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Many clothing donations end up in African landfills

268 points by stereoradonc 5y ago

NikolaeVarius 5y ago
I refuse to fault fast fashion for these issues when the amount of trash free t-shirts given away for free at any conference could probably build a mountain on its own.
- nobodyandproud 5y ago
  A lot of horrible shirts. Yet one of my favorite t shirts was a black Linux-distro shirt from the mid(?) 1990s with a cool, flaring sun (Caldera?). I only stopped wearing it when it was so worn out that it ripped in the washer, in the early 2000s.
- treeman79 5y ago
  Was working at a startup and walked past a homeless person wearing our company shirt. Person wore it every day for many weeks on the same bench. Only homeless bench on that street. So we had exclusive homeless advertising.
- TaylorAlexander 5y ago
  The volume of clothes produced and discarded by fast fashion far outweighs whatever is given away at conferences.
- jetrink 5y ago
  Those are the opposite of fast fashion, being both completely unfashionable and oddly long-lived. I have event t-shirts that are almost old enough to vote. And then of course, they have a long afterlife, first as painting shirts and finally as cleaning rags.
  - pueblito 5y ago
    I’m presently wearing a shirt I got at COMDEX
  - mint2 5y ago
    Many people don’t use or like conference shirts. Your mileage may vary.
- tjr225 5y ago
  Always thought it would be funny to create an "app" that funneled unwanted swag back to the homeless/people who need clothes.
betaby 5y ago
Very relevant https://www.reaktor.com/blog/why-ive-tracked-every-single-piece-of-clothing-ive-worn-for-three-years/ https://www.reaktor.com/blog/why-ive-tracked-every-single-pi... Why I’ve tracked every single piece of clothing I’ve worn for three years
throwaway888abc 5y ago
Can "this" and "this" and "this" be donated somewhere and put in good use ? Chile’s desert dumping ground for fast fashion leftovers [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29155488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29155488 [1] https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/11/8/chiles-desert-dumping-ground-for-fast-fashion-leftovers https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/11/8/chiles-desert-du...
pstuart 5y ago
It would be great to see systems like this automated recycling system scale up: https://www.fastcompany.com/90616764/bring-your-old-clothes-and-this-in-store-recycling-machine-will-turn-them-into-something-new https://www.fastcompany.com/90616764/bring-your-old-clothes-...
rileyphone 5y ago
I've taken to buying almost all my clothes second hand recently, both for this reason and I find the selection and styles far better than what fast fashion provides. Thrift stores like Goodwill provide some gems, but the best shopping comes from we-buy-your-clothes type places like Buffalo Exchange and Crossroads, and the prices are better too!
- bruceb 5y ago
  But you exchange more of your time at 2nd hand places. The reason new exists is not just the styles, but the higher likelihood you are going to find the correct (or near to it) size.
  - mint2 5y ago
    That’s only true if one is an average size or isn’t mindful of fit. Shopping new can be a huge drag otherwise.
    - Talanes 5y ago
      But it's not like any of that is easier second-hand? If I go jean shopping new I might not find my size in every style, but it's very rare that I find second-hand pants that fit without needing to hem.
      - mint2 5y ago
        True, if there was a store with lightly used 80 and 90s clothing and shoes it would be great because sizing was different and less standardized between brands. But second hand is mostly recent stuffs so it’s equally ill fitting. Some stuff can’t be hemmed easily.
  - germ 5y ago
    Time is half of the appeal though, the other half is randomness. If I had a nickel for every time I assembled an outfit or three around something so outside of my normal, I'd probably have a few bucks. It's delightful to find a funky 70s coat that you can work with and spend a few hours running around. Also the cost factor is nice. My partner works at a local thrift and getting steep discounts on top of the already reduced prices is amazing. And whenever something outgrows my wardrobe it's back off to the donation bin (wear providing) Sizing is tough though, you're right. My body is outside being sized for most clothes so a ton of otherwise good finds just won't do (but that's what traditional shops are for filling). Thankfully my partner has a similar sizer torso so we can share tops, jackets and whatnot style providing. Organizing two stuffed closets is a bit tricky however There's always more stuff to dig through and finds to discover!
hilbert42 5y ago
That's conspicuous consumption gone mad, it seems to me too many people have far too much disposable income. What is it about people that they cannot be content with their clothes in that they have to change them long before they're worn out? This is fashion gone mad. I never throw out clothes, and I can keep the same items for many years - I've still got jeans, BD dungarees, etc. that I bought over 20 years ago. When they eventually become threadbare I tear them up for cleaning rags. What the hell is wrong with these people that they can be so wasteful?
- Retric 5y ago
  Much of this isn’t conspicuous consumption it’s a lack of reuse inside of developed nations. Low quality clothing is so cheap it’s hard to fathom, making buying new simply easier and just as affordable. “In 2019, American families spent on average about 2% of their income on clothing.” It’s vastly more affordable than “In the 1950s, the average American family spent about 10% of its income on clothing, and that money bought them just a few sturdy garments a year.” Thrift shops went from a way to save real money at the cost of time to a fashion statement.
  - hilbert42 5y ago
    "Much of this isn’t conspicuous consumption..." Perhaps not. However where I live the amount of dumped clothing is unbelievable. Charities that once used to take almost any amount of clothing now do not. Instead, they'll take the top 10% of it and dump the rest - 'dump' here means send the rest overseas to third world countries. Moreover, not that many years ago, these charities used to have used clothing collection bins - great big steel boxes about as tall as a person with a hinged lid at top - scattered all over conspicuous parts of the city and they have been all removed because the charities no longer want the responsibility of dumping huge volumes of stuff (as it's many times more than they can cope with and it's long past the point where if they were to accept the clothing then it would cost them money to it. Essentially, these charities have been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of clothing. Now, they are very picky about what they will accept. If one now wants to give clothes to a charitity then one has to take it there themselves. The charitity will then pick the eyes out of it and what it does not want the donor will have to find somewhere to dump the remainer. Now, much clothing goes directly into the trash can thence to landfill. If you wondered why my post was so cynical now you know.
scotty79 5y ago
Regulate fashion. For example you might make destruction or stockpiling of unsold clothes a crime. Also ban exporting clothes that were manufactured abroad.
- zokier 5y ago
  It doesn't need to be regulated. Like many for problems, the negative externalities need to be accounted in taxation/tariffs.
  - scotty79 5y ago
    Sure, but it could be done with less ill effects than not regulating it. There already are specific regulations regarding fashion industry.
- bloodyplonker22 5y ago
  "Regulate this, regulate that", it's the socialist/communist answer to everything. Sooner or later, they'll be yelling to regulate when I can use the toilet for water saving purposes.
  - Nursie 5y ago
    It's quite funny reading this sort of myopic bullshit in response to an article about destruction of the natural world due to unregulated commercial activity. It's not the answer to everything, but it sure is the answer to some things.
halpert 5y ago
The weird part of this isn’t that fast fashion generates a lot of trash. Almost every part of the American lifestyle generates tons of waste. The strange part is that the US strong arms African countries into buying the “donated” garments from textile recyclers. I’ll be throwing my used garments directly into the landfill in the future.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  The recycling industrial complex is a total mess in general. American recycling also gets dumped on South East Asia (mainly China if memory serves) where much of it is just waste. There's a reason recycling is the third R, and it should primarily take the form of other people reusing your stuff anyway - not throwing items in a specifically coloured bin and calling it a day.
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    No, China specifically outlawed a lot of the recycling trade that was coming in, and it caused havoc to municipal recycling a few years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_National_Sword https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_National_Sword
    - beaconstudios 5y ago
      Yeah I knew about this - China reacted negatively to this process in describing, but no doubt we're all sending it elsewhere now.
  - User23 5y ago
    China isn't part of Southeast Asia[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast_Asia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast_Asia
    - beaconstudios 5y ago
      Oh yeah
Proven 5y ago
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deathanatos 5y ago
> Today, the average American buys 68 new items of clothing per year. > “You wonder, do people in America have so much money that they can just wear things once and then throw them away?” I uh… I too would like to know. What scares me is that the use of whatever demographic is causing that average has to be way higher than the actual average, but this feels like it has to be bimodal. And there are lots of these numbers in the news. The "average American" produces an obscene amount of food waste too, far beyond what I feel I actually produce, as best as I can estimate it.
- HFguy 5y ago
  I don’t believe that the average American buys 68 pieces of clothing a year. I’d like them to share the source of that. The author doesn’t offer one that I saw. TBC, I think wearing something 3-4 times and discarding it is horrible.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    Where I live, if you enter a random mall, perhaps 1/2 to 2/3rds of the shops sell clothing. And they live somehow and obviously attract enough customers - a cursory look will prove that they aren't empty. There must be people who buy three or four pieces of clothing every week for years.
  - smnrchrds 5y ago
    I imagine they are counting everything, e.g. counting each sock as a separate item of clothing. Otherwise, there is no way the AVERAGE is 68 items per year.
    - mint2 5y ago
      Likely does include socks and underwear but the median is probably lower than the avenger age. I’m guessing this is a skewed distribution.
      - smnrchrds 5y ago
DoreenMichele 5y ago
In Ghana, imported secondhand clothes are called obroni wawu, dead white man’s clothes. In Malawi, they are kaunjika — literally “clothes sold in a heap.” In Mozambique, they are known as calamidade, calamity, for their historical association with disaster relief aid. Fascinating article if only for such an interesting glimpse into Africa and African culture and how it is being shaped by its relationship to the larger world.
- gexla 5y ago
  In the Philippines it's Ukay-Ukay, which originates from a term which means "to dig." So, they're digging for good finds. ;)
  - boeingUH60 5y ago
    Here in Nigeria, they’re called “Okrika”. Pretty funny names.
t8y 5y ago
I think people should really talk about mass market fashion vs luxury fashion. Many people seem to think that buying LVMH clothes or other luxury brands is somehow more ethical when those brands can be even worse. Those brands just sell far fewer items so it's not the same amount. If 99.9% of clothes are fast fashion than 99.9% of left over clothes should also be fast fashion, it's actually more like 100% as luxury brands will just destroy unsold merchandise usually to prevent damage to the brand. I'm a guy so clearly things don't change as much but almost every piece of clothing I own is "fast fashion" that I'll wear until it's ruined. Consumers are told constantly by the media, social media and brands that they need to continuously change or be out of fashion and "cringe" or "cheugy". I think fast fashion companies in general are one of the least to blame for these trends, they seem to just copy quickly what is deemed as good but others. Kmart in Australia is a good example. Most stores sell crappy out of date stuff so you have to shop online but Kmart has heaps of good cheap stuff under the Anko brand. From $3.70 t-shirts with a good fit, to $50.00 air fryers to nice containers to store stuff in. IMO it's a big win for most people to have cheap good stuff to buy. If it wasn't for Kmart it would be far harder to not be "cringe" while being poor. If the coolness industrial complex decides that this stuff is not good then Kmart would need to get rid of stock to replace it with new cool stuff. Is that Kmarts fault? I don't think so.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  I think a lot of it is that (I assume) you can re-wear luxury pieces with far less perceived social judgement.
- x3iv130f 5y ago
  I buy mostly luxury brands however there are quite a few tricks with it. Buying luxury off the rack at a well known store is almost always a bad financial decision. I stick primarily to lesser known brands that still maintain good quality. I almost always buy used with just a few exceptions. For some reason it is hard for me to find good pants used or with any sort of discount.
  - null_deref 5y ago
    Where do you find second hand clothing? I use Facebook Marketplace for furniture and electronics, but I find it uncomfortable to buy second hand clothing from there
foxfired 5y ago
Growing up, it was completely normal to look at my older brothers clothes and pick which I wanted 2 years before it was handed down to me. Then we got MTV. When our mother travelled on business, we would make print outs of shoes and clothing that we wanted. God forbid someone caught you with an off-brand shoe at school now that the poorest kid under the hot sun of Saudi Arabia was fashion aware. It was wasteful, it was expensive, it was less than 5 items each a year. I can't even imagine what it's like to buy 68 article of clothing a year. But then again a wise author once said: "Ending is better than mending."
gexla 5y ago
Hopefully the climate change issue could motivate to change this. Even if this stuff is piling up in a place sight unseen from the origin, it's still coming back to that origin in ways which we don't well understand. Just as the pandemic accelerated global cooperation and change, so could the climate issue. If the US wanted to shut down this problem, regulators could find the key spot to put a bullet into. Ideally the US would take the responsibility that comes with globalism after nuking the world with trash. Trash is how I view everything I buy. I'm walking into a store to buy trash. It doesn't matter that I still wear a belt daily which I have had for 15 years and much of my clothes are seriously straining from overuse. It still goes to trash eventually. If I take it to my grave, then I'm trash wrapped in trash. When I first stayed in a developing country, there was no trash service for much of the region. If you wanted to get rid of something, you burned it. Today I do all my shopping considering what it would be like to burn it. Car shopping would be so much fun. Don't think it matters what we do individually. This needs to be an urgent thing taken at levels where people actually have power to change things. Also, I think the issue is that this is essentially a scheme to cheaply get rid of trash. You could probably pay these importers to take the trash and it would still be worth it. "You mean, you'll pay us to take our trash?! Thank you so much for solving that nightmare of a problem for us. This was looking REALLY expensive for us to deal with in our own country."
- bamboozled 5y ago
  > Just as the pandemic accelerated global cooperation and change, so could the climate issue. Not to be negative but how did the pandemic do anything but prove we’re pretty bad at cooperation ?
- dehrmann 5y ago
  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.
blaaaaa99 5y ago
Weird article. Poor people get good condition, fashionable recycled clothing for a few cents, and this is somehow a bad thing? Does africa really need to be in garment production? Could they compete with vietnam/bangladesh?Banning imports and mandating locally produced clothing is likely just going to lead to forcing poor people to pay 10x more with no improvement or even worse quality.
reddog 5y ago
Sounds a lot like clothing is now “post scarcity”. I’d have thought that was a positive thing but from the articles moral panicky tone, I guess it’s just another thing we need to feel guilty about.
- yourapostasy 5y ago
  > Sounds a lot like clothing is now “post scarcity”. Only a tiny step further along the path towards post scarcity. One of the parts of post scarcity that is rarely covered are the full ramifications of increasing mastery over matter and energy. Trash is a civilization's admission its technology and science haven't yet mastered how to use low embedded energy, the same way money implies poverty (h/t Iain M. Banks).
forgotmypw17 5y ago
I stopped buying clothing completely.
BurningFrog 5y ago
The article describes a world of affluence, reaching deep into the poorest parts of Africa. Gone are the days when people would have to be naked when they washed the only piece of clothing they owned. Somehow this eradication of third world poverty is bad. Because everything is bad if you want to think of it that way. Just one point: Clothing ending up in landfills are a form of carbon sequestration.
- esarbe 5y ago
  > reaching deep into the poorest parts of Africa. Yes. We're using the poorest parts of Africa as garbage dump. We're not helping these people prosper, quite the contrary; we're destroying local economies.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  There is a lot of garbage which should just be burned. Most fast fashion is made of plastic which was made of oil and the fact that the oil spent a little time as a shirt shouldn't be any impediment into turning it into electricity when somebody is done with it. Much cheaper having a local waste-to-power plant than "donating" garbage and shipping it across the planet to places where people don't want it and have to dump it anyway. It is quite possibly carbon negative in the big picture because it prevents some oil from being burned for power and some oil from being burned for transport and doesn't waste human effort with sorting garbage several times which ends up in a landfill anyway not so unlikely polluting the planet with plenty of microplastics along the way.
- culi 5y ago
  > Just one point: Clothing ending up in landfills are a form of carbon sequestration. By that logic, so is the insane amount of waste that's currently in the ocean instead of having been burnt. The forests and grasslands that were cut down for those landfills would've sequestered much more carbon in the long term. Plastics can take anywhere between 50 and millions of years to decompose and they decompose into what? Microplastics? Other chemicals that hardly any lifeform is capable of utilizing? One thing you quickly observe about Americans after spending enough time on HN is how quickly they'll jump to justify massive amounts of waste with some vague reference somehow tying it to decreasing poverty. Last winter, Lufthansa airlines had 18,000 empty flights just to maintain their airport spots. In 2015 the EU mistakenly classified wood pellets as a renewable energy source. Since then, US exports of wood pellets have tripled, the EU's "renewable energy" makeup has gone from less than 20% biomass to ~60% biomass in 2020. Waste exists. I don't understand the compulsion people have to somehow bring poverty into the conversation every time someone tries to point it out
Overtonwindow 5y ago
Related, Clothing Poverty: The Hidden World of Fast Fashion and Second-Hand Clothes, by Andrew Brooks examines this world of considerable waste.
cm2012 5y ago
We could dump ten times the clothes and it wouldn't matter. Landfill space is not at all rare, it wouldn't even be a huge engineering project to build a hole big enough to house all human trash for the next hundred years. Frankly, the gains from having cheap clothing and letting people express themselves far outweighs the downsides from the waste.
zamalek 5y ago
I don't give two damns about fashion, but I would like good long-lasting clothing. Any suggestions on where I can find that (once my current stock wears out)?
- tchvil 5y ago
  Patagonia makes clothes that last. And if you learn to sew to fix them, even more.
- MerelyMortal 5y ago
  I wear Carhartt clothes daily after I remove their branding logos with a razor blade.
- ejb999 5y ago
  LL Bean used to always have super high quality products - stuff you could buy and wear for years, even decades. Sadly, now that they no longer offer warranties like they used to, the quality has decreased greatly. I am on my second pair of LL Bean boots - first pair I used for 20 years before they cracked and started leaking - second pair I bought - after the warranty changed, broke the first day (loops on the back that you use to pull them up ripped off: 1 the first day, 2nd one a week later - and a few weeks after that, the laces-holes also ripped - this is for a $200 pair of boots. Seems nobody can make money selling quality stuff anymore - it's all a race to the bottom.
  - dayofthedaleks 5y ago
    Salomon shoes and boots can take a serious beating. Red Wings if you want heavier.
- dayofthedaleks 5y ago
  I've been trying to emphasize natural fabrics and tossing out stuff that doesn't fit, so I've been buying: Pendleton - Amazing wool shirts, and their cotton stuff is very solid. They still sell all-wool sweaters, which is becoming rare even at the high end. Sometimes eBay/poshmark have nice older USA-made pieces but sizing can be a crapshoot. Brooks Brothers - Reliable for well-made warm-weather linens and cottons, pretty sure that remains so post-bankruptcy. Style choices run from 'Weekend Lawyer' to 'Insolent Schoolboy.' American Giant - All-cotton tshirts and hoodies. Haven't tried their pants. Woolrich - Good sweaters and heavy shirts. My first sweater from the now-shuttered PA factory has survived 30 years with spells of very rough traveling and outdoor work without holes. Bemidji Woolen Mills - Wool Mackinaws and barn jackets do well in most situations where waterproofing isn't required. Arc'teryx - The Canadian-made Gore-Tex stuff is very durable. Overseas-made no slouch either. I believe Gore is making serious progress in shedding fewer microplastics. Double Pump - I think this is a captive Amazon brand? Durable and inexpensive cotton cowboy snap work shirts, the only ones I've found that are not synthetic blend. Ely Cattleman has a line of 97% cotton shirts but most are awfully rodeo-y. LL Bean - Still make good casual and lined winter pants, but they're going downhill fast in nearly every other category. Will market something as 'wool' when it's 95% synthetic. Eddie Bauer - See LL Bean, maybe with better shirt choices. Smartwool/Meriwool - Base layers are magic, both brands seem indestructible. Smartwool socks are nice for all but the hottest weather. Meriwool is more likely to be all-wool. Runner-up goes to Peoplesocks brand. Oh and the key to laundering all of these natural fabrics? Wash as cold delicates, dryer cycle with no heat for wrinkles, hang dry near a dehumidifier.
AussieWog93 5y ago
I'm in e-commerce, and reading through this thread I think many people have the misconception that people make purchases to solve problems and want that solution to last as long as possible. In reality, and this is something I spent a long time coming to terms with, much shopping is done because it's fun. Spending money isn't a cost - it's the whole point of the exercise.
- TulliusCicero 5y ago
  It's possible for both to be true. People make purchases that are fun, and they'd like said purchases to solve some problem (and preferably with decent quality). Like, when I make silly gadget purchases, yes it's fun to acquire the gadgets, but I'd like them to be good products that last too.
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    >but I'd like them to be good products that last too. How much does this really affect your purchase, though? If you bought a Garmin watch that failed after 3 years, would you buy the new model? What if the same thing happened with your car and they refused to fix it? Would you buy the same brand again, or would you tell every single person you know to avoid them like the plague? I think the thing is, that above $X, people really do expect a product to solve a problem effectively. Under that amount, though, much of what people spend is just frittered away.
    - wccrawford 5y ago
      This happened to me with Fitbit. The first lasted longer than 3 years, and I was happy with that. The second didn't, and I wasn't... But I bought another. When that failed early, too, I gave up on them. For a tool, I don't want it to fail on me, ever. I don't enjoy learning to use a new tool for the same old purpose. I want it to just keep working. When I'm ready for a new way of that tool working, I seek it out. I do not want it forced on me. That said, I also treat clothes as a tool. I buy new ones when I want something different, but until then I want them to continue as they had. When I'm sick of them or they wear out, I use them for woodworking, painting, etc, until they finally just are too ugly or damaged.
Nursie 5y ago
> If you live in the West, chances are at some point you have stuffed your used clothes into a garbage bag and hauled them off to a Goodwill or the Salvation Army. Please don't let this article put you off donating clothes to good causes. I know that (for instance) in the UK the Red Cross sells as much as it can, and only the unsellable stuff (ripped, stained etc) goes out to 'rag' with the recyclers. Clothing is even cycled through different shops if one can't sell it. So I'm really not sure that 10-20% figure holds up globally. Something this article glossses over is that this stuff is not just being dumped - it's being bought. I think it's wrong that (for instance, in the article) the US interfered in law-making in various places to veto restrictions on the trade, of course. But fundamentally, the countries need to get a handle on dumping and start factoring that into the price of doing business. Yes, westerners could buy less crap, and they could also do more shopping for used stuff themselves. But that's only part of hte picture.
scotty79 5y ago
Many fashion moguls adorn varius "richest people" lists. I think it's a good rule of thumb to pay close attention to any industry that produces disproportionate number of billionaires. Because there might be some societal or ecological cost involved that the marked should be made aware of with through taxes or regulation. Fasion and real estate should be some of the prime targets for investigation.
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  I'm sure clothing and footwear profits from slavery and child labor and general exporting of poor working conditions and environmental standards as many other industries have done with globalization, and however connected to the "fashion" industry that is I guess. Are there other problems with it? My mind would have gone to energy, war industry, tech, banking, news media, chemical, health and pharmaceutical, and probably a lot of others before I thought of fashion though if I was thinking of societal cost. How do you gauge what is a good and bad proportion of billionaires for an industry, and what kind of societal cost do you think the fashion industry might have?
  - scotty79 5y ago
    Just take a look at what industry most billionaires got rich from. Those are the industries that extract most value from society and environment. And since there's no free lunch there probably is some associated cost no matter how well hidden and surprising. > My mind would have gone to energy, war industry, tech, banking, news media, chemical, health and pharmaceutical, and probably a lot of others before I thought of fashion though if I was thinking of societal cost. Sure, there are other heuristics that might point out to other industries worth regulating.
    - throwawaylinux 5y ago
      This isn't really how things work. Let's say Belon Tusk is worth $100 million and invests that into starting a submarine company. Eventually they make a working product they can sell, and that puts the value of the company at $1 billion. Eventually the second design comes along and revolutionizes submarine industry and reduces the costs that governments (taxpayers) and private industry were paying for submarine voyages significantly. This puts the value of the company at $100 billion and makes Belon a hundred billionaire. This is not wealth that was "extracted" from anywhere. The company might be using cheap finance on its valuation, but it's also paying workers, buying goods and services, and selling services into the economy as well. It's most likely creating a net positive for society.
fennecfoxen 5y ago
> As it stands, lax customs enforcement — along with spotty infrastructure and the prevalence of cheap Asian imports — has made it difficult for Africa to develop a garment industry of its own. Local producers are great, but they're outnumbered ten thousand to one by local consumers. How the world would be any better if some of the world's poorest were forced by their governments to pay extra money to buy inferior clothes, while some small-time politically-connected tycoon profited from it? That's not really how prosperity works. Scale back your consumption here in the US, go ahead, that's fine, but let's not pretend that the bales of clothing smuggled over the border into South Africa are harming anyone but the comfortable.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  >Local producers are great, but they're outnumbered ten thousand to one by local consumers. How the world would be any better if some of the world's poorest were forced by their governments to pay extra money to buy inferior clothes, while some small-time politically-connected tycoon profited from it? Employees of local producers are great too, the theory I always hear is that people getting paid in an area stimulate more economic activity. So I mean you should take that idea apart more as it is pretty much established wisdom. That said how do you know the products would be inferior? Cheap Asian imports are generally of poor quality, it seems strange that the locally made clothes would not be at least equal to that but actually inferior! Donated clothes that westerners have worn are probably going to be inferior since after all they were worn and were probably cheap Asian imports to begin with.
  - fennecfoxen 5y ago
    > Employees of local producers are great too, the theory I always hear is that people getting paid in an area stimulate more economic activity. So I mean you should take that idea apart more as it is pretty much established wisdom. The "established wisdom" you cite is a long-lived natural propaganda campaign. It begins with politicians, people who succeed or fail based mostly on their image, not on the quality of their governance. Why would they do the hard work seeking out the causes of prosperity, help organize that prosperity, and seek ways that collective action can make things better? That's a sucker's game. If you rip off the population at large — just a little bit at a time, mind you — then you gain political allies in the industry who benefits. Of course they'll market you as the champion of prosperity: you've made their success possible. It's not strictly cynical; it's quite easy to believe, if you're not the person paying for it, and motivated reasoning is strong. It's a win/win deal, because you ignore the people who actually pay for things. Welcome to public-choice theory. It likely won't ever change. Hooray! It should be painfully obvious to anyone who thinks about the facts of the matter that having access to nearly-free clothes — not the obnoxious piles of waste or anything, just the bales of clothing the article laments being imported into South Africa — having access is strictly better than not having this access. These people, after all, are always free to buy different clothes. It's not hard: Americans have access to similar, and can buy stupidly cheap clothes at an American thrift store, but in practice, they mostly don't even look at such an establishment. So why don't the people of South Africa buy locally made clothes right now? Because given their income, they much prefer the nearly-free clothes. Common sense does work here! As an individual, you don't become prosperous by looking for ways to do things that are more expensive. As a society, the same principle applies. Yes, yes, someone will conjure many promises: if everyone just spends more money, we'll have more money! But you know, if you spend less money on clothes you can spend more money on literally anything else which you'd rather have. It's like a perpetual motion machine: the energy does actually come from somewhere, you just might not be looking at it. The prosperity they propose society will gain from protecting garment industry is stolen from everyone who buys clothes, and everything that they would have bought instead, and you lose some of the prosperity in the process, because you expend effort and capital and materials.
faangiq 5y ago
Why not just burn them?
- beebeepka 5y ago
  Seriously? Some of the poorest people around here do that sort of thing in the winter. The fumes are horrible and include all rainbow colours. This entire thread is horrible. Not many other topics bring out the worst of people. Disgust is what I feel reading many of the comments here. Apparently waste is good and even if it were bad, what can you do, heh?
rcdwealth 5y ago
kleiba 5y ago
Everything that gets produced eventually lands in a dump. The moral justification for shipping stuff your nation has no use for anymore, i.e. your garbage, off to Africa needs to be discussed. Some of that stuff will find second use, which is good in some ways and bad in other ways, but whether that happens or not, everything that gets shipped to Africa will end up in a dump in Africa sooner or later - unless it gets shipped away again somewhere else.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  Metal is economic to recycle, so is probably glass. Paper so-so (unless greasy), plastic almost never, cotton neither.
2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
Once again sci fi got it right. Everyone in the future wears similar things because the fashion industry was too costly.
a0-prw 5y ago
Donations of clothes from the West can also undermine local clothing industries. This also happened with "cheap" milk powder from the EU to (iirc) Ghana. Ghana was helping to finance the EU's overproduction of milk.
- seb1204 5y ago
  I have heard that chicken necks and feet are exported to China from EU Same for pig feet.
  - 317070 5y ago
    I reckon more pig feet end up in cat and dog food than end up in a recognisable form in Chinese cuisine. In the West, people eat a lot of pig feet too! It's just sold as mince.
- _trampeltier 5y ago
  Also chicken wings. In the EU, nobody wants to eat chicken wings, just the bigger chicken meat parts. So the chicken wings end up for almost free in Africa and also destroyed every chicken farm, because the where more expensive than the chicken from EU.
  - samarama 5y ago
    Ok but then don’t make a chicken farm, there are numerous other animals you can farm and it provides a baseline of food for the poor.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    Looking at the Chinese cuisine one starts to wonder about other parts. Wings are relatively popular, but what about things like feet, neck, head and organs? What we do with all of them? As clearly they are not even on the full birds. Same goes for pigs. You can buy some, but the ratio is entirely off.
    - 317070 5y ago
plebianRube 5y ago
> the fashion industry is responsible for one-tenth of the world’s carbon emissions, according to the U.N. Environment Program — more than international flights and maritime shipping combined I think we need clothing that lasts longer. If you are clothing shopping for fun, your actions aren't harmless.
- seb1204 5y ago
  Cheap clothing is just cheap as the hidden cost are... Hidden. Cheap labour, cheap material, low quality combined with high emissions and pesticides/toxins that are released mostly untreated.
  - esarbe 5y ago
    You've hit the nail on the head. If all these externalized cost were actually included in the price of the product it would raise the price massively and no one would accept today's low-quality ware anymore. Maybe?
8589934591 5y ago
I have started buying clothes from USA _because_ they are of higher quality. Even though they are made in my India, they are usually not available for sale here. The quality and variety available for exports is drastically different from what is available for the local market. Mine have lasted at least 2-3 years before I buy a new set of clothes. I wonder why there is a huge churn in USA to keep buying new clothes. Is it just more affordable/cheaper to buy than to mend your clothes? Easier access that makes it binge buy quickly? Too many special occasions? I am confused cos I feel they haven't seen inferior quality of clothing that they don't keep their belongings longer.
- wccrawford 5y ago
  I'm an American that doesn't buy new clothes often, but I want to provide my view. My clothes last a lot longer than 2-3 years. To get to the point that they're ragged or faded takes a long time for most of them. (The very cheapest t-shirts from online sites are the exception. I don't buy those any more.) On the other hand, my wife gets great pleasure from getting new clothing. She has a lot more than I do, and still she buys more. She is genuinely excited about wearing and showing off the new clothes she bought. When she gets a compliment about them, she is very, very happy. Strangers aren't likely to give those compliments, and friends aren't going to compliment the same clothes again. To get those feelings, she needs new clothes. All that said, she doesn't buy as many clothes as many of the vapid women/girls that I've met over the years. She's responsible with her money and doesn't buy excessively. But watching her emotions about the ones she does buy informs me a lot about the less responsible women out there. I don't know any men like that, but I have seen them on TV (especially "reality" shows), so I'm sure they exist, too.
  - telesilla 5y ago
    In case she is open to discussing this, it's a fairly common problem. It can be resolved by finding another source of praise, for example volunteer work or teaching, or exceeding in extra activities in her field. She is not needing new clothes but attention, and there are healthy ways to achieve that. Experience: my own (as a woman) and various friends over the years.
parenthesis 5y ago
Once an item of clothing wears out too much to wear in public, I wear it around the house or sleep in it. During the pandemic I've rarely had to wear `decent' clothes. On video calls I just temporarily put on a non-worn-out top over whatever I'm wearing. Unfortunately I do have to buy replacement footwear quite regularly (50+ miles on foot per week). But a worn out pair of shoes does for working in the garden, and worn socks as slippers round the house. So, eventually, my clothes end up in UK landfill, once they are too worn out even for me (which can be after decades).
- regularjack 5y ago
  I'm the same. My girlfriend is constantly wanting to throw out some of my clothing items, and I'm thinking "I could probably still wear that for another 10 years!"
chiefalchemist 5y ago
> To be sure, the availability of inexpensive clothes isn’t entirely a bad thing. In a country like South Africa, where more than half of people live below the poverty line, demand remains brisk, and some Western castoffs have become wardrobe staples for people who might not be able to afford new clothes. Ah...not quite. The problem is, these leftovers from The West ultimately undermine the local economy. So, for example, locals can't work in a local clothing factory because there's no market. That market is already monopolized by much more inexpensive donation clothes.
Pooge 5y ago
I gave some (+5 years old) clothes to a family member's acquaintance. I'm glad to hear they even wear it to work sometimes.
jacquesm 5y ago
The whole commercial system is so full of perverse incentives. It is absolutely horrible what we do to your planet but there is so much momentum behind this. Someone near me loves to throw things away. I kid you not. Mountains of disposables, perfectly good stuff gets replaced just to get something new. And let's not get started about the amount of food that goes into the waste bin even though there is nothing wrong with it other than that an expiry sticker says it is now one day over time. Personal status report: articles of clothing bought in the last year: 0. Articles of clothing bought in the last three years: still 0. And I don't think I'll be buying any for the next year either and then likely I'll buy some underwear and socks. But for my kids (who are growing quite rapidly) it is a completely different story and I suspect that that is one factor that pushes up that average.
- imtringued 5y ago
  Positive interest rates are by definition short term thinking. The borrower must pay sooner than later. Investors will not be satisfied with companies that perform worse than the interest rate.
5ESS 5y ago
How is this a problem? They get free clothes they would otherwise never be able to afford. Perhaps they should be grateful instead of expecting everything to be free forever.

268 points by stereoradonc 5y ago

I refuse to fault fast fashion for these issues when the amount of trash free t-shirts given away for free at any conference could probably build a mountain on its own.

nobodyandproud 5y ago
A lot of horrible shirts. Yet one of my favorite t shirts was a black Linux-distro shirt from the mid(?) 1990s with a cool, flaring sun (Caldera?). I only stopped wearing it when it was so worn out that it ripped in the washer, in the early 2000s.
treeman79 5y ago
Was working at a startup and walked past a homeless person wearing our company shirt. Person wore it every day for many weeks on the same bench. Only homeless bench on that street. So we had exclusive homeless advertising.
TaylorAlexander 5y ago
The volume of clothes produced and discarded by fast fashion far outweighs whatever is given away at conferences.
jetrink 5y ago
Those are the opposite of fast fashion, being both completely unfashionable and oddly long-lived. I have event t-shirts that are almost old enough to vote. And then of course, they have a long afterlife, first as painting shirts and finally as cleaning rags.
- pueblito 5y ago
  I’m presently wearing a shirt I got at COMDEX
- mint2 5y ago
  Many people don’t use or like conference shirts. Your mileage may vary.
tjr225 5y ago
Always thought it would be funny to create an "app" that funneled unwanted swag back to the homeless/people who need clothes.

betaby 5y ago

Very relevant https://www.reaktor.com/blog/why-ive-tracked-every-single-piece-of-clothing-ive-worn-for-three-years/ https://www.reaktor.com/blog/why-ive-tracked-every-single-pi... Why I’ve tracked every single piece of clothing I’ve worn for three years

throwaway888abc 5y ago

Can "this" and "this" and "this" be donated somewhere and put in good use ? Chile’s desert dumping ground for fast fashion leftovers [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29155488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29155488 [1] https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/11/8/chiles-desert-dumping-ground-for-fast-fashion-leftovers https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/11/8/chiles-desert-du...

pstuart 5y ago

It would be great to see systems like this automated recycling system scale up: https://www.fastcompany.com/90616764/bring-your-old-clothes-and-this-in-store-recycling-machine-will-turn-them-into-something-new https://www.fastcompany.com/90616764/bring-your-old-clothes-...

rileyphone 5y ago

I've taken to buying almost all my clothes second hand recently, both for this reason and I find the selection and styles far better than what fast fashion provides. Thrift stores like Goodwill provide some gems, but the best shopping comes from we-buy-your-clothes type places like Buffalo Exchange and Crossroads, and the prices are better too!

bruceb 5y ago
But you exchange more of your time at 2nd hand places. The reason new exists is not just the styles, but the higher likelihood you are going to find the correct (or near to it) size.
- mint2 5y ago
  That’s only true if one is an average size or isn’t mindful of fit. Shopping new can be a huge drag otherwise.
  - Talanes 5y ago
    But it's not like any of that is easier second-hand? If I go jean shopping new I might not find my size in every style, but it's very rare that I find second-hand pants that fit without needing to hem.
    - mint2 5y ago
      True, if there was a store with lightly used 80 and 90s clothing and shoes it would be great because sizing was different and less standardized between brands. But second hand is mostly recent stuffs so it’s equally ill fitting. Some stuff can’t be hemmed easily.
- germ 5y ago
  Time is half of the appeal though, the other half is randomness. If I had a nickel for every time I assembled an outfit or three around something so outside of my normal, I'd probably have a few bucks. It's delightful to find a funky 70s coat that you can work with and spend a few hours running around. Also the cost factor is nice. My partner works at a local thrift and getting steep discounts on top of the already reduced prices is amazing. And whenever something outgrows my wardrobe it's back off to the donation bin (wear providing) Sizing is tough though, you're right. My body is outside being sized for most clothes so a ton of otherwise good finds just won't do (but that's what traditional shops are for filling). Thankfully my partner has a similar sizer torso so we can share tops, jackets and whatnot style providing. Organizing two stuffed closets is a bit tricky however There's always more stuff to dig through and finds to discover!

hilbert42 5y ago

That's conspicuous consumption gone mad, it seems to me too many people have far too much disposable income. What is it about people that they cannot be content with their clothes in that they have to change them long before they're worn out? This is fashion gone mad. I never throw out clothes, and I can keep the same items for many years - I've still got jeans, BD dungarees, etc. that I bought over 20 years ago. When they eventually become threadbare I tear them up for cleaning rags. What the hell is wrong with these people that they can be so wasteful?

Retric 5y ago
Much of this isn’t conspicuous consumption it’s a lack of reuse inside of developed nations. Low quality clothing is so cheap it’s hard to fathom, making buying new simply easier and just as affordable. “In 2019, American families spent on average about 2% of their income on clothing.” It’s vastly more affordable than “In the 1950s, the average American family spent about 10% of its income on clothing, and that money bought them just a few sturdy garments a year.” Thrift shops went from a way to save real money at the cost of time to a fashion statement.
- hilbert42 5y ago
  "Much of this isn’t conspicuous consumption..." Perhaps not. However where I live the amount of dumped clothing is unbelievable. Charities that once used to take almost any amount of clothing now do not. Instead, they'll take the top 10% of it and dump the rest - 'dump' here means send the rest overseas to third world countries. Moreover, not that many years ago, these charities used to have used clothing collection bins - great big steel boxes about as tall as a person with a hinged lid at top - scattered all over conspicuous parts of the city and they have been all removed because the charities no longer want the responsibility of dumping huge volumes of stuff (as it's many times more than they can cope with and it's long past the point where if they were to accept the clothing then it would cost them money to it. Essentially, these charities have been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of clothing. Now, they are very picky about what they will accept. If one now wants to give clothes to a charitity then one has to take it there themselves. The charitity will then pick the eyes out of it and what it does not want the donor will have to find somewhere to dump the remainer. Now, much clothing goes directly into the trash can thence to landfill. If you wondered why my post was so cynical now you know.

scotty79 5y ago

Regulate fashion. For example you might make destruction or stockpiling of unsold clothes a crime. Also ban exporting clothes that were manufactured abroad.

zokier 5y ago
It doesn't need to be regulated. Like many for problems, the negative externalities need to be accounted in taxation/tariffs.
- scotty79 5y ago
  Sure, but it could be done with less ill effects than not regulating it. There already are specific regulations regarding fashion industry.
bloodyplonker22 5y ago
"Regulate this, regulate that", it's the socialist/communist answer to everything. Sooner or later, they'll be yelling to regulate when I can use the toilet for water saving purposes.
- Nursie 5y ago
  It's quite funny reading this sort of myopic bullshit in response to an article about destruction of the natural world due to unregulated commercial activity. It's not the answer to everything, but it sure is the answer to some things.

halpert 5y ago

The weird part of this isn’t that fast fashion generates a lot of trash. Almost every part of the American lifestyle generates tons of waste. The strange part is that the US strong arms African countries into buying the “donated” garments from textile recyclers. I’ll be throwing my used garments directly into the landfill in the future.

beaconstudios 5y ago
The recycling industrial complex is a total mess in general. American recycling also gets dumped on South East Asia (mainly China if memory serves) where much of it is just waste. There's a reason recycling is the third R, and it should primarily take the form of other people reusing your stuff anyway - not throwing items in a specifically coloured bin and calling it a day.
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  No, China specifically outlawed a lot of the recycling trade that was coming in, and it caused havoc to municipal recycling a few years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_National_Sword https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_National_Sword
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    Yeah I knew about this - China reacted negatively to this process in describing, but no doubt we're all sending it elsewhere now.
- User23 5y ago
  China isn't part of Southeast Asia[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast_Asia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast_Asia
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    Oh yeah

Proven 5y ago

[dead]

deathanatos 5y ago

> Today, the average American buys 68 new items of clothing per year. > “You wonder, do people in America have so much money that they can just wear things once and then throw them away?” I uh… I too would like to know. What scares me is that the use of whatever demographic is causing that average has to be way higher than the actual average, but this feels like it has to be bimodal. And there are lots of these numbers in the news. The "average American" produces an obscene amount of food waste too, far beyond what I feel I actually produce, as best as I can estimate it.

HFguy 5y ago
I don’t believe that the average American buys 68 pieces of clothing a year. I’d like them to share the source of that. The author doesn’t offer one that I saw. TBC, I think wearing something 3-4 times and discarding it is horrible.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  Where I live, if you enter a random mall, perhaps 1/2 to 2/3rds of the shops sell clothing. And they live somehow and obviously attract enough customers - a cursory look will prove that they aren't empty. There must be people who buy three or four pieces of clothing every week for years.
- smnrchrds 5y ago
  I imagine they are counting everything, e.g. counting each sock as a separate item of clothing. Otherwise, there is no way the AVERAGE is 68 items per year.
  - mint2 5y ago
    Likely does include socks and underwear but the median is probably lower than the avenger age. I’m guessing this is a skewed distribution.
    - smnrchrds 5y ago

DoreenMichele 5y ago

In Ghana, imported secondhand clothes are called obroni wawu, dead white man’s clothes. In Malawi, they are kaunjika — literally “clothes sold in a heap.” In Mozambique, they are known as calamidade, calamity, for their historical association with disaster relief aid. Fascinating article if only for such an interesting glimpse into Africa and African culture and how it is being shaped by its relationship to the larger world.

gexla 5y ago
In the Philippines it's Ukay-Ukay, which originates from a term which means "to dig." So, they're digging for good finds. ;)
- boeingUH60 5y ago
  Here in Nigeria, they’re called “Okrika”. Pretty funny names.

t8y 5y ago

I think people should really talk about mass market fashion vs luxury fashion. Many people seem to think that buying LVMH clothes or other luxury brands is somehow more ethical when those brands can be even worse. Those brands just sell far fewer items so it's not the same amount. If 99.9% of clothes are fast fashion than 99.9% of left over clothes should also be fast fashion, it's actually more like 100% as luxury brands will just destroy unsold merchandise usually to prevent damage to the brand. I'm a guy so clearly things don't change as much but almost every piece of clothing I own is "fast fashion" that I'll wear until it's ruined. Consumers are told constantly by the media, social media and brands that they need to continuously change or be out of fashion and "cringe" or "cheugy". I think fast fashion companies in general are one of the least to blame for these trends, they seem to just copy quickly what is deemed as good but others. Kmart in Australia is a good example. Most stores sell crappy out of date stuff so you have to shop online but Kmart has heaps of good cheap stuff under the Anko brand. From $3.70 t-shirts with a good fit, to $50.00 air fryers to nice containers to store stuff in. IMO it's a big win for most people to have cheap good stuff to buy. If it wasn't for Kmart it would be far harder to not be "cringe" while being poor. If the coolness industrial complex decides that this stuff is not good then Kmart would need to get rid of stock to replace it with new cool stuff. Is that Kmarts fault? I don't think so.

MattGaiser 5y ago
I think a lot of it is that (I assume) you can re-wear luxury pieces with far less perceived social judgement.
x3iv130f 5y ago
I buy mostly luxury brands however there are quite a few tricks with it. Buying luxury off the rack at a well known store is almost always a bad financial decision. I stick primarily to lesser known brands that still maintain good quality. I almost always buy used with just a few exceptions. For some reason it is hard for me to find good pants used or with any sort of discount.
- null_deref 5y ago
  Where do you find second hand clothing? I use Facebook Marketplace for furniture and electronics, but I find it uncomfortable to buy second hand clothing from there

foxfired 5y ago

Growing up, it was completely normal to look at my older brothers clothes and pick which I wanted 2 years before it was handed down to me. Then we got MTV. When our mother travelled on business, we would make print outs of shoes and clothing that we wanted. God forbid someone caught you with an off-brand shoe at school now that the poorest kid under the hot sun of Saudi Arabia was fashion aware. It was wasteful, it was expensive, it was less than 5 items each a year. I can't even imagine what it's like to buy 68 article of clothing a year. But then again a wise author once said: "Ending is better than mending."

gexla 5y ago

Hopefully the climate change issue could motivate to change this. Even if this stuff is piling up in a place sight unseen from the origin, it's still coming back to that origin in ways which we don't well understand. Just as the pandemic accelerated global cooperation and change, so could the climate issue. If the US wanted to shut down this problem, regulators could find the key spot to put a bullet into. Ideally the US would take the responsibility that comes with globalism after nuking the world with trash. Trash is how I view everything I buy. I'm walking into a store to buy trash. It doesn't matter that I still wear a belt daily which I have had for 15 years and much of my clothes are seriously straining from overuse. It still goes to trash eventually. If I take it to my grave, then I'm trash wrapped in trash. When I first stayed in a developing country, there was no trash service for much of the region. If you wanted to get rid of something, you burned it. Today I do all my shopping considering what it would be like to burn it. Car shopping would be so much fun. Don't think it matters what we do individually. This needs to be an urgent thing taken at levels where people actually have power to change things. Also, I think the issue is that this is essentially a scheme to cheaply get rid of trash. You could probably pay these importers to take the trash and it would still be worth it. "You mean, you'll pay us to take our trash?! Thank you so much for solving that nightmare of a problem for us. This was looking REALLY expensive for us to deal with in our own country."

bamboozled 5y ago
> Just as the pandemic accelerated global cooperation and change, so could the climate issue. Not to be negative but how did the pandemic do anything but prove we’re pretty bad at cooperation ?
dehrmann 5y ago
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.

blaaaaa99 5y ago

Weird article. Poor people get good condition, fashionable recycled clothing for a few cents, and this is somehow a bad thing? Does africa really need to be in garment production? Could they compete with vietnam/bangladesh?Banning imports and mandating locally produced clothing is likely just going to lead to forcing poor people to pay 10x more with no improvement or even worse quality.

reddog 5y ago

Sounds a lot like clothing is now “post scarcity”. I’d have thought that was a positive thing but from the articles moral panicky tone, I guess it’s just another thing we need to feel guilty about.

yourapostasy 5y ago
> Sounds a lot like clothing is now “post scarcity”. Only a tiny step further along the path towards post scarcity. One of the parts of post scarcity that is rarely covered are the full ramifications of increasing mastery over matter and energy. Trash is a civilization's admission its technology and science haven't yet mastered how to use low embedded energy, the same way money implies poverty (h/t Iain M. Banks).

forgotmypw17 5y ago

I stopped buying clothing completely.

BurningFrog 5y ago

The article describes a world of affluence, reaching deep into the poorest parts of Africa. Gone are the days when people would have to be naked when they washed the only piece of clothing they owned. Somehow this eradication of third world poverty is bad. Because everything is bad if you want to think of it that way. Just one point: Clothing ending up in landfills are a form of carbon sequestration.

esarbe 5y ago
> reaching deep into the poorest parts of Africa. Yes. We're using the poorest parts of Africa as garbage dump. We're not helping these people prosper, quite the contrary; we're destroying local economies.
colechristensen 5y ago
There is a lot of garbage which should just be burned. Most fast fashion is made of plastic which was made of oil and the fact that the oil spent a little time as a shirt shouldn't be any impediment into turning it into electricity when somebody is done with it. Much cheaper having a local waste-to-power plant than "donating" garbage and shipping it across the planet to places where people don't want it and have to dump it anyway. It is quite possibly carbon negative in the big picture because it prevents some oil from being burned for power and some oil from being burned for transport and doesn't waste human effort with sorting garbage several times which ends up in a landfill anyway not so unlikely polluting the planet with plenty of microplastics along the way.
culi 5y ago
> Just one point: Clothing ending up in landfills are a form of carbon sequestration. By that logic, so is the insane amount of waste that's currently in the ocean instead of having been burnt. The forests and grasslands that were cut down for those landfills would've sequestered much more carbon in the long term. Plastics can take anywhere between 50 and millions of years to decompose and they decompose into what? Microplastics? Other chemicals that hardly any lifeform is capable of utilizing? One thing you quickly observe about Americans after spending enough time on HN is how quickly they'll jump to justify massive amounts of waste with some vague reference somehow tying it to decreasing poverty. Last winter, Lufthansa airlines had 18,000 empty flights just to maintain their airport spots. In 2015 the EU mistakenly classified wood pellets as a renewable energy source. Since then, US exports of wood pellets have tripled, the EU's "renewable energy" makeup has gone from less than 20% biomass to ~60% biomass in 2020. Waste exists. I don't understand the compulsion people have to somehow bring poverty into the conversation every time someone tries to point it out

Overtonwindow 5y ago

Related, Clothing Poverty: The Hidden World of Fast Fashion and Second-Hand Clothes, by Andrew Brooks examines this world of considerable waste.

cm2012 5y ago

We could dump ten times the clothes and it wouldn't matter. Landfill space is not at all rare, it wouldn't even be a huge engineering project to build a hole big enough to house all human trash for the next hundred years. Frankly, the gains from having cheap clothing and letting people express themselves far outweighs the downsides from the waste.

zamalek 5y ago

I don't give two damns about fashion, but I would like good long-lasting clothing. Any suggestions on where I can find that (once my current stock wears out)?

tchvil 5y ago
Patagonia makes clothes that last. And if you learn to sew to fix them, even more.
MerelyMortal 5y ago
I wear Carhartt clothes daily after I remove their branding logos with a razor blade.
ejb999 5y ago
LL Bean used to always have super high quality products - stuff you could buy and wear for years, even decades. Sadly, now that they no longer offer warranties like they used to, the quality has decreased greatly. I am on my second pair of LL Bean boots - first pair I used for 20 years before they cracked and started leaking - second pair I bought - after the warranty changed, broke the first day (loops on the back that you use to pull them up ripped off: 1 the first day, 2nd one a week later - and a few weeks after that, the laces-holes also ripped - this is for a $200 pair of boots. Seems nobody can make money selling quality stuff anymore - it's all a race to the bottom.
- dayofthedaleks 5y ago
  Salomon shoes and boots can take a serious beating. Red Wings if you want heavier.
dayofthedaleks 5y ago
I've been trying to emphasize natural fabrics and tossing out stuff that doesn't fit, so I've been buying: Pendleton - Amazing wool shirts, and their cotton stuff is very solid. They still sell all-wool sweaters, which is becoming rare even at the high end. Sometimes eBay/poshmark have nice older USA-made pieces but sizing can be a crapshoot. Brooks Brothers - Reliable for well-made warm-weather linens and cottons, pretty sure that remains so post-bankruptcy. Style choices run from 'Weekend Lawyer' to 'Insolent Schoolboy.' American Giant - All-cotton tshirts and hoodies. Haven't tried their pants. Woolrich - Good sweaters and heavy shirts. My first sweater from the now-shuttered PA factory has survived 30 years with spells of very rough traveling and outdoor work without holes. Bemidji Woolen Mills - Wool Mackinaws and barn jackets do well in most situations where waterproofing isn't required. Arc'teryx - The Canadian-made Gore-Tex stuff is very durable. Overseas-made no slouch either. I believe Gore is making serious progress in shedding fewer microplastics. Double Pump - I think this is a captive Amazon brand? Durable and inexpensive cotton cowboy snap work shirts, the only ones I've found that are not synthetic blend. Ely Cattleman has a line of 97% cotton shirts but most are awfully rodeo-y. LL Bean - Still make good casual and lined winter pants, but they're going downhill fast in nearly every other category. Will market something as 'wool' when it's 95% synthetic. Eddie Bauer - See LL Bean, maybe with better shirt choices. Smartwool/Meriwool - Base layers are magic, both brands seem indestructible. Smartwool socks are nice for all but the hottest weather. Meriwool is more likely to be all-wool. Runner-up goes to Peoplesocks brand. Oh and the key to laundering all of these natural fabrics? Wash as cold delicates, dryer cycle with no heat for wrinkles, hang dry near a dehumidifier.

AussieWog93 5y ago

I'm in e-commerce, and reading through this thread I think many people have the misconception that people make purchases to solve problems and want that solution to last as long as possible. In reality, and this is something I spent a long time coming to terms with, much shopping is done because it's fun. Spending money isn't a cost - it's the whole point of the exercise.

TulliusCicero 5y ago
It's possible for both to be true. People make purchases that are fun, and they'd like said purchases to solve some problem (and preferably with decent quality). Like, when I make silly gadget purchases, yes it's fun to acquire the gadgets, but I'd like them to be good products that last too.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  >but I'd like them to be good products that last too. How much does this really affect your purchase, though? If you bought a Garmin watch that failed after 3 years, would you buy the new model? What if the same thing happened with your car and they refused to fix it? Would you buy the same brand again, or would you tell every single person you know to avoid them like the plague? I think the thing is, that above $X, people really do expect a product to solve a problem effectively. Under that amount, though, much of what people spend is just frittered away.
  - wccrawford 5y ago
    This happened to me with Fitbit. The first lasted longer than 3 years, and I was happy with that. The second didn't, and I wasn't... But I bought another. When that failed early, too, I gave up on them. For a tool, I don't want it to fail on me, ever. I don't enjoy learning to use a new tool for the same old purpose. I want it to just keep working. When I'm ready for a new way of that tool working, I seek it out. I do not want it forced on me. That said, I also treat clothes as a tool. I buy new ones when I want something different, but until then I want them to continue as they had. When I'm sick of them or they wear out, I use them for woodworking, painting, etc, until they finally just are too ugly or damaged.

Nursie 5y ago

> If you live in the West, chances are at some point you have stuffed your used clothes into a garbage bag and hauled them off to a Goodwill or the Salvation Army. Please don't let this article put you off donating clothes to good causes. I know that (for instance) in the UK the Red Cross sells as much as it can, and only the unsellable stuff (ripped, stained etc) goes out to 'rag' with the recyclers. Clothing is even cycled through different shops if one can't sell it. So I'm really not sure that 10-20% figure holds up globally. Something this article glossses over is that this stuff is not just being dumped - it's being bought. I think it's wrong that (for instance, in the article) the US interfered in law-making in various places to veto restrictions on the trade, of course. But fundamentally, the countries need to get a handle on dumping and start factoring that into the price of doing business. Yes, westerners could buy less crap, and they could also do more shopping for used stuff themselves. But that's only part of hte picture.

scotty79 5y ago

Many fashion moguls adorn varius "richest people" lists. I think it's a good rule of thumb to pay close attention to any industry that produces disproportionate number of billionaires. Because there might be some societal or ecological cost involved that the marked should be made aware of with through taxes or regulation. Fasion and real estate should be some of the prime targets for investigation.

throwawaylinux 5y ago
I'm sure clothing and footwear profits from slavery and child labor and general exporting of poor working conditions and environmental standards as many other industries have done with globalization, and however connected to the "fashion" industry that is I guess. Are there other problems with it? My mind would have gone to energy, war industry, tech, banking, news media, chemical, health and pharmaceutical, and probably a lot of others before I thought of fashion though if I was thinking of societal cost. How do you gauge what is a good and bad proportion of billionaires for an industry, and what kind of societal cost do you think the fashion industry might have?
- scotty79 5y ago
  Just take a look at what industry most billionaires got rich from. Those are the industries that extract most value from society and environment. And since there's no free lunch there probably is some associated cost no matter how well hidden and surprising. > My mind would have gone to energy, war industry, tech, banking, news media, chemical, health and pharmaceutical, and probably a lot of others before I thought of fashion though if I was thinking of societal cost. Sure, there are other heuristics that might point out to other industries worth regulating.
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    This isn't really how things work. Let's say Belon Tusk is worth $100 million and invests that into starting a submarine company. Eventually they make a working product they can sell, and that puts the value of the company at $1 billion. Eventually the second design comes along and revolutionizes submarine industry and reduces the costs that governments (taxpayers) and private industry were paying for submarine voyages significantly. This puts the value of the company at $100 billion and makes Belon a hundred billionaire. This is not wealth that was "extracted" from anywhere. The company might be using cheap finance on its valuation, but it's also paying workers, buying goods and services, and selling services into the economy as well. It's most likely creating a net positive for society.

fennecfoxen 5y ago

> As it stands, lax customs enforcement — along with spotty infrastructure and the prevalence of cheap Asian imports — has made it difficult for Africa to develop a garment industry of its own. Local producers are great, but they're outnumbered ten thousand to one by local consumers. How the world would be any better if some of the world's poorest were forced by their governments to pay extra money to buy inferior clothes, while some small-time politically-connected tycoon profited from it? That's not really how prosperity works. Scale back your consumption here in the US, go ahead, that's fine, but let's not pretend that the bales of clothing smuggled over the border into South Africa are harming anyone but the comfortable.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago
>Local producers are great, but they're outnumbered ten thousand to one by local consumers. How the world would be any better if some of the world's poorest were forced by their governments to pay extra money to buy inferior clothes, while some small-time politically-connected tycoon profited from it? Employees of local producers are great too, the theory I always hear is that people getting paid in an area stimulate more economic activity. So I mean you should take that idea apart more as it is pretty much established wisdom. That said how do you know the products would be inferior? Cheap Asian imports are generally of poor quality, it seems strange that the locally made clothes would not be at least equal to that but actually inferior! Donated clothes that westerners have worn are probably going to be inferior since after all they were worn and were probably cheap Asian imports to begin with.
- fennecfoxen 5y ago
  > Employees of local producers are great too, the theory I always hear is that people getting paid in an area stimulate more economic activity. So I mean you should take that idea apart more as it is pretty much established wisdom. The "established wisdom" you cite is a long-lived natural propaganda campaign. It begins with politicians, people who succeed or fail based mostly on their image, not on the quality of their governance. Why would they do the hard work seeking out the causes of prosperity, help organize that prosperity, and seek ways that collective action can make things better? That's a sucker's game. If you rip off the population at large — just a little bit at a time, mind you — then you gain political allies in the industry who benefits. Of course they'll market you as the champion of prosperity: you've made their success possible. It's not strictly cynical; it's quite easy to believe, if you're not the person paying for it, and motivated reasoning is strong. It's a win/win deal, because you ignore the people who actually pay for things. Welcome to public-choice theory. It likely won't ever change. Hooray! It should be painfully obvious to anyone who thinks about the facts of the matter that having access to nearly-free clothes — not the obnoxious piles of waste or anything, just the bales of clothing the article laments being imported into South Africa — having access is strictly better than not having this access. These people, after all, are always free to buy different clothes. It's not hard: Americans have access to similar, and can buy stupidly cheap clothes at an American thrift store, but in practice, they mostly don't even look at such an establishment. So why don't the people of South Africa buy locally made clothes right now? Because given their income, they much prefer the nearly-free clothes. Common sense does work here! As an individual, you don't become prosperous by looking for ways to do things that are more expensive. As a society, the same principle applies. Yes, yes, someone will conjure many promises: if everyone just spends more money, we'll have more money! But you know, if you spend less money on clothes you can spend more money on literally anything else which you'd rather have. It's like a perpetual motion machine: the energy does actually come from somewhere, you just might not be looking at it. The prosperity they propose society will gain from protecting garment industry is stolen from everyone who buys clothes, and everything that they would have bought instead, and you lose some of the prosperity in the process, because you expend effort and capital and materials.

faangiq 5y ago

Why not just burn them?

beebeepka 5y ago
Seriously? Some of the poorest people around here do that sort of thing in the winter. The fumes are horrible and include all rainbow colours. This entire thread is horrible. Not many other topics bring out the worst of people. Disgust is what I feel reading many of the comments here. Apparently waste is good and even if it were bad, what can you do, heh?

rcdwealth 5y ago

kleiba 5y ago

Everything that gets produced eventually lands in a dump. The moral justification for shipping stuff your nation has no use for anymore, i.e. your garbage, off to Africa needs to be discussed. Some of that stuff will find second use, which is good in some ways and bad in other ways, but whether that happens or not, everything that gets shipped to Africa will end up in a dump in Africa sooner or later - unless it gets shipped away again somewhere else.

inglor_cz 5y ago
Metal is economic to recycle, so is probably glass. Paper so-so (unless greasy), plastic almost never, cotton neither.

2muchcoffeeman 5y ago

Once again sci fi got it right. Everyone in the future wears similar things because the fashion industry was too costly.

a0-prw 5y ago

Donations of clothes from the West can also undermine local clothing industries. This also happened with "cheap" milk powder from the EU to (iirc) Ghana. Ghana was helping to finance the EU's overproduction of milk.

seb1204 5y ago
I have heard that chicken necks and feet are exported to China from EU Same for pig feet.
- 317070 5y ago
  I reckon more pig feet end up in cat and dog food than end up in a recognisable form in Chinese cuisine. In the West, people eat a lot of pig feet too! It's just sold as mince.
_trampeltier 5y ago
Also chicken wings. In the EU, nobody wants to eat chicken wings, just the bigger chicken meat parts. So the chicken wings end up for almost free in Africa and also destroyed every chicken farm, because the where more expensive than the chicken from EU.
- samarama 5y ago
  Ok but then don’t make a chicken farm, there are numerous other animals you can farm and it provides a baseline of food for the poor.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  Looking at the Chinese cuisine one starts to wonder about other parts. Wings are relatively popular, but what about things like feet, neck, head and organs? What we do with all of them? As clearly they are not even on the full birds. Same goes for pigs. You can buy some, but the ratio is entirely off.
  - 317070 5y ago

plebianRube 5y ago

> the fashion industry is responsible for one-tenth of the world’s carbon emissions, according to the U.N. Environment Program — more than international flights and maritime shipping combined I think we need clothing that lasts longer. If you are clothing shopping for fun, your actions aren't harmless.

seb1204 5y ago
Cheap clothing is just cheap as the hidden cost are... Hidden. Cheap labour, cheap material, low quality combined with high emissions and pesticides/toxins that are released mostly untreated.
- esarbe 5y ago
  You've hit the nail on the head. If all these externalized cost were actually included in the price of the product it would raise the price massively and no one would accept today's low-quality ware anymore. Maybe?

8589934591 5y ago

I have started buying clothes from USA _because_ they are of higher quality. Even though they are made in my India, they are usually not available for sale here. The quality and variety available for exports is drastically different from what is available for the local market. Mine have lasted at least 2-3 years before I buy a new set of clothes. I wonder why there is a huge churn in USA to keep buying new clothes. Is it just more affordable/cheaper to buy than to mend your clothes? Easier access that makes it binge buy quickly? Too many special occasions? I am confused cos I feel they haven't seen inferior quality of clothing that they don't keep their belongings longer.

wccrawford 5y ago
I'm an American that doesn't buy new clothes often, but I want to provide my view. My clothes last a lot longer than 2-3 years. To get to the point that they're ragged or faded takes a long time for most of them. (The very cheapest t-shirts from online sites are the exception. I don't buy those any more.) On the other hand, my wife gets great pleasure from getting new clothing. She has a lot more than I do, and still she buys more. She is genuinely excited about wearing and showing off the new clothes she bought. When she gets a compliment about them, she is very, very happy. Strangers aren't likely to give those compliments, and friends aren't going to compliment the same clothes again. To get those feelings, she needs new clothes. All that said, she doesn't buy as many clothes as many of the vapid women/girls that I've met over the years. She's responsible with her money and doesn't buy excessively. But watching her emotions about the ones she does buy informs me a lot about the less responsible women out there. I don't know any men like that, but I have seen them on TV (especially "reality" shows), so I'm sure they exist, too.
- telesilla 5y ago
  In case she is open to discussing this, it's a fairly common problem. It can be resolved by finding another source of praise, for example volunteer work or teaching, or exceeding in extra activities in her field. She is not needing new clothes but attention, and there are healthy ways to achieve that. Experience: my own (as a woman) and various friends over the years.

parenthesis 5y ago

Once an item of clothing wears out too much to wear in public, I wear it around the house or sleep in it. During the pandemic I've rarely had to wear `decent' clothes. On video calls I just temporarily put on a non-worn-out top over whatever I'm wearing. Unfortunately I do have to buy replacement footwear quite regularly (50+ miles on foot per week). But a worn out pair of shoes does for working in the garden, and worn socks as slippers round the house. So, eventually, my clothes end up in UK landfill, once they are too worn out even for me (which can be after decades).

regularjack 5y ago
I'm the same. My girlfriend is constantly wanting to throw out some of my clothing items, and I'm thinking "I could probably still wear that for another 10 years!"

chiefalchemist 5y ago

> To be sure, the availability of inexpensive clothes isn’t entirely a bad thing. In a country like South Africa, where more than half of people live below the poverty line, demand remains brisk, and some Western castoffs have become wardrobe staples for people who might not be able to afford new clothes. Ah...not quite. The problem is, these leftovers from The West ultimately undermine the local economy. So, for example, locals can't work in a local clothing factory because there's no market. That market is already monopolized by much more inexpensive donation clothes.

Pooge 5y ago

I gave some (+5 years old) clothes to a family member's acquaintance. I'm glad to hear they even wear it to work sometimes.

jacquesm 5y ago

The whole commercial system is so full of perverse incentives. It is absolutely horrible what we do to your planet but there is so much momentum behind this. Someone near me loves to throw things away. I kid you not. Mountains of disposables, perfectly good stuff gets replaced just to get something new. And let's not get started about the amount of food that goes into the waste bin even though there is nothing wrong with it other than that an expiry sticker says it is now one day over time. Personal status report: articles of clothing bought in the last year: 0. Articles of clothing bought in the last three years: still 0. And I don't think I'll be buying any for the next year either and then likely I'll buy some underwear and socks. But for my kids (who are growing quite rapidly) it is a completely different story and I suspect that that is one factor that pushes up that average.

imtringued 5y ago
Positive interest rates are by definition short term thinking. The borrower must pay sooner than later. Investors will not be satisfied with companies that perform worse than the interest rate.

5ESS 5y ago

How is this a problem? They get free clothes they would otherwise never be able to afford. Perhaps they should be grateful instead of expecting everything to be free forever.