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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

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.
      - dewey 7y ago
        > 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. It sounds like you are taking this for granted and something that can't be changed. In fact there are a lot of initiatives and companies that work on reducing the footprint, using sustainable sources of cotton, paying fair wages, using less harmful dying methods and filtering the water used in production. If you are interested in the topic I'd suggest to start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_fashion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_fashion. As for the green washing, there are probably better sources ([1], [2]) for that but you'll find enough if you do a little research yourself. [1] https://ecowarriorprincess.net/2018/08/can-hm-ever-be-sustainable/ https://ecowarriorprincess.net/2018/08/can-hm-ever-be-sustai... [2] https://wellmadeclothes.com/articles/HMConsciousCollectionIsGreenwashing101/ https://wellmadeclothes.com/articles/HMConsciousCollectionIs...
  - oftenwrong 7y ago
    In my neighbourhood, which hosts a critical mass of environmentally-conscious parents of young children, there is a children's clothing exchange run by a local church. It is a better version of the traditional hand-me-down culture, as it provides more of a desirable selection.
    - c22 7y ago
      We have something like this in my neighborhood too. It's hosted in someone's basement and consists of dozens of bins labelled by age/size and clothing type. It operates pretty much like a library where people take some things they like and return them when their child outgrows them. Over time I've seen the same shirt/whatever on multiple different children in the community. This mostly works for children's clothes because children tend to outgrow them well before they wear out. It might not work so well for adult garments. I tend to keep my clothes till the patches start overlapping, then I turn them into rags for the local maker space.
    - bubblewrap 7y ago
      So you admit that not all second hand clothing is still very desirable? It is nice to have such initiatives, but I am not yet convinced that they would be enough to make retailers of clothes superfluous.
- siruncledrew 7y ago
  I wonder if this strategy has anything to do with H&M's noticeable drop in clothing quality over the last decade. I have H&M shirts from the late-90s and they are still holding up fine, meanwhile H&M shirts I bought 3 years ago are already getting holes and worn out, for wearing the two shirts roughly equally. Perhaps this has to do with the "fast fashion" push to always be churning out new clothing. Sell something that loses significant value in a few years, Get the customer to return it to you for (basically) free, and the Customer buys more clothes (more profit). Forever21, Zara, Express, and H&M are all in the "fast-fashion" store bucket now.
  - wuschel 7y ago
    Hi, > H&M's noticeable drop in clothing quality over the last decade I have observed similar quality decrease with H&M, GAP and other brands. Technically (chem.eng.), it would make sense - but one has to look into the actual process in order to get clear insight.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    It’s about public companies needing to keep earnings growing. You can cut $5 of cost out of a product and lower the price $0.50. My grandparents camp has a washing machine and fridge from the 1950s, still going strong. Meanwhile I’m on my 3rd washing machine in this house since 2010.
- Larrikin 7y ago
  The coupon typically ranges from ten to fifteen percent which isn't insignificant. In the US I can typically sell my clothes for a decent return at my family's yearly yard sale. Anything that wouldn't sell such as old towels or items that didn't sell I can just take to h&m since they literally accept anything that is fabric. It was even better when I was in Japan. My family always did yard sales or donated our old clothes but over there there really isn't a culture of getting things second hand, especially if they aren't in near mint condition like what you would find at BookOff or they have been specifically curated and put in a trendy store in Harajuku. My ex would just throw her old clothes in the trash until I did my research and found she could donate to H&M for that coupon. I think that's an overall net positive.
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.

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.
    - dewey 7y ago
      > 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. It sounds like you are taking this for granted and something that can't be changed. In fact there are a lot of initiatives and companies that work on reducing the footprint, using sustainable sources of cotton, paying fair wages, using less harmful dying methods and filtering the water used in production. If you are interested in the topic I'd suggest to start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_fashion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_fashion. As for the green washing, there are probably better sources ([1], [2]) for that but you'll find enough if you do a little research yourself. [1] https://ecowarriorprincess.net/2018/08/can-hm-ever-be-sustainable/ https://ecowarriorprincess.net/2018/08/can-hm-ever-be-sustai... [2] https://wellmadeclothes.com/articles/HMConsciousCollectionIsGreenwashing101/ https://wellmadeclothes.com/articles/HMConsciousCollectionIs...
- oftenwrong 7y ago
  In my neighbourhood, which hosts a critical mass of environmentally-conscious parents of young children, there is a children's clothing exchange run by a local church. It is a better version of the traditional hand-me-down culture, as it provides more of a desirable selection.
  - c22 7y ago
    We have something like this in my neighborhood too. It's hosted in someone's basement and consists of dozens of bins labelled by age/size and clothing type. It operates pretty much like a library where people take some things they like and return them when their child outgrows them. Over time I've seen the same shirt/whatever on multiple different children in the community. This mostly works for children's clothes because children tend to outgrow them well before they wear out. It might not work so well for adult garments. I tend to keep my clothes till the patches start overlapping, then I turn them into rags for the local maker space.
  - bubblewrap 7y ago
    So you admit that not all second hand clothing is still very desirable? It is nice to have such initiatives, but I am not yet convinced that they would be enough to make retailers of clothes superfluous.
siruncledrew 7y ago
I wonder if this strategy has anything to do with H&M's noticeable drop in clothing quality over the last decade. I have H&M shirts from the late-90s and they are still holding up fine, meanwhile H&M shirts I bought 3 years ago are already getting holes and worn out, for wearing the two shirts roughly equally. Perhaps this has to do with the "fast fashion" push to always be churning out new clothing. Sell something that loses significant value in a few years, Get the customer to return it to you for (basically) free, and the Customer buys more clothes (more profit). Forever21, Zara, Express, and H&M are all in the "fast-fashion" store bucket now.
- wuschel 7y ago
  Hi, > H&M's noticeable drop in clothing quality over the last decade I have observed similar quality decrease with H&M, GAP and other brands. Technically (chem.eng.), it would make sense - but one has to look into the actual process in order to get clear insight.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  It’s about public companies needing to keep earnings growing. You can cut $5 of cost out of a product and lower the price $0.50. My grandparents camp has a washing machine and fridge from the 1950s, still going strong. Meanwhile I’m on my 3rd washing machine in this house since 2010.
Larrikin 7y ago
The coupon typically ranges from ten to fifteen percent which isn't insignificant. In the US I can typically sell my clothes for a decent return at my family's yearly yard sale. Anything that wouldn't sell such as old towels or items that didn't sell I can just take to h&m since they literally accept anything that is fabric. It was even better when I was in Japan. My family always did yard sales or donated our old clothes but over there there really isn't a culture of getting things second hand, especially if they aren't in near mint condition like what you would find at BookOff or they have been specifically curated and put in a trendy store in Harajuku. My ex would just throw her old clothes in the trash until I did my research and found she could donate to H&M for that coupon. I think that's an overall net positive.

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.