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Comment by dehrmann | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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