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Comment by halpert | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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