10 ms·

Recycling clothing gathers steam

65 points by RickJWagner 7y ago

RickJWagner 7y ago
I'd think the insulation would be heavy. I like the idea of keeping old clothes out of the landfill, though.
gambiting 7y ago
My parents started a company 20 years ago that turns old clothing into cleaning rags sold to factories, workshops, printing presses, or for materials that are not great for cleaning with, they get shredded and used for filling in things like car seats etc. Good quality clothing gets sold in second-hand shops. And you know what's interesting to me? That in those 20 years my parents never once talked about it as "recycling" - it's just good business even without looking at it from the environmental perspective.
- shioyama 7y ago
  Exactly. I'm so sick of all these stories framed as how we should all be good sumaritans and recycle. That's not the way to do it! This stuff has value. It's a business opportunity. If you're doing it to feel good, or to make people feel good, then what you're doing will not scale. Different industry, but similar story: https://discardstudies.com/2019/05/06/adam-minter-how-things-flow/ https://discardstudies.com/2019/05/06/adam-minter-how-things... (covered here on HN recently)
  - xattt 7y ago
    H&M has been pushing this as “brand new” idea where if you return old clothing, you get a single-digit percent discount off your purchase. There’s some perversion in this incentive in that you are “feeding the beast”. There could be some deliberate behavioural psychology at play as well to curb growing awareness around waste in fashion. A background feeling of guilt of buying new by the shopper is negated in the immediate act of returning old clothes or by a future consideration of the act.
    - bubblewrap 7y ago
      H&M is not "the beast". Having kids, I am very thankful for their existence, otherwise merely buying new clothes every year would probably bankrupt us. Before you say I should buy Second Hand: many kids clothes simply break by daily use. It is already common to give old children's clothes that are still OK to friends with smaller children, so it is not like the clothes are wasted by excessive consumerism.
      - radicalbyte 7y ago
        Here we just give people our old kids clothes. It feels kind of cheap to sell old clothing especially when the value is so small. What's $20 for a box of old clothes going to bring me?
        bubblewrap 7y ago
        As I said, we give away the clothes that are not broken.
      - dewey 7y ago
        > H&M is not "the beast". On the topic of sustainability it's probably warranted to call them "the beast". Fast fashion companies are a big part of the problem if you look up how much water and resources are needed to produce a single piece of clothing. Of course having cheap clothing is great for the consumer in the short-term the same way that flying short distance instead of taking the train is comfortable, or commuting with a car instead of public transport. Their clothing recycling program falls under the definition of green washing. https://observer.com/2018/03/hm-sustainability-conscious-exclusive-collection/ https://observer.com/2018/03/hm-sustainability-conscious-exc...
        bubblewrap 7y ago
        I don't see where in the article they show it is green washing? They only mention some criticism H&M received, including the ridiculous uproar about the "coolest monkey" T-Shirt. If that is proof for green washing, it is not very convincing. Fast fashion - it depends on how much gets thrown away at the end of the day? Just because clothing has a heavy toll on the environment, doesn't mean companies producing it are evil. Toll on the environment or not, people need clothes.
  - megous 7y ago
    Things only have value because people want/need them. So education (basically - changing the wants, satifying needs less destructively to the environment) is a good way to affect these things, too.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    By framing it as recycling they are setting your expectancy of value to '0' for the input phase.
    - shioyama 7y ago
      That's an interesting point. A value of '0' is at least better than a negative value. The problem here IMHO is that nobody else is seeing an opportunity to pay more than zero and make a correspondingly larger gain on the other end. Waste is a strange thing. On the one hand, it's a physical thing. But it's also a stance about that thing. Once we label something as waste, it loses a huge part of its value in our eyes. Yet in practical terms, it never lost anything. That difference between perception and reality is a huge business opportunity.
  - firethief 7y ago
    I don't think good intentions are that ruinous. A business that's economically viable for someone who cares only for profit can still be economically viable for someone with higher goals.
  - dwaltrip 7y ago
    > If you're doing it to feel good, or to make people feel good, then what you're doing will not scale. You had a great point, but then you had to go full Homo economicus... It's possible to combine good business or operational strategy with a value system that manages to include things beyond just dollars alone.
    - shioyama 7y ago
      > It's possible to combine good business or operational strategy with a value system that manages to include things beyond just dollars alone. Sure it is, and that's fine. But the moral framing of the issue (recycling/reusing as a "good thing to do", as opposed to an economic opportunity waiting to be tapped) has the perverse effect of negating (in our head) the actual market value of the things we throw away. To the point where Western consumers see a vast portion of the economy as intrinsically unviable and in need of support to sustain itself, when in fact (much of the time) it is not. TBH, when it comes to this topic, I think Westerners would benefit from putting on the Homo economicus hat a lot more often. That's how most of the rest of the world thinks about it.
      - dwaltrip 7y ago
        > But the moral framing of the issue (recycling/reusing as a "good thing to do", as opposed to an economic opportunity waiting to be tapped) has the perverse effect of negating (in our head) the actual market value of the things we throw away. The market dynamics are one consideration that affect the moral evaluation of the situation, but there are usually others as well. If there are important aspects that the market, along with existing regulations, haven't fully integrated -- which is usually the case to one degree or another -- then one can make a moral case to not blindly follow the market's incentives alone. If the incentives are particularly strong, the dicey part may be figuring out when and how when individuals can effectively subvert these systemic incentives or modify the system itself. I don't have clear or concise thoughts on that right now, other than believing it does occur from time to time. It sounds like part of your argument is that the current moral values around recycling aren't fully reflecting the reality and what people actually care about (which is a larger set of things than the market fully captures). I think there is truth to that. However, narrowly arguing about the market dynamics alone doesn't seem like the best path to me, given that we know market dynamics have their limitations.
- jgtrosh 7y ago
  Out of curiosity: if the fabric is made with elasthane or something like it, does that shredding process not release a large amount of micro particles? I could be wrong, also maybe this happens in other common processes?
  - gambiting 7y ago
    So the shredding is the only part which they don't do in-house, there's an external company that does it, so I'm not sure about the answer to this, sorry. Cutting into rags is done in-house but only absorbent materials are good for this so I don't think cutting elasthane is much of an issue.
- sansnomme 7y ago
  Name of company? Can you write a blog about this or elaborate more? I am curious about how you usually get into this industry.
  - Scoundreller 7y ago
    Probably not OP’s, but I know of one here with a few videos on their website: http://www.waliawipers.com/ http://www.waliawipers.com/ Definitely not a high tech industry, so I’m sure a lot of business is conducted off-line.
  - gambiting 7y ago
    So for my parents they started by importing second hand clothing from all over Europe, it's usually sold by charities which collect it directly. Some bigger charities have a bidding process(like the Red Cross or the British Heart Foundation) some smaller ones just sell directly and it's a matter of going to them and talking to someone responsible for this side of things. Initially they would only sort the clothing and sell on the good quality stuff to stores, lower quality to companies which processed it further, then later on they opened their own second-hand stores, started processing(cutting into rags) in-house, and well, kind of grew from there. As for the name, 1) I don't really like sharing personally identifiable information on the internet, sorry 2) as someone else pointed out - pretty much everyone in this business is offline anyway. All you'd get by searching an address on google is the address on google maps. There is a website but it only has a single page - with address and telephone number. Nothing else has ever been needed.
SomeOldThrow 7y ago
Recycle is the THIRD of the three Rs for a reason. Fast fashion is incredibly heavy in CO2 output, so recycling won't do much at all to hamper this UNLESS people shift their purchasing away from heavy consumption. The recycling process very likely has significant CO2 impact itself, so here’s hoping it’s at least heavily reduced from using raw materials. That said, I’m very excited about this, and SF offers recycling that’s very convenient. Much better than goodwill/thrift IMHO for more than lightly worn clothing—fast fashion doesn’t make good second hand clothing as it’s typically cheaply made and falls apart rapidly.
hilyen 7y ago
This is cool. The title had me thinking about just repairing old clothing. It generally takes $4-6 at a tailor to fix a pair of pants, etc. I've gotten years more out of my jeans just doing that.
- thrower123 7y ago
  If home economics classes in school hadn't been gutted a generation ago, this could be much more viable. It's becoming hard to find anybody that can so much as sew on a button. Much less operate an electric sewing machine. It's one of those things that is really not hard, you just have to have some exposure to it.
  - oftenwrong 7y ago
    I learned sewing in school, but I never developed the skill for anything more than the most basic alterations. Most of the tailors in my area are older people, and they seem to be from the "Eastern Bloc" or China. I would imagine they grew up using sewing as a practical, day-to-day skill, or profession, and not merely as a hobby or odd-skill-I-learned-in-school.
- jopsen 7y ago
  Does the tailor make a decent wage? I think just shortening a pair of pants is 30$ minimum. Things that can't be done in a factory are increasingly expensive, especially if you don't have underpaid workers.
  - jseliger 7y ago
    "Baumol's Cost Disease" is the missing discussion in these conversations https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/the-baumol-effect.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/th...
    - carapace 7y ago
      Reminds me of Mark S. Miller's classic: "A Computer's Perspective on Moore's Law: Humans are getting more expensive at an exponential rate." https://web.archive.org/web/20070203034530/http://www.caplet.com:80/adages.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070203034530/http://www.caplet...
hanniabu 7y ago
I'm surprised they didn't mention the R value of the insulation.
atupis 7y ago
I have noticed that t-shirts that are made from recycled cotton are much more durable and doesn't shrink same way than normal.
aaron695 7y ago
The real poor in this world rely on jobs manufacturing clothing. Sure if clothing manufacturing goes away or is lessened they could do other jobs like prostitution. But of you want to help 3rd world people employ them in good decent service jobs like making clothing. It takes nothing from their environment and gives them as humans, which they also are, money and decency.
flas9sd 7y ago
Real sustainability might mean not buying at all in the first place or to buy within a community if it is available and especially with textiles, not from remote open markets - you don't know which levers are in place for a business to make its profits, which costs are dissipated to everybody but the profiteer. Policies and programmes help. But don't fool yourself to be relieved of your consumers responsibility by recycling. Somebody else will shoulder the external costs. Recently a local social organisation offered numbers for textile donations: women make up 80% of their donations, 10 tons per week, men are mostly recipients. Less than 10% are reused or resold, the rest might become insulation. They lamented: we get too much. Access to cheap textiles is easy.
- mises 7y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean here with not buying. Do you mean not replacing clothes seasonally based on what's "en vogue"? If so, that may be why women make up most of the donations: they do tend to use clothes for a much shorter time. I still remember being shocked when I spoke to a young lady who told me she wore a dress two times at most. I've never been much of an environmentalist, but I guess I can feel good about keeping clothes for years and not changing them with styles.
  - cosmodisk 7y ago
    I used to dress relatively well.Lots of good quality clothes. Then I put on lots of weight and was like " fuck it,I look like shit anyway", so started buying the cheap stuff. A pair of jeans-£6, t-shirts-£3, etc.The only exception is footwear- I don't buy cheap shoes,as they are crap. £6 jeans last only a couple of months before they become unwearable,as the material is usually subpar. So I kept buying them every 2 month or so. However recently I stopped buying this cheap crap,and usually buy clothes that are high quality and they do last. That's how I'd describe less consumption.
GordonS 7y ago
Here in the UK, donating old/unwanted clothes to charity has been a thing for a long time, at least a decade. Many supermarkets accept various kinds of recycling, and many have a large box for clothing, which goes to places like the Salvation Army. TBH, I've no idea what they do with it though. There are also door-to-door collections, where a bag is put through your door, for collection a couple of days later - of course, anyone can do this, and there have been cases in the past of unscrupulous people claiming proceeds will go to charity, but instead pocketing all the money.
- ghaff 7y ago
  Donating used clothing and other things to Goodwill, Salvation Army, etc. has been a thing for many decades in the US. These days you also see a fair number of collection bins in parking lots for either clothing/shoes or books/videos. I don't know how much of what's donated just gets thrown out though; I suspect a fair bit.
- peter303 7y ago
  Most of that goes directly to landfill after these places extract 5% x10% thatcan be profitably resold.
  - smileypete 7y ago
    Apparently some (most?) charity shops will accept unwearable clothes for rags, would be no point if it all went to landfill.

65 points by RickJWagner 7y ago

I'd think the insulation would be heavy. I like the idea of keeping old clothes out of the landfill, though.

My parents started a company 20 years ago that turns old clothing into cleaning rags sold to factories, workshops, printing presses, or for materials that are not great for cleaning with, they get shredded and used for filling in things like car seats etc. Good quality clothing gets sold in second-hand shops. And you know what's interesting to me? That in those 20 years my parents never once talked about it as "recycling" - it's just good business even without looking at it from the environmental perspective.

shioyama 7y ago
Exactly. I'm so sick of all these stories framed as how we should all be good sumaritans and recycle. That's not the way to do it! This stuff has value. It's a business opportunity. If you're doing it to feel good, or to make people feel good, then what you're doing will not scale. Different industry, but similar story: https://discardstudies.com/2019/05/06/adam-minter-how-things-flow/ https://discardstudies.com/2019/05/06/adam-minter-how-things... (covered here on HN recently)
- xattt 7y ago
  H&M has been pushing this as “brand new” idea where if you return old clothing, you get a single-digit percent discount off your purchase. There’s some perversion in this incentive in that you are “feeding the beast”. There could be some deliberate behavioural psychology at play as well to curb growing awareness around waste in fashion. A background feeling of guilt of buying new by the shopper is negated in the immediate act of returning old clothes or by a future consideration of the act.
  - bubblewrap 7y ago
    H&M is not "the beast". Having kids, I am very thankful for their existence, otherwise merely buying new clothes every year would probably bankrupt us. Before you say I should buy Second Hand: many kids clothes simply break by daily use. It is already common to give old children's clothes that are still OK to friends with smaller children, so it is not like the clothes are wasted by excessive consumerism.
    - radicalbyte 7y ago
      Here we just give people our old kids clothes. It feels kind of cheap to sell old clothing especially when the value is so small. What's $20 for a box of old clothes going to bring me?
      - bubblewrap 7y ago
        As I said, we give away the clothes that are not broken.
    - dewey 7y ago
      > H&M is not "the beast". On the topic of sustainability it's probably warranted to call them "the beast". Fast fashion companies are a big part of the problem if you look up how much water and resources are needed to produce a single piece of clothing. Of course having cheap clothing is great for the consumer in the short-term the same way that flying short distance instead of taking the train is comfortable, or commuting with a car instead of public transport. Their clothing recycling program falls under the definition of green washing. https://observer.com/2018/03/hm-sustainability-conscious-exclusive-collection/ https://observer.com/2018/03/hm-sustainability-conscious-exc...
      - bubblewrap 7y ago
        I don't see where in the article they show it is green washing? They only mention some criticism H&M received, including the ridiculous uproar about the "coolest monkey" T-Shirt. If that is proof for green washing, it is not very convincing. Fast fashion - it depends on how much gets thrown away at the end of the day? Just because clothing has a heavy toll on the environment, doesn't mean companies producing it are evil. Toll on the environment or not, people need clothes.
- megous 7y ago
  Things only have value because people want/need them. So education (basically - changing the wants, satifying needs less destructively to the environment) is a good way to affect these things, too.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  By framing it as recycling they are setting your expectancy of value to '0' for the input phase.
  - shioyama 7y ago
    That's an interesting point. A value of '0' is at least better than a negative value. The problem here IMHO is that nobody else is seeing an opportunity to pay more than zero and make a correspondingly larger gain on the other end. Waste is a strange thing. On the one hand, it's a physical thing. But it's also a stance about that thing. Once we label something as waste, it loses a huge part of its value in our eyes. Yet in practical terms, it never lost anything. That difference between perception and reality is a huge business opportunity.
- firethief 7y ago
  I don't think good intentions are that ruinous. A business that's economically viable for someone who cares only for profit can still be economically viable for someone with higher goals.
- dwaltrip 7y ago
  > If you're doing it to feel good, or to make people feel good, then what you're doing will not scale. You had a great point, but then you had to go full Homo economicus... It's possible to combine good business or operational strategy with a value system that manages to include things beyond just dollars alone.
  - shioyama 7y ago
    > It's possible to combine good business or operational strategy with a value system that manages to include things beyond just dollars alone. Sure it is, and that's fine. But the moral framing of the issue (recycling/reusing as a "good thing to do", as opposed to an economic opportunity waiting to be tapped) has the perverse effect of negating (in our head) the actual market value of the things we throw away. To the point where Western consumers see a vast portion of the economy as intrinsically unviable and in need of support to sustain itself, when in fact (much of the time) it is not. TBH, when it comes to this topic, I think Westerners would benefit from putting on the Homo economicus hat a lot more often. That's how most of the rest of the world thinks about it.
    - dwaltrip 7y ago
      > But the moral framing of the issue (recycling/reusing as a "good thing to do", as opposed to an economic opportunity waiting to be tapped) has the perverse effect of negating (in our head) the actual market value of the things we throw away. The market dynamics are one consideration that affect the moral evaluation of the situation, but there are usually others as well. If there are important aspects that the market, along with existing regulations, haven't fully integrated -- which is usually the case to one degree or another -- then one can make a moral case to not blindly follow the market's incentives alone. If the incentives are particularly strong, the dicey part may be figuring out when and how when individuals can effectively subvert these systemic incentives or modify the system itself. I don't have clear or concise thoughts on that right now, other than believing it does occur from time to time. It sounds like part of your argument is that the current moral values around recycling aren't fully reflecting the reality and what people actually care about (which is a larger set of things than the market fully captures). I think there is truth to that. However, narrowly arguing about the market dynamics alone doesn't seem like the best path to me, given that we know market dynamics have their limitations.
jgtrosh 7y ago
Out of curiosity: if the fabric is made with elasthane or something like it, does that shredding process not release a large amount of micro particles? I could be wrong, also maybe this happens in other common processes?
- gambiting 7y ago
  So the shredding is the only part which they don't do in-house, there's an external company that does it, so I'm not sure about the answer to this, sorry. Cutting into rags is done in-house but only absorbent materials are good for this so I don't think cutting elasthane is much of an issue.
sansnomme 7y ago
Name of company? Can you write a blog about this or elaborate more? I am curious about how you usually get into this industry.
- Scoundreller 7y ago
  Probably not OP’s, but I know of one here with a few videos on their website: http://www.waliawipers.com/ http://www.waliawipers.com/ Definitely not a high tech industry, so I’m sure a lot of business is conducted off-line.
- gambiting 7y ago
  So for my parents they started by importing second hand clothing from all over Europe, it's usually sold by charities which collect it directly. Some bigger charities have a bidding process(like the Red Cross or the British Heart Foundation) some smaller ones just sell directly and it's a matter of going to them and talking to someone responsible for this side of things. Initially they would only sort the clothing and sell on the good quality stuff to stores, lower quality to companies which processed it further, then later on they opened their own second-hand stores, started processing(cutting into rags) in-house, and well, kind of grew from there. As for the name, 1) I don't really like sharing personally identifiable information on the internet, sorry 2) as someone else pointed out - pretty much everyone in this business is offline anyway. All you'd get by searching an address on google is the address on google maps. There is a website but it only has a single page - with address and telephone number. Nothing else has ever been needed.

SomeOldThrow 7y ago

Recycle is the THIRD of the three Rs for a reason. Fast fashion is incredibly heavy in CO2 output, so recycling won't do much at all to hamper this UNLESS people shift their purchasing away from heavy consumption. The recycling process very likely has significant CO2 impact itself, so here’s hoping it’s at least heavily reduced from using raw materials. That said, I’m very excited about this, and SF offers recycling that’s very convenient. Much better than goodwill/thrift IMHO for more than lightly worn clothing—fast fashion doesn’t make good second hand clothing as it’s typically cheaply made and falls apart rapidly.

hilyen 7y ago

This is cool. The title had me thinking about just repairing old clothing. It generally takes $4-6 at a tailor to fix a pair of pants, etc. I've gotten years more out of my jeans just doing that.

thrower123 7y ago
If home economics classes in school hadn't been gutted a generation ago, this could be much more viable. It's becoming hard to find anybody that can so much as sew on a button. Much less operate an electric sewing machine. It's one of those things that is really not hard, you just have to have some exposure to it.
- oftenwrong 7y ago
  I learned sewing in school, but I never developed the skill for anything more than the most basic alterations. Most of the tailors in my area are older people, and they seem to be from the "Eastern Bloc" or China. I would imagine they grew up using sewing as a practical, day-to-day skill, or profession, and not merely as a hobby or odd-skill-I-learned-in-school.
jopsen 7y ago
Does the tailor make a decent wage? I think just shortening a pair of pants is 30$ minimum. Things that can't be done in a factory are increasingly expensive, especially if you don't have underpaid workers.
- jseliger 7y ago
  "Baumol's Cost Disease" is the missing discussion in these conversations https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/the-baumol-effect.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/th...
  - carapace 7y ago
    Reminds me of Mark S. Miller's classic: "A Computer's Perspective on Moore's Law: Humans are getting more expensive at an exponential rate." https://web.archive.org/web/20070203034530/http://www.caplet.com:80/adages.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070203034530/http://www.caplet...

hanniabu 7y ago

I'm surprised they didn't mention the R value of the insulation.

atupis 7y ago

I have noticed that t-shirts that are made from recycled cotton are much more durable and doesn't shrink same way than normal.

aaron695 7y ago

The real poor in this world rely on jobs manufacturing clothing. Sure if clothing manufacturing goes away or is lessened they could do other jobs like prostitution. But of you want to help 3rd world people employ them in good decent service jobs like making clothing. It takes nothing from their environment and gives them as humans, which they also are, money and decency.

flas9sd 7y ago

Real sustainability might mean not buying at all in the first place or to buy within a community if it is available and especially with textiles, not from remote open markets - you don't know which levers are in place for a business to make its profits, which costs are dissipated to everybody but the profiteer. Policies and programmes help. But don't fool yourself to be relieved of your consumers responsibility by recycling. Somebody else will shoulder the external costs. Recently a local social organisation offered numbers for textile donations: women make up 80% of their donations, 10 tons per week, men are mostly recipients. Less than 10% are reused or resold, the rest might become insulation. They lamented: we get too much. Access to cheap textiles is easy.

mises 7y ago
I'm not sure what you mean here with not buying. Do you mean not replacing clothes seasonally based on what's "en vogue"? If so, that may be why women make up most of the donations: they do tend to use clothes for a much shorter time. I still remember being shocked when I spoke to a young lady who told me she wore a dress two times at most. I've never been much of an environmentalist, but I guess I can feel good about keeping clothes for years and not changing them with styles.
- cosmodisk 7y ago
  I used to dress relatively well.Lots of good quality clothes. Then I put on lots of weight and was like " fuck it,I look like shit anyway", so started buying the cheap stuff. A pair of jeans-£6, t-shirts-£3, etc.The only exception is footwear- I don't buy cheap shoes,as they are crap. £6 jeans last only a couple of months before they become unwearable,as the material is usually subpar. So I kept buying them every 2 month or so. However recently I stopped buying this cheap crap,and usually buy clothes that are high quality and they do last. That's how I'd describe less consumption.

GordonS 7y ago

Here in the UK, donating old/unwanted clothes to charity has been a thing for a long time, at least a decade. Many supermarkets accept various kinds of recycling, and many have a large box for clothing, which goes to places like the Salvation Army. TBH, I've no idea what they do with it though. There are also door-to-door collections, where a bag is put through your door, for collection a couple of days later - of course, anyone can do this, and there have been cases in the past of unscrupulous people claiming proceeds will go to charity, but instead pocketing all the money.

ghaff 7y ago
Donating used clothing and other things to Goodwill, Salvation Army, etc. has been a thing for many decades in the US. These days you also see a fair number of collection bins in parking lots for either clothing/shoes or books/videos. I don't know how much of what's donated just gets thrown out though; I suspect a fair bit.
peter303 7y ago
Most of that goes directly to landfill after these places extract 5% x10% thatcan be profitably resold.
- smileypete 7y ago
  Apparently some (most?) charity shops will accept unwearable clothes for rags, would be no point if it all went to landfill.