation and moving from a low income, resource extraction based economy to a medium income manufacturing based economy, despite the deservedly poor reputation of the textile industry for environmental damage and labour exploitation.

Toms Shoes[0] is the classical example of this. I like the idea of things like Kiva[1] and did 214 loans with them over the years[2] but they have been looking a little sketchy lately. Rather than dumping goods and destroying local businesses I think investment is a better way to improve conditions in developing nations. For example in the US we have farm subsidies that buy up food at above market prices and ship it to struggling nations, but I'd argue it would be much more effective to take those same subsidies and invest in local farmers instead. If you do it right the cost of that program isn't much more than the cost of inflation plus currency differences over the course of the loan.

[0]https://www.vox.com/2015/7/23/9025975/toms-shoes-poverty-giv...

[1]https://www.kiva.org/

[2]https://www.kiva.org/lender/williamcipriano

What do you think is sketchy about Kiva lately?

Kiva has always seemed to have people who aren't fans of the model and has had problems in the past[0]. Lately it's been more of a feeling, the messaging has a corporate spin to it that makes it harder to give them the benefit of the doubt. A specific thing is they have done recently made the page where you withdraw funds harder to use, and it seems like they have stopped sending emails to me when I have funds available in my account.

[0]https://blog.givewell.org/2009/11/16/not-our-last-words-on-t...

Kiva sends me emails weekly, asking me to relend my funds as they get paid back. So the email is not the problem. In fact, I get emails from them every few days.

The thing that I wonder about Kiva is the "donate to Kiva" part. If you lend, and re-lend as money is paid back, and re-lend again, with the default "donate to Kiva" settings... eventually, after a couple of years, 100% of your money ends up in Kiva's hands and not a poor person.

But that said, I never expected to withdraw my money back.

Hopefully the climate change issue could motivate to change this. Even if this stuff is piling up in a place sight unseen from the origin, it's still coming back to that origin in ways which we don't well understand.

Just as the pandemic accelerated global cooperation and change, so could the climate issue. If the US wanted to shut down this problem, regulators could find the key spot to put a bullet into. Ideally the US would take the responsibility that comes with globalism after nuking the world with trash.

Trash is how I view everything I buy. I'm walking into a store to buy trash. It doesn't matter that I still wear a belt daily which I have had for 15 years and much of my clothes are seriously straining from overuse. It still goes to trash eventually. If I take it to my grave, then I'm trash wrapped in trash. When I first stayed in a developing country, there was no trash service for much of the region. If you wanted to get rid of something, you burned it. Today I do all my shopping considering what it would be like to burn it. Car shopping would be so much fun.

Don't think it matters what we do individually. This needs to be an urgent thing taken at levels where people actually have power to change things.

Also, I think the issue is that this is essentially a scheme to cheaply get rid of trash. You could probably pay these importers to take the trash and it would still be worth it. "You mean, you'll pay us to take our trash?! Thank you so much for solving that nightmare of a problem for us. This was looking REALLY expensive for us to deal with in our own country."

> Just as the pandemic accelerated global cooperation and change, so could the climate issue.

Not to be negative but how did the pandemic do anything but prove we’re pretty bad at cooperation ?

Clothes are a small source of CO2 emissions compared to transportation and electricity.

> Just as the pandemic accelerated global cooperation and change

No, cooperation has gotten worse. Look at how many countries want to repatriate industries so they're not dependent on others.

> Today I do all my shopping considering what it would be like to burn it. Car shopping would be so much fun.

I'll just leave that one there.

> I think the issue is that this is essentially a scheme to cheaply get rid of trash.

Trash isn't that expensive to get rid of, and, at least the US, isn't running short on places to store it. I have no idea why clothes in poor condition are still worth shipping to developing countries unless charities just feel really committed to doing something.

Haha, the trash issue actually did help my consumption. I didn't have much of a choice at the time, so I lived like I was camping and did manage to keep my trash down to almost nothing. I had a laptop, clothes and some gadgets. Many drinks come in bottles which really do get re-used. I can get meat and veggies at the market with no packaging. Certainly, burning trash isn't good for the environment though.

As for cheap trash, I don't do research into that. It's not expensive to get rid of trash, but it must come with significant enough expenses that it can be shipped via container to another country. Though maybe we're not using the correct terms. This article is talking about clothes. The origin countries may have logistical difficulties with certain types of things which would otherwise go into a landfill. Throw one shirt into the landfill? Fine. Bring dump-trucks of clothes? Maybe now we have a problem. Same for E-waste (also an issue here in the form of used computers which are barely usable.) I could see shipping this stuff overseas as taking a major problem off someone's hands. I imagine it's massively expensive to clean up for plants which deal with large volumes of the worst chemicals, but they deal with high enough margins to pay for the clean-up and some things you can't pawn off on someone else without moving industries (exporting waste and pollution creating manufacturing to China.)

ETA: Recyclable materials is another "trash-like" item which gets shipped. I believe China has since blocked this?

>The origin countries may have logistical difficulties with certain types of things which would otherwise go into a landfill. Throw one shirt into the landfill? Fine. Bring dump-trucks of clothes? Maybe now we have a problem. Same for E-waste (also an issue here in the form of used computers which are barely usable.)

I don't think there's anything special about clothes that make them particularly hard to dispose of, unlike e-waste. My municipality has warnings specifically for e-waste, but none for clothing. The non-cynical view of why we ship ewaste and/or clothes to china is that they're valuable on net, even if 80% of it or whatever are thrown away. You see this with e-waste. They're not just imported into the country and then dumped in the nearest river/landfill. They're sent to a recycling center where scavengers pick through them to recover what's left.

Not how I imagined a "recycling center" to actually be an overseas landfill.

Watched an interesting video of how H&M are dealing with textile waste:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obO1PKfXGpQ

What I've anecdotally seem is that it makes these fast fashion "green brands" pop up who claim to plant trees or use "organic" materials instead of common sense reuse, recycle point of view.

If they would sell clothes from recycled fabrics, the quality would probably be very poor. The technology to separate fabrics of mixed content (cotton, synthetics) is not good enough.

The whole commercial system is so full of perverse incentives. It is absolutely horrible what we do to your planet but there is so much momentum behind this. Someone near me loves to throw things away. I kid you not. Mountains of disposables, perfectly good stuff gets replaced just to get something new. And let's not get started about the amount of food that goes into the waste bin even though there is nothing wrong with it other than that an expiry sticker says it is now one day over time.

Personal status report: articles of clothing bought in the last year: 0. Articles of clothing bought in the last three years: still 0. And I don't think I'll be buying any for the next year either and then likely I'll buy some underwear and socks.

But for my kids (who are growing quite rapidly) it is a completely different story and I suspect that that is one factor that pushes up that average.

Positive interest rates are by definition short term thinking.

The borrower must pay sooner than later. Investors will not be satisfied with companies that perform worse than the interest rate.

Once an item of clothing wears out too much to wear in public, I wear it around the house or sleep in it. During the pandemic I've rarely had to wear `decent' clothes. On video calls I just temporarily put on a non-worn-out top over whatever I'm wearing.

Unfortunately I do have to buy replacement footwear quite regularly (50+ miles on foot per week). But a worn out pair of shoes does for working in the garden, and worn socks as slippers round the house.

So, eventually, my clothes end up in UK landfill, once they are too worn out even for me (which can be after decades).

I'm the same. My girlfriend is constantly wanting to throw out some of my clothing items, and I'm thinking "I could probably still wear that for another 10 years!"

I have started buying clothes from USA _because_ they are of higher quality. Even though they are made in my India, they are usually not available for sale here. The quality and variety available for exports is drastically different from what is available for the local market. Mine have lasted at least 2-3 years before I buy a new set of clothes.

I wonder why there is a huge churn in USA to keep buying new clothes. Is it just more affordable/cheaper to buy than to mend your clothes? Easier access that makes it binge buy quickly? Too many special occasions? I am confused cos I feel they haven't seen inferior quality of clothing that they don't keep their belongings longer.

I'm an American that doesn't buy new clothes often, but I want to provide my view. My clothes last a lot longer than 2-3 years. To get to the point that they're ragged or faded takes a long time for most of them. (The very cheapest t-shirts from online sites are the exception. I don't buy those any more.)

On the other hand, my wife gets great pleasure from getting new clothing. She has a lot more than I do, and still she buys more. She is genuinely excited about wearing and showing off the new clothes she bought. When she gets a compliment about them, she is very, very happy.

Strangers aren't likely to give those compliments, and friends aren't going to compliment the same clothes again. To get those feelings, she needs new clothes.

All that said, she doesn't buy as many clothes as many of the vapid women/girls that I've met over the years. She's responsible with her money and doesn't buy excessively. But watching her emotions about the ones she does buy informs me a lot about the less responsible women out there.

I don't know any men like that, but I have seen them on TV (especially "reality" shows), so I'm sure they exist, too.

In case she is open to discussing this, it's a fairly common problem. It can be resolved by finding another source of praise, for example volunteer work or teaching, or exceeding in extra activities in her field. She is not needing new clothes but attention, and there are healthy ways to achieve that. Experience: my own (as a woman) and various friends over the years.

Hey please have a look at my reply above. My wife would definitely love to make better friends to talk about something other than clothes/earrings. As a woman how do you handle such situations when your self worth is evaluated by the newer clothes/things you wear as opposed to talking about your success in your career?

I should have added "attention and validation" as these are normal social things that we all need. Wanting these are not bad, it's just how we get them that can sometimes be unhealthy.

Is it possible your wife has lower self-esteem? It becomes a vicious circle, as you seek ways to increase it using the best ways you know, until you become self-aware enough to step out of the pattern. Does she have opportunities to be praised by other women for non-material or visual qualities? We all need this.

I don't think she has a "problem" per se. I think her clothes buying is entirely within reason, and she makes wise decisions about when to buy or retire clothes.

I was mainly extrapolating her feelings for new clothes to others who spend a lot more on clothes.

Thank you for your reply.

> On the other hand, my wife gets great pleasure from getting new clothing. She has a lot more than I do, and still she buys more. She is genuinely excited about wearing and showing off the new clothes she bought. When she gets a compliment about them, she is very, very happy.

My wife feels the same way. We both have discussed this and have a hypothesis that the compliments for her new clothes is received more often from women (and men sometimes) who belong to the previous generations. We feel this is partially because during their lives buying clothes was more of a luxury than an everyday thing, mainly due to scarcity. Traditionally new clothes have been bought for festivals and kept and cherished for the years to come. This came to around 5-10 new clothes per year. But now we can just buy whatever whenever.

> friends aren't going to compliment the same clothes again. To get those feelings, she needs new clothes.

Another observation we have is that we have been groomed by the previous generation to like newer clothes that we arent able to appreciate the other things in our lives. My wife has a successful business which she started at the start of the pandemic, but this gets a lot less discussion than what she wears or what plants she grows at home. We feel this is also reflected by how the previous generation might have defined self worth for a woman.

> Is it just more affordable/cheaper to buy than to mend your clothes?

I'm not from the US (EU instead) but mending clothes is almost never cost-effective for me, because it's hard to do well, and would cost more than most garments (either in time, or in paying somebody to do it).

I still sometimes mend my clothes for fun.

I agree with you. I think I should have been clearer. By mending I meant small tears or threads coming off. Not full blown tears which can just be used to clean your table.

Depends, buying is cheap, so why not - meanwhile also having so much clothes can be annoying. Easier to get rid of them, then sell them and such.

>>so why not

The 'why not' only matters if you care about the planet, buying and replacing things that don't need to be purchased in the first place is horrible for the planet in every conceivable way.

I recycle things when I can, but I am a firm believer that not buying things that won't last or that you don't need - is much much better than separating your plastic and cardboard in the recycling bins - most of which just ends up in the landfill anyway.

I agree, but consumerism/shopping is a hobby in the USA. You can choose to buy quality, but it will not be the same price point. Shoes from H&M vs LL Bean are a huge difference in price and quality.

Having had my sleep interrupted by a toddler bed wetting situation, I just spent 2 hours typing a novel about the human condition on my phone rather than sleeping, and then slipped and accidently swiped "refresh". Long story short, the reason why Americans buy excessive amounts of consumer goods is because they can and have for 3 or 4 generations and it's culturally normal. There's fleeting happiness from the small reward of dopamine in your brain from spending money, and an economy optimized for it built on top of unprecedented abundance since the late 1940's.

A lot of Americans are uninformed about quality, and are well enough off not to need to be. As an extreme example, a few weeks ago my young nephews were really excited because a "$400" drone was "on sale" for only $100 in limited quantities! "Daaaadddd we HAVE to buy it. We'll use our own money!" Luckily I was there and, as their uncle, have no problem crushing their hopes and dreams. I work on autonomous aircraft professionally, so it was pretty easy to explain thoroughly and painfully (for them) why it was junk. I made it a point for them to understand that despite the fact that they had the money, they couldn't really afford to buy it. If they did, they would have fun for about 90 seconds until it crashed and broke, and then they would have a pile of e-waste and no money.

Adults are generally wiser than children, but still frequently irrational (not to imply that that's a bad thing). My wife orders and returns clothes often times as a way to cope with stress and anxiety. It's several orders of magnitude cheaper and easier than therapy (which is a rather unfortunate state for our society), and her experiences as a child led to her developing a scarcity mindset. She also hates clutter, and will tend to either pack things away never to be seen again or readily throw things away on a daily basis.

I'm fairly opposite. I rarely buy clothes; the average age of any item of clothing I own is probably 10 years. I'll hand sew holes to keep my favorite shorts on life support. My experiences as a child lead to developing an abundance mindset. I appreciate order but don't mind clutter, and like to know I can find something within 10 minutes of looking, even if it's been a few years, because it's exactly where I left it. I don't throw things away without some premeditation, because I bought it with some premeditation.

We have fun together!

> I don't throw things away without some premeditation, because I bought it with some premeditation.

I like this. Lately I've been thinking about what I own. I've come to the conclusion that if I'm going to own something, I want it to be good, and I want to have made a deliberate decision to own it. But I also have a bit of a minimalist side to me and can't stand clutter, so to me the decision to buy something is a big one, because I feel like I need to consider the whole lifecycle of that object first (Where will I keep it? Can I easily bring it with me? And how will I eventually dispose of it?).

> If you live in the West, chances are at some point you have stuffed your used clothes into a garbage bag and hauled them off to a Goodwill or the Salvation Army.

Please don't let this article put you off donating clothes to good causes. I know that (for instance) in the UK the Red Cross sells as much as it can, and only the unsellable stuff (ripped, stained etc) goes out to 'rag' with the recyclers. Clothing is even cycled through different shops if one can't sell it. So I'm really not sure that 10-20% figure holds up globally.

Something this article glossses over is that this stuff is not just being dumped - it's being bought. I think it's wrong that (for instance, in the article) the US interfered in law-making in various places to veto restrictions on the trade, of course. But fundamentally, the countries need to get a handle on dumping and start factoring that into the price of doing business.

Yes, westerners could buy less crap, and they could also do more shopping for used stuff themselves. But that's only part of hte picture.

Everything that gets produced eventually lands in a dump. The moral justification for shipping stuff your nation has no use for anymore, i.e. your garbage, off to Africa needs to be discussed. Some of that stuff will find second use, which is good in some ways and bad in other ways, but whether that happens or not, everything that gets shipped to Africa will end up in a dump in Africa sooner or later - unless it gets shipped away again somewhere else.

Metal is economic to recycle, so is probably glass. Paper so-so (unless greasy), plastic almost never, cotton neither.

Growing up, it was completely normal to look at my older brothers clothes and pick which I wanted 2 years before it was handed down to me.

Then we got MTV. When our mother travelled on business, we would make print outs of shoes and clothing that we wanted. God forbid someone caught you with an off-brand shoe at school now that the poorest kid under the hot sun of Saudi Arabia was fashion aware. It was wasteful, it was expensive, it was less than 5 items each a year.

I can't even imagine what it's like to buy 68 article of clothing a year. But then again a wise author once said: "Ending is better than mending."

That's conspicuous consumption gone mad, it seems to me too many people have far too much disposable income.

What is it about people that they cannot be content with their clothes in that they have to change them long before they're worn out? This is fashion gone mad.

I never throw out clothes, and I can keep the same items for many years - I've still got jeans, BD dungarees, etc. that I bought over 20 years ago. When they eventually become threadbare I tear them up for cleaning rags.

What the hell is wrong with these people that they can be so wasteful?

Much of this isn’t conspicuous consumption it’s a lack of reuse inside of developed nations. Low quality clothing is so cheap it’s hard to fathom, making buying new simply easier and just as affordable.

“In 2019, American families spent on average about 2% of their income on clothing.” It’s vastly more affordable than “In the 1950s, the average American family spent about 10% of its income on clothing, and that money bought them just a few sturdy garments a year.”

Thrift shops went from a way to save real money at the cost of time to a fashion statement.

"Much of this isn’t conspicuous consumption..."

Perhaps not.

However where I live the amount of dumped clothing is unbelievable. Charities that once used to take almost any amount of clothing now do not. Instead, they'll take the top 10% of it and dump the rest - 'dump' here means send the rest overseas to third world countries.

Moreover, not that many years ago, these charities used to have used clothing collection bins - great big steel boxes about as tall as a person with a hinged lid at top - scattered all over conspicuous parts of the city and they have been all removed because the charities no longer want the responsibility of dumping huge volumes of stuff (as it's many times more than they can cope with and it's long past the point where if they were to accept the clothing then it would cost them money to it.

Essentially, these charities have been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of clothing. Now, they are very picky about what they will accept.

If one now wants to give clothes to a charitity then one has to take it there themselves. The charitity will then pick the eyes out of it and what it does not want the donor will have to find somewhere to dump the remainer.

Now, much clothing goes directly into the trash can thence to landfill.

If you wondered why my post was so cynical now you know.

A lot of the super cheap stuff from Shein is so utter shit quality it won't last more than a few wears.

And it's almost all plastic.

I can't stand synthetic fabrics I feel like if people were exposed to real materials they would learn it feels better and last longer. And is fashionable. Real wool, nice cotton, silk. It lasts a long time if it's constructed & woven well.

I don't know if it's actually better in terms of co2 but sustainable livestock and cotton seem better than plastic.

I would bet a lot of the typic HN 'dude engineers' don't even know their shirts are plastic.

"A lot of the super cheap stuff from Shein is so utter shit quality it won't last more than a few wears."

Then why do people buy the stuff? I just do not understand their mentality. I buy good clothes to last.

Let me give an example, I have a number of pairs of BD-like dungarees which I bought brand new several decades ago (they're not ex military but a high quality clone thereof). These are my knockabout do-anything in clothes and I'm damned if I can wear them out (sometimes I wish I could as I'm getting tired of the greeny color). What's more, they we dead cheap - about one third the cost of say Levi 501 jeans.

So you can buy cheap good quality clothes if you take the time to look. I'm no gift to sartorial excellence, so I suppose that's an advantage. Give me durability over fashion any day. Besides, that type of clothing is usually much more comfortable and practical than the fashion-laden equivalent.

I'll try to say this in a polite way, but if you're presenting dungarees as an example of a good purchase, explaining fashion simply isn't possible. It's like trying to explain to a typical old woman born and raised in rural Belarus the value of a a fine set of chopsticks, or a Mormon the value of a fine coffee grinder. Your reason for buying clothes is completely fine--but it's not at all what motivates people who partake in this problem.

For younger people, fashion is a way to show off to people or be comfortable in various situations. It's much easier to spend $150 on a set of new clothes to try impressing a date than it is to try impressing someone with your car like people may've tried decades ago. And trends change often these days, so people change their clothes often as well.

I'm not defending it. I buy one pair of pants and one or two shirts a year. But it's not a thing you're ever going to "logic and reason" people out of.

"For younger people, fashion is a way to show off to people or be comfortable in various situations. It's much easier to spend $150 on a set of new clothes to try impressing a date than it is to try impressing someone with your car like people may've tried decades ago."

That's the real problem, the world can no longer afford that given the environmental crisis. They cannot have it both ways: millions of young people are always whingeing that the older generation has left them with a horrible environmental legacy that they'll have to clean up. Well, I suggest we start by pointing to them that to continue with both behaviors would shown them up as hypocritical.

Of course all those in the rag/fashion trade or the overly fashion conscious will vigorously disagree—mainly that to do otherwise would reduce their incomes.

The fact remains, we're using and wasting cotton in huge amounts and the amount of water needed to produce cotton is outright enormous—just phenomenal. Essentially the world's ecosystem can't afford it. If you want to be reminded of exactly how much that is that damage then I'd suggest you see what happened to the Aral Sea because of cotton growing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea. Right, cotton growing has essentially made the sea disappear. This really ought to be a wake-up call to the clothing and fashion industries.

"But it's not a thing you're ever going to "logic and reason"

Hike the price and it'd have an effect, so would nuking clothing and fashion industry ads (like the tobacco industry) and it may have to come to that. If I had any say in the matter (which I never will) I'd put an environmental tax on cotton (in first world countries only where the main waste occurs). What's needed is a cultural shift that it's not cool to show off this way. Like any other cultural shift, it'd take quite some time but it;s not impossible. If things continue to go from bad to worse governments may even force the matter.

BTW: That example was for knockabout clothes. I also have much better clothes right up to a 'money suit' complete with bow tie, although I've not updated any in recent years because almost all of them are AOK—i.e.: not out of fashion (it's actually quite easy to buy clothes whose fashion hardly ever changes). If I'm going to a formal dinner then I definitely look the part, same goes for a processional engagement (dealing with clients etc. one must be very particular and I never look out of place there either).

Re cars: I've never had one good enough to impress anyone (to me, vehicles are only a means to an end and I often wonder why they impress so many). Currently, I don't even own one. Environmental waste and the enormous waste of human effort is the result of the premature turnover of vehicles and it is an unmitigated environmental disgrace. Again, much of this is driven by fashion 'forced' on people by the manufactures and advertising industry (i.e.: same as the clothing/fashion industry in that they 'manufacture consent'—a feeling of need to continually want to buy and or upgrade their clothes).

They were trained to be good little consumers and they are doing a splendid job.

The weird part of this isn’t that fast fashion generates a lot of trash. Almost every part of the American lifestyle generates tons of waste. The strange part is that the US strong arms African countries into buying the “donated” garments from textile recyclers. I’ll be throwing my used garments directly into the landfill in the future.

The recycling industrial complex is a total mess in general. American recycling also gets dumped on South East Asia (mainly China if memory serves) where much of it is just waste.

There's a reason recycling is the third R, and it should primarily take the form of other people reusing your stuff anyway - not throwing items in a specifically coloured bin and calling it a day.

No, China specifically outlawed a lot of the recycling trade that was coming in, and it caused havoc to municipal recycling a few years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_National_Sword

Yeah I knew about this - China reacted negatively to this process in describing, but no doubt we're all sending it elsewhere now.

China isn't part of Southeast Asia[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast_Asia

Oh yeah

Oh yeah, pardon my brain fart.

Sound more like the US government won’t allow African governments to maintain tariff-free and trade-barrier-free access to US markets without the African governments reciprocating. It’s the African customers choosing to pay the American recyclers, not the US government.

Clearly African governments think its in their interests to maintain that trade deal - that’s probably why they agreed to it in the first place.

And yet we outlaw plenty of things that have negative effects on society. And of course, our biggest trading partner (China) does not allow free market access to US companies. Don’t pretend this about some lofty ideal. It’s about profit, pure and simple.

One of the great talking points of capitalism is that competition breeds efficiency, so no: the complete decoupling of production from demand is at least A weird part.

The article mentions that clothing fell from 10% of the average US households budget to 2%. That sounds like efficiency to me, especially if more clothes are being purchased.

Sounds a lot like clothing is now “post scarcity”.

I’d have thought that was a positive thing but from the articles moral panicky tone, I guess it’s just another thing we need to feel guilty about.

> Sounds a lot like clothing is now “post scarcity”.

Only a tiny step further along the path towards post scarcity. One of the parts of post scarcity that is rarely covered are the full ramifications of increasing mastery over matter and energy. Trash is a civilization's admission its technology and science haven't yet mastered how to use low embedded energy, the same way money implies poverty (h/t Iain M. Banks).

I'm in e-commerce, and reading through this thread I think many people have the misconception that people make purchases to solve problems and want that solution to last as long as possible.

In reality, and this is something I spent a long time coming to terms with, much shopping is done because it's fun. Spending money isn't a cost - it's the whole point of the exercise.

Did shopping become fun because fast-fashion clothes were cheap, or did clothes become cheap because shopping is fun?

I'm also e-commerce-adjacent, but I believe fast-fashion (especially synthetics) is bad for humanity. Sure, people are making loads of money[1], but it's an ecological disaster in the making.

1. Me included, but only getting a little. Shein is getting ALL the money.

Fast fashion only opens the door for "fun" to be had be normal people. Rich people going on a buying spree has generally always been a thing.

In fact the processing of "natural" fibers is much more harmful to the environment then synthetics.

Whether it's harmful or not depends on the lifespan of the garment and whether or not that "natural" garment replaces enough throw-away garments to make it worthwhile.

Sure, it's totally possible for a well-made synthetic garment to last as long or longer than a natural one (many of our dead uncle's double knit polyester slacks are still kicking-it in a thrift store somewhere). But we're talking here about "fast fashion", which is entirely cheaply made garments that, by definition, have a short lifespan. These are typically synthetic fabrics or cotton/polyester blends.

You're confusing this just with "fast fashion clothes." Shopping can be anything. Also in e-comm, but have good prices, social media approval and you can sell anything for a cause, because it's popular or such.

It s always been a bit fun, I think people at the market 400 years ago liked the bartering and choosing and spending as much the chicken they ended up with.

There's nothing wrong with mercantile pleasure per se. It's probably an incentive/reward mechanism in the brain to encourage comfort.

It's possible for both to be true. People make purchases that are fun, and they'd like said purchases to solve some problem (and preferably with decent quality).

Like, when I make silly gadget purchases, yes it's fun to acquire the gadgets, but I'd like them to be good products that last too.

>but I'd like them to be good products that last too.

How much does this really affect your purchase, though?

If you bought a Garmin watch that failed after 3 years, would you buy the new model?

What if the same thing happened with your car and they refused to fix it? Would you buy the same brand again, or would you tell every single person you know to avoid them like the plague?

I think the thing is, that above $X, people really do expect a product to solve a problem effectively. Under that amount, though, much of what people spend is just frittered away.

This happened to me with Fitbit. The first lasted longer than 3 years, and I was happy with that. The second didn't, and I wasn't... But I bought another. When that failed early, too, I gave up on them.

For a tool, I don't want it to fail on me, ever. I don't enjoy learning to use a new tool for the same old purpose. I want it to just keep working. When I'm ready for a new way of that tool working, I seek it out. I do not want it forced on me.

That said, I also treat clothes as a tool. I buy new ones when I want something different, but until then I want them to continue as they had. When I'm sick of them or they wear out, I use them for woodworking, painting, etc, until they finally just are too ugly or damaged.

Ihave a phone and tablet rhat i'm still fine with but both no longer get security updates. its hare to root these things to replace the OS. I thought one was going to update old firmware longer than it did. Companies have learned force obsolescence makes them more money; they are not responsible for helping dispose of the devices. Seems like we don't get much choice other than to not play the game I guess.

I'm in the minority then, I hate shopping it only brings me stress and not joy. I think I haven't bought new clothes (except underwear) in the past two years.

I suspect you're in the majority of shoppers, but the minority when weighted by dollars spent, which is OP's chief concern.

I think some shopping is ‘security’ and ‘self-sufficiency’ impulses. However, at some point this tendency is exploited (leveraged) by industry and augmented by the tendency to peer pressure. Kids made fun of other kids who wore the same clothes over and over, for example. Not all groups succumbed to this, of course. The ‘punk’ and ‘metal’ kids didn’t get into that as much as others (though they each had their own ‘uniforms’) but they tended to be more static and you wore what you had… you didn’t need the latest Nikes (or these days Canada Goose) or what have you.

I refuse to fault fast fashion for these issues when the amount of trash free t-shirts given away for free at any conference could probably build a mountain on its own.

Was working at a startup and walked past a homeless person wearing our company shirt. Person wore it every day for many weeks on the same bench. Only homeless bench on that street. So we had exclusive homeless advertising.

The volume of clothes produced and discarded by fast fashion far outweighs whatever is given away at conferences.

Those are the opposite of fast fashion, being both completely unfashionable and oddly long-lived. I have event t-shirts that are almost old enough to vote. And then of course, they have a long afterlife, first as painting shirts and finally as cleaning rags.

I’m presently wearing a shirt I got at COMDEX

Many people don’t use or like conference shirts. Your mileage may vary.

Always thought it would be funny to create an "app" that funneled unwanted swag back to the homeless/people who need clothes.

A lot of horrible shirts.

Yet one of my favorite t shirts was a black Linux-distro shirt from the mid(?) 1990s with a cool, flaring sun (Caldera?).

I only stopped wearing it when it was so worn out that it ripped in the washer, in the early 2000s.

Can "this" and "this" and "this" be donated somewhere and put in good use ?

Chile’s desert dumping ground for fast fashion leftovers

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29155488 [1] https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/11/8/chiles-desert-du...

The article describes a world of affluence, reaching deep into the poorest parts of Africa. Gone are the days when people would have to be naked when they washed the only piece of clothing they owned.

Somehow this eradication of third world poverty is bad. Because everything is bad if you want to think of it that way.

Just one point: Clothing ending up in landfills are a form of carbon sequestration.

There is a lot of garbage which should just be burned. Most fast fashion is made of plastic which was made of oil and the fact that the oil spent a little time as a shirt shouldn't be any impediment into turning it into electricity when somebody is done with it. Much cheaper having a local waste-to-power plant than "donating" garbage and shipping it across the planet to places where people don't want it and have to dump it anyway.

It is quite possibly carbon negative in the big picture because it prevents some oil from being burned for power and some oil from being burned for transport and doesn't waste human effort with sorting garbage several times which ends up in a landfill anyway not so unlikely polluting the planet with plenty of microplastics along the way.

> Just one point: Clothing ending up in landfills are a form of carbon sequestration.

By that logic, so is the insane amount of waste that's currently in the ocean instead of having been burnt. The forests and grasslands that were cut down for those landfills would've sequestered much more carbon in the long term. Plastics can take anywhere between 50 and millions of years to decompose and they decompose into what? Microplastics? Other chemicals that hardly any lifeform is capable of utilizing?

One thing you quickly observe about Americans after spending enough time on HN is how quickly they'll jump to justify massive amounts of waste with some vague reference somehow tying it to decreasing poverty. Last winter, Lufthansa airlines had 18,000 empty flights just to maintain their airport spots. In 2015 the EU mistakenly classified wood pellets as a renewable energy source. Since then, US exports of wood pellets have tripled, the EU's "renewable energy" makeup has gone from less than 20% biomass to ~60% biomass in 2020.

Waste exists. I don't understand the compulsion people have to somehow bring poverty into the conversation every time someone tries to point it out

This is a really misguided comment. Africa, as far as an entire continent can be generalized, is not as you describe and hasn't been in a long time. Nations there face many challenges, but nakedness is not among them.

And this is not even remotely close to "eradication of third world poverty." Rich countries are doing this to avoid filling their own landfills. That there are side benefits for some is good, but it's hardly transformative, especially at the volumes described.

And yes, it's sequestration compared to burning them. But the production of these garments at enormous volumes is wasteful and toxic. The culture of waste and disposability, and treating poor countries as sovereign landfills that should be grateful for our luxury garbage, are serious problems.

It wasn't too many generations ago that you'd find poor people in the US with one set of clothing.

I know people who have just about one garment per day of the week and they rotate them. That is it. Not because they are poor --they just don't like change and like the same thing.

And, indeed, before the '50's, many Americans had a couple of changes of clothing for the week plus their Sunday clothes. So even we're not that far removed from that time.

If you go back that far then you find poor people making their own clothing casually in the short term. A dress for an evening out might be assembled from available material during the day. Ready to wear clothing is a relatively new thing. Only modern people consistently lean on specialists to supply their clothes.

>Clothing ending up in landfills are a form of carbon sequestration.

No. Clothing ending up in landfill produces methane.

Is affluence having things or having work? One of the first big and important sectors for developing nations is tailoring as it is a manufacturing sector that everyone has a need for and requires minimal skill and material. Dumping huge amounts of unwanted clothing on relatively poor countries effectively eliminates one of the most important rungs on the development ladder.

Affluence is having things. The real affluent don't work at all.

The clothing can't both be unwanted and outcompete local manufacturers.

> The clothing can't both be unwanted and outcompete local manufacturers.

Of course it can. You can have a vast mountain of worthless fabric that's not wanted by anyone and still have enough usable and useful pieces of clothing besides that to destroy any local manufacturing.

If people buy and wear the clothing it is, by definition, wanted by them.

> reaching deep into the poorest parts of Africa.

Yes. We're using the poorest parts of Africa as garbage dump. We're not helping these people prosper, quite the contrary; we're destroying local economies.

Very relevant https://www.reaktor.com/blog/why-ive-tracked-every-single-pi... Why I’ve tracked every single piece of clothing I’ve worn for three years

I've taken to buying almost all my clothes second hand recently, both for this reason and I find the selection and styles far better than what fast fashion provides. Thrift stores like Goodwill provide some gems, but the best shopping comes from we-buy-your-clothes type places like Buffalo Exchange and Crossroads, and the prices are better too!

But you exchange more of your time at 2nd hand places.

The reason new exists is not just the styles, but the higher likelihood you are going to find the correct (or near to it) size.

That’s only true if one is an average size or isn’t mindful of fit. Shopping new can be a huge drag otherwise.

But it's not like any of that is easier second-hand? If I go jean shopping new I might not find my size in every style, but it's very rare that I find second-hand pants that fit without needing to hem.

True, if there was a store with lightly used 80 and 90s clothing and shoes it would be great because sizing was different and less standardized between brands. But second hand is mostly recent stuffs so it’s equally ill fitting. Some stuff can’t be hemmed easily.

Time is half of the appeal though, the other half is randomness. If I had a nickel for every time I assembled an outfit or three around something so outside of my normal, I'd probably have a few bucks. It's delightful to find a funky 70s coat that you can work with and spend a few hours running around.

Also the cost factor is nice. My partner works at a local thrift and getting steep discounts on top of the already reduced prices is amazing. And whenever something outgrows my wardrobe it's back off to the donation bin (wear providing)

Sizing is tough though, you're right. My body is outside being sized for most clothes so a ton of otherwise good finds just won't do (but that's what traditional shops are for filling). Thankfully my partner has a similar sizer torso so we can share tops, jackets and whatnot style providing. Organizing two stuffed closets is a bit tricky however

There's always more stuff to dig through and finds to discover!

There are also some online resale marketplaces that have pretty great selections and aren't prohibitively expensive either. Postmark, Depop, Thredup, Curtsy, etc.

disclaimer: I work for Curtsy.

> As it stands, lax customs enforcement — along with spotty infrastructure and the prevalence of cheap Asian imports — has made it difficult for Africa to develop a garment industry of its own.

Local producers are great, but they're outnumbered ten thousand to one by local consumers. How the world would be any better if some of the world's poorest were forced by their governments to pay extra money to buy inferior clothes, while some small-time politically-connected tycoon profited from it? That's not really how prosperity works.

Scale back your consumption here in the US, go ahead, that's fine, but let's not pretend that the bales of clothing smuggled over the border into South Africa are harming anyone but the comfortable.

>Local producers are great, but they're outnumbered ten thousand to one by local consumers. How the world would be any better if some of the world's poorest were forced by their governments to pay extra money to buy inferior clothes, while some small-time politically-connected tycoon profited from it?

Employees of local producers are great too, the theory I always hear is that people getting paid in an area stimulate more economic activity. So I mean you should take that idea apart more as it is pretty much established wisdom.

That said how do you know the products would be inferior? Cheap Asian imports are generally of poor quality, it seems strange that the locally made clothes would not be at least equal to that but actually inferior! Donated clothes that westerners have worn are probably going to be inferior since after all they were worn and were probably cheap Asian imports to begin with.

> Employees of local producers are great too, the theory I always hear is that people getting paid in an area stimulate more economic activity. So I mean you should take that idea apart more as it is pretty much established wisdom.

The "established wisdom" you cite is a long-lived natural propaganda campaign. It begins with politicians, people who succeed or fail based mostly on their image, not on the quality of their governance. Why would they do the hard work seeking out the causes of prosperity, help organize that prosperity, and seek ways that collective action can make things better? That's a sucker's game. If you rip off the population at large — just a little bit at a time, mind you — then you gain political allies in the industry who benefits. Of course they'll market you as the champion of prosperity: you've made their success possible. It's not strictly cynical; it's quite easy to believe, if you're not the person paying for it, and motivated reasoning is strong. It's a win/win deal, because you ignore the people who actually pay for things. Welcome to public-choice theory. It likely won't ever change. Hooray!

It should be painfully obvious to anyone who thinks about the facts of the matter that having access to nearly-free clothes — not the obnoxious piles of waste or anything, just the bales of clothing the article laments being imported into South Africa — having access is strictly better than not having this access. These people, after all, are always free to buy different clothes. It's not hard: Americans have access to similar, and can buy stupidly cheap clothes at an American thrift store, but in practice, they mostly don't even look at such an establishment. So why don't the people of South Africa buy locally made clothes right now? Because given their income, they much prefer the nearly-free clothes.

Common sense does work here! As an individual, you don't become prosperous by looking for ways to do things that are more expensive. As a society, the same principle applies. Yes, yes, someone will conjure many promises: if everyone just spends more money, we'll have more money! But you know, if you spend less money on clothes you can spend more money on literally anything else which you'd rather have. It's like a perpetual motion machine: the energy does actually come from somewhere, you just might not be looking at it. The prosperity they propose society will gain from protecting garment industry is stolen from everyone who buys clothes, and everything that they would have bought instead, and you lose some of the prosperity in the process, because you expend effort and capital and materials.

sure. but at the same time, this is true of pretty much anything in Africa, due to their poor infrastructure.

You have to have local firms (or self employed) making something, and selling that something, so that they can employ local people, and so on.

But it's often cheaper to build/make/farm that something in EU/Asia/Americas and ship it to Africa.

Something has to break this cycle.

> Something has to break this cycle.

This "something" is unlikely to be protectionism.

Well, at some point people have to trust someone other than themselves to tell them how complicated things work because there is just too much complexity and layering of knowledge in our modern world for one person to be an expert in everything.

So, I have accepted this natural propaganda as you call it because it seemed to be said by lots of people who were experts, I mean it's not just like I heard it from Milton Friedman and went with that. It's a pretty wide range of people I've heard this from. If it is a propaganda campaign it is a wide ranging one with lots of people involved some of whom you would think would have had the clout to make different arguments but didn't. In the many times I've encountered the argument there tends to be statistics and graphs involved, sure, not in my specialty but at any rate things looked reasonable on the surface and so over the years I accepted an argument that did not necessarily follow common sense when first encountered.

Your argument against it sounds totally reasonable and sensible. But you do not bring any evidence to bear, just your argument. Admittedly the argument is based on logic, but sometimes the things that seem logically sound can be shown to not work because of some deeper underlying logic to it. Is this your own idea, or did you encounter it somewhere and think that sounds much more reasonable than the other stuff I've been told? If so can you give me a guide to where I can read about the idea myself. What leads you to call the opposing argument propaganda, is there any research you can point to about this?

> To be sure, the availability of inexpensive clothes isn’t entirely a bad thing. In a country like South Africa, where more than half of people live below the poverty line, demand remains brisk, and some Western castoffs have become wardrobe staples for people who might not be able to afford new clothes.

Ah...not quite. The problem is, these leftovers from The West ultimately undermine the local economy. So, for example, locals can't work in a local clothing factory because there's no market. That market is already monopolized by much more inexpensive donation clothes.

How is this a problem? They get free clothes they would otherwise never be able to afford. Perhaps they should be grateful instead of expecting everything to be free forever.

I don't give two damns about fashion, but I would like good long-lasting clothing. Any suggestions on where I can find that (once my current stock wears out)?

Patagonia makes clothes that last. And if you learn to sew to fix them, even more.

I wear Carhartt clothes daily after I remove their branding logos with a razor blade.

LL Bean used to always have super high quality products - stuff you could buy and wear for years, even decades. Sadly, now that they no longer offer warranties like they used to, the quality has decreased greatly.

I am on my second pair of LL Bean boots - first pair I used for 20 years before they cracked and started leaking - second pair I bought - after the warranty changed, broke the first day (loops on the back that you use to pull them up ripped off: 1 the first day, 2nd one a week later - and a few weeks after that, the laces-holes also ripped - this is for a $200 pair of boots.

Seems nobody can make money selling quality stuff anymore - it's all a race to the bottom.

Salomon shoes and boots can take a serious beating.

Red Wings if you want heavier.

I've been trying to emphasize natural fabrics and tossing out stuff that doesn't fit, so I've been buying:

Pendleton - Amazing wool shirts, and their cotton stuff is very solid. They still sell all-wool sweaters, which is becoming rare even at the high end. Sometimes eBay/poshmark have nice older USA-made pieces but sizing can be a crapshoot.

Brooks Brothers - Reliable for well-made warm-weather linens and cottons, pretty sure that remains so post-bankruptcy. Style choices run from 'Weekend Lawyer' to 'Insolent Schoolboy.'

American Giant - All-cotton tshirts and hoodies. Haven't tried their pants.

Woolrich - Good sweaters and heavy shirts. My first sweater from the now-shuttered PA factory has survived 30 years with spells of very rough traveling and outdoor work without holes.

Bemidji Woolen Mills - Wool Mackinaws and barn jackets do well in most situations where waterproofing isn't required.

Arc'teryx - The Canadian-made Gore-Tex stuff is very durable. Overseas-made no slouch either. I believe Gore is making serious progress in shedding fewer microplastics.

Double Pump - I think this is a captive Amazon brand? Durable and inexpensive cotton cowboy snap work shirts, the only ones I've found that are not synthetic blend. Ely Cattleman has a line of 97% cotton shirts but most are awfully rodeo-y.

LL Bean - Still make good casual and lined winter pants, but they're going downhill fast in nearly every other category. Will market something as 'wool' when it's 95% synthetic.

Eddie Bauer - See LL Bean, maybe with better shirt choices.

Smartwool/Meriwool - Base layers are magic, both brands seem indestructible. Smartwool socks are nice for all but the hottest weather. Meriwool is more likely to be all-wool. Runner-up goes to Peoplesocks brand.

Oh and the key to laundering all of these natural fabrics? Wash as cold delicates, dryer cycle with no heat for wrinkles, hang dry near a dehumidifier.

Many fashion moguls adorn varius "richest people" lists.

I think it's a good rule of thumb to pay close attention to any industry that produces disproportionate number of billionaires. Because there might be some societal or ecological cost involved that the marked should be made aware of with through taxes or regulation.

Fasion and real estate should be some of the prime targets for investigation.

I'm sure clothing and footwear profits from slavery and child labor and general exporting of poor working conditions and environmental standards as many other industries have done with globalization, and however connected to the "fashion" industry that is I guess. Are there other problems with it?

My mind would have gone to energy, war industry, tech, banking, news media, chemical, health and pharmaceutical, and probably a lot of others before I thought of fashion though if I was thinking of societal cost.

How do you gauge what is a good and bad proportion of billionaires for an industry, and what kind of societal cost do you think the fashion industry might have?

Just take a look at what industry most billionaires got rich from. Those are the industries that extract most value from society and environment. And since there's no free lunch there probably is some associated cost no matter how well hidden and surprising.

> My mind would have gone to energy, war industry, tech, banking, news media, chemical, health and pharmaceutical, and probably a lot of others before I thought of fashion though if I was thinking of societal cost.

Sure, there are other heuristics that might point out to other industries worth regulating.

This isn't really how things work.

Let's say Belon Tusk is worth $100 million and invests that into starting a submarine company. Eventually they make a working product they can sell, and that puts the value of the company at $1 billion.

Eventually the second design comes along and revolutionizes submarine industry and reduces the costs that governments (taxpayers) and private industry were paying for submarine voyages significantly. This puts the value of the company at $100 billion and makes Belon a hundred billionaire.

This is not wealth that was "extracted" from anywhere.

The company might be using cheap finance on its valuation, but it's also paying workers, buying goods and services, and selling services into the economy as well. It's most likely creating a net positive for society.

That's details. Look at list of the top richest people and look how most of them got there. You can see trends that go beyond any single person and any accounting tricks.

The real estate moguls don't create value for society. They capture finite resource with capital and extract the value from society to capture even more. It's literally called rent.

Check out Bezos. Amazon is in large part worker-exploitation-as-a-service delivered to customers same day, washed squeeky clean of any moral qualms. Bezos just takes his cut.

Fasion industry is in large part child-labor-as-a-service.

It's not details, it's the central tenet of your argument was that billionaires are rich because they extracted something and there's no free lunch.

That's just now how it works. Most of the new tech billionaires got rich entirely on the value of companies they created or invested in.

Tesla has been pushing the old automotive industry that's built around internal combustion into the EV era, and SpaceX has been lowering the cost of rocket launches so tax payers get more bang for their dollar spent for government launches, allowing companies to provide more connectivity and other satellite services to more people, and is taking monopoly money away from the old war profiteers who were milking their government-funded cold war technology.

Absolute wins. So Musk became a billionaire by providing better and cheaper things to people and improving society.

So billionaires=bad metric is pretty flimsy, in my opinion.

> That's just now how it works. Most of the new tech billionaires got rich entirely on the value of companies they created or invested in.

That value doesn't come from thin air.

> Tesla has been pushing the old automotive industry that's built around internal combustion into the EV era

Telsa routinely overpromises and underdeliveres. It sells best where governments use tax money to pay for it. As a company is insanely overvalued. And while it made some actual progress, which is hard to avoid with billions flowing around it had created nowhere close to the value Elon Musk is free to command. A lot of that money came from taxes, a lot from pockets of people (both customers and investors) that could use it way better but were duped by wonderful fairy tale. And Tesla working culture has plenty of worker exploitation vibes.

And Tesla is just the best case scenario. Other stuff is way more obviously costly to the social and ecological environment.

Let's take SpaceX. It's just a venture based on occupying different point on price/quality curve. His rockets are so cheap that they blow up routinely for reasons that are no mystery for people that were involved in rocketry on govenrment dime. And btw his rockets are still paid for mostly by tax money.

> allowing companies to provide more connectivity and other satellite services to more people

Have you heard about Starlink? It allows ordinary people to sponsor acceleration of progression of Kessler syndrome, through the use of crappy saltelite internet that will only get worse as more people use it. Not to mention screwing up scientific community of people who chose to look into the sky.

None of what billionaires do are absolute wins. They are just absolute wins for them. They do some good by disseminating some useful technology and finding ways to automate making stuff making it cheaper. But that's just some of them and that's just part of what some of them do. What all of them do is democratize doing damage to our planet and to society. Thanks to billionaires, you too can exploit workers, you too can benefit from child labor, you too can generate irreverisible environmental damage, you too can accelerate the end of sattelite era.

It would be great to see systems like this automated recycling system scale up: https://www.fastcompany.com/90616764/bring-your-old-clothes-...

> the fashion industry is responsible for one-tenth of the world’s carbon emissions, according to the U.N. Environment Program — more than international flights and maritime shipping combined

I think we need clothing that lasts longer. If you are clothing shopping for fun, your actions aren't harmless.

Cheap clothing is just cheap as the hidden cost are... Hidden. Cheap labour, cheap material, low quality combined with high emissions and pesticides/toxins that are released mostly untreated.

You've hit the nail on the head. If all these externalized cost were actually included in the price of the product it would raise the price massively and no one would accept today's low-quality ware anymore.

Maybe?

Weird article.

Poor people get good condition, fashionable recycled clothing for a few cents, and this is somehow a bad thing?

Does africa really need to be in garment production? Could they compete with vietnam/bangladesh?Banning imports and mandating locally produced clothing is likely just going to lead to forcing poor people to pay 10x more with no improvement or even worse quality.

Related, Clothing Poverty: The Hidden World of Fast Fashion and Second-Hand Clothes, by Andrew Brooks examines this world of considerable waste.

I gave some (+5 years old) clothes to a family member's acquaintance. I'm glad to hear they even wear it to work sometimes.

Once again sci fi got it right. Everyone in the future wears similar things because the fashion industry was too costly.

Why not just burn them?

Seriously? Some of the poorest people around here do that sort of thing in the winter. The fumes are horrible and include all rainbow colours.

This entire thread is horrible. Not many other topics bring out the worst of people. Disgust is what I feel reading many of the comments here. Apparently waste is good and even if it were bad, what can you do, heh?

I stopped buying clothing completely.

Regulate fashion.

For example you might make destruction or stockpiling of unsold clothes a crime. Also ban exporting clothes that were manufactured abroad.

It doesn't need to be regulated. Like many for problems, the negative externalities need to be accounted in taxation/tariffs.

Sure, but it could be done with less ill effects than not regulating it.

There already are specific regulations regarding fashion industry.

"Regulate this, regulate that", it's the socialist/communist answer to everything. Sooner or later, they'll be yelling to regulate when I can use the toilet for water saving purposes.

It's quite funny reading this sort of myopic bullshit in response to an article about destruction of the natural world due to unregulated commercial activity.

It's not the answer to everything, but it sure is the answer to some things.

We could dump ten times the clothes and it wouldn't matter. Landfill space is not at all rare, it wouldn't even be a huge engineering project to build a hole big enough to house all human trash for the next hundred years.

Frankly, the gains from having cheap clothing and letting people express themselves far outweighs the downsides from the waste.

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