This is huge progress compared to the old days, when many people only had one set of clothes, and had to wash them naked.
If the price for this is a lot of clothing trash, that seems a pretty great bargain to me.
The problem with most of the fast fashion is that the clothes don't last very long, at only a handful of uses, so its only cheaper if you need lots of different outfits. If you are hanging on by a thread, then you need cheap outfits that last for as long as possible.
That's not much morphing, the goal is to have clothes that are quickly obsoleted for people who can now immediately keep up with the trends. Those people can be a minority of their customers but buy far more by volume, don't wear clothes until they wear out, and need to dispose of out-of-date clothes. If they push enough consumers to fast fashion then there is a vast excess of used clothes that need to be thrown out.
The problem is buying garbage in the first place.
Yes, in Europe this is no big deal. In the US there are very few shoe shops that will do this kind of work. When you find one, they typically charge a lot - $100+.
Also, let people tell stories however they feel like they want to tell them.
I'm not sure what your last remark is meant to imply but it feels quite rude. It's normal to be curious and ask people to expand on or clarify what they're saying, especially on a site where the main posting guidline is "intellectual curiosity." I don't appreciate your directive in this case, as I don't feel I was blocking anyone from sharing their story with the question I asked.
But, if we're being prescriptive, the term "women" is generally more accepted when talking about humans. "Females" is regarded by many as dehumanising.
I don’t think „society“ accepts an adult man who is dressed in rags either. At best people will think you’re some kind of hippie, at worst actively avoid you. In m experience does not apply if you are a student or below 30.
The expection for women to put more effort into their appearance than men is well understood. Do you disagree?
These sound like rags to me.
It is or was very common to see men wearing clothing with tips and tears as a style choice, so I would not say men cannot get away with it. It just depends what the totality of the look is.
There's an interesting topic for discussion in regards to measuring social phenomenon and it feels out of keeping with site guidelines that you wouldn't engage on that basis but rather begin with complete dismissal.
Your comments have now become personal and derogatory and I am not willing to have a conversation like this at all, so I will do as you say and go away, or "shut the f up" as the other commenter said.
I'm not sure what gives you the right to tell me my views aren't welcome here. I've kept my comments within the site guidelines while you have not. Is this your personal echo chamber where others aren't welcome? The boys club where laughing about "females" goes ahead without comment? It must be that way since you targeted the single critical voice in a thread with at least 2 other examples of what you're ostensibly complaining about that you chose to ignore. You wouldn't even have the decency to respond to anything I said, again straight to dismissal and telling me to leave. So much for being challenged.
Not sure why that would be the case.
For example, consider if everyone had as much clothes as they need. Then only occasional replacements would suffice, which is a quantity significantly less the total amount required if each person lacked sufficient clothing.
Or consider some regulation: 97% of stock must remain on the shelves and sell before new stock is brought in. That will certainly put a break on fast fashion.
Also, define oversupply: +1%, 10%, 50%?
The challenge is that clothes rapidly progress beyond "need" into "wants". Being "fashionable" is very roughly a human constant. One of the very very first things that we industrialized was textile and clothing production, and then we continued to keep facing fashion and clothing churn.
I think it would very challenging to regulate clothing into a strict need.
But, again, it's not a choice between no fashion and ultra fast fashion (sell 10% of stock and throw away the rest). We can make clothes that are more durable, more customizable, we can have regulate how fast should fast fashion be, and, of course, regulate how waste should be treated.
Btw, I bet if you throw all that waste in a chemical reactor with a hydrogen source you can revert it back to hydrocarbons. I'm not a chemical engineer and I might be wrong, of course.
Clothes aren't totally fungible, after all. I think burning food is much worse. I know the big burning pile look bad there... but how big is it really? The article says between 11k - 59k tons. I'll go with the high end and assume 50k metric tonnes. Assuming 150 grams per item (weight of a tshirt) that's 6666 items per tonne, which is about 333 million items in the pile. In the grand scheme of things, it's not that much. I think 5% oversupply is probably a floor for clothes. Any less than that and we're looking at shortages at retail. Say 5 billion humans each own 50 kilograms of clothing, which is ridiculously low balling it, that's 250 billion tons. And I'm not even talking about our shoe supply here! It must take tens of millions of tonnes of production each year to sustain that, and it's not like it gets instantly teleported to the consumer.
If whoever owned that pile could get even 50 cents per piece for them, they probably would rather have taken the money. I think burning is probably wrong though, better it be dumped in pits and left there as is in case one day an economical way to use the material emerges in the future. I get the feeling to reduce waste, I really do, but I don't like your idea of regulation on this. It'll only deprive the poorer among us of access. I'm willing to accept some waste so that people on a tight budget can dress themselves with style and feel good.
In any event, having all these clothes is just a part of life that we’ve gotten used to. I’ve never heard anyone complain about a lack of clothes or shoes unless they were suddenly deprived of them.
I did a big remodel recently, I had a bunch of perfectly good hardware, an entire kitchen of appliances, cabinets, etc, and such items.
People told me all about "oh someone might use that", and I'd ask if they would use it, everyone said "no, not me". The local re-use non profits all had big lists of things they don't want, because nobody actually wants them.
I suspect too that the needy and poor are really the last people with the room and time to stash away a bunch of things they're not using but maybe one day someone will show up and install them... and hopefully they still work.
ReStore has their niches, but overall there's a large feel good hopecycling dynamic as well. So many used furniture sets just sitting around indefinitely.
Exceptions of used things people seek out basically prove the rule - things that you can't get any more (solidly built, repairable appliances, wide lumber, etc), or vintage styles coming back around into fashion.
Put them outside by the curb. If it's usable, it'll get picked up. Certainly working (and non-working) appliances would.
[0] https://renovationangel.com/ [1] https://www.habitat.org/restores/find-donate-building-materi...
Ironically I've been trying to sell a few brand new items that I don't need, like a keyboard and mouse, but nobody wants those.
Then most of the cabinets were taken away for free by a guy who was setting up his garage to brew beer, and some builders who were putting together a staff kitchen for a (presumably pretty penny-pinching) local business owner.
People tend to overestimate the costs of production versus recycling. You could easily spend, in terms of CO2, vastly more resources trying to sort, clean and ship around this stuff, rather then just setting the pile on fire - particularly if it's principally organically-derived fibers (cotton) and not synthetics.
The case of plastic bag recycling is outrageous deception.
After all, it is clearly in the glassmaker's best interests to run around breaking windows.
I think it's just lazy corporate employees didn't know what else to do with large volumes of excess inventory.
THIS IS INTENTIONAL.
The reason this works with clothing for some brands is that some utility of the clothing is in the signaling it provides to the humans wearing it, and the signaling comes from the scarcity of that type of clothing.
A clothes seller selling clothing that signals the wearer is able to afford a more scarce type of clothing is thus ruining their own products’ value proposition by decreasing the scarcity of the clothes.
That is why it might be better to destroy than see it on sale at TJ Maxx or Walmart or whatever cheap store.
Bottom line is clothes sellers are catering to what clothes buyers want. They are not stupid about how to operate their business.
And o11c’s comment about glass makers breaking windows is irrelevant since the glass maker does not own the window they are breaking, whereas a clothes seller owns the clothes they might be destroying.
Even if it might be useful elsewhere, it isn't in that other place because it's so worthless that transporting it isn't worth it. "Would be" useful elsewhere just means "useless where it is".
Just like most of the stuff that Amazon gets criticized for throwing in the trash is likely either stuff that's unsafe or so worthless that the pallet-of-random-crap buyers don't want it.