Donating clothes is contributing to Africa's 'mitumba' problem

I'm not sure it's quite as evil as the author implies, though, I don't doubt dealing with the junk is a problem and there should be some recycling infrastructure setup to deal with the junk clothing.

or more like it ends up in Eastern Europe where it runs some rounds first in 2nd hand shops.

“german 2nd hand cloths”, “english quality used cloths” and shops like these are extremely common in Slovakia, Hungary, Romania etc. all over the countries

> making an official state visit to the United States, marking the first time in nearly 16 years for an African leader to do so

That’s definitely not true

It is impossible to buy a locally made shirt, nor pants, nor anything. Except "traditional" / indigenous clothes for tourist, but that doesnt count.

Obviously, very few people would, like me, buy locally made new clothes because they would be more expensive and "Not American". And I understand and accept why that happens as described in the article.

Do you want to help a poor country? Buy their products at fair price. Don't dump powder milk surplus because the kids.

thankfully my mom is around for me to drop off some stuff and ask her to "stitch up this rip" and she'll not only do that, but re-inforce the other side to prevent the inevitable

burning the cotton/wool stuff as fuel is probably fine, but less and less of that comes off the manufacturing line

all in all, plastics waste from clothing isn't much kg/year/person compared to everything else

maybe a post-ozempic world will reduce some clothing waste (while initially increasing it)

Sure thing, that'd be a pity and would generate some unemployment. However, overall we'd be better off: people would be freed from the costs of buying toys for kids and would have their resources available for other industries and endeavors...

Don't get me wrong: if this happened overnight, it'd be catastrophic for many people, but still, on the long run, we'd be better off.

A real problem, though, is that we're still wearing a lot of low quality clothing. We, as a society, would really benefit from a shift to buying higher-quality clothing that would stay good and last for longer.

> If used clothing is the problem, why not prohibit it altogether? The answer is that countries tried. In 2016, a group of East African countries joined forces to ban imports of secondhand clothing. In retaliation, the Trump administration threatened to remove the countries from the program that is at the core of U.S.-Africa trade policy if they followed through. No surprise that a lobby group representing used clothing sorters backed the move. The only country that stood firm was Rwanda and, to this day, its duty-free apparel benefits under AGOA remain suspended.