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Where does it end though? We have grades of quality at different price points for many things: - organic, free range chicken that cost $20 vs factory farmed bi

Where does it end though? We have grades of quality at different price points for many things: - organic, free range chicken that cost $20 vs factory farmed birds that cost $6. - quality furniture built to last generations vs disposable brands like IKEA - most materials homes are made of line windows, siding, etc. I’ve always found it odd that clothing is the 1 thing mostly pointed out and I suspect that those on top of fashion trends who pay too dollar for the latest thing are sick of seeing the masses be able to wear derivative articles so quickly. Nothing kills fashion more quickly than as it becomes more and more accessible to lower economic cohorts.

XorNot 4y ago
IKEA is disposable based on price, but I'd definitely not say they're low quality. IKEA is damn durable for what it is.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  IKEA has range of quality. The cheapest stuff is cardboard or poor quality mdf that disintegrates from most damages. On other hand some of the somewhat more expensive products are lot sturdier and longer lasting.
- southerntofu 4y ago
  > IKEA is damn durable for what it is It's still very not durable. Do you imagine Ikea furniture passed down from generation to generation? Besides the obvious problem that all IKEA furniture is bathed in various chemicals that slowly kills your entire family, the furniture is just not solid enough for this process to take place. I can't count how many IKEA furniture i've stupidly damaged over the years, and i can even less so count how many i've seen on the street headed straight for the landfill (or local waste disposal equivalent). Traditional furniture is heavier and more expensive, but the wood can usually be reused, and certainly keeps solidity/value over time.
uxp100 4y ago
Clothing is called out because it’s environmental footprint is often estimated as being surprisingly high, and there is a certain pattern of consumption that encourages buying tons of extremely cheap clothes and wearing them only once. For the first point, well, it might be an over estimate, or focused on environmental harms that are imo less important (landfill waste vs carbon footprint). But I’m not sure, I’ve read and forgotten a few of the articles, they were popular a year or two back. For the second point, everyone loves beating up on the imaginary 18 year old girl who buys on shein every day, but I don’t really know how many of those people exist. Some? Probably not that many?
acdha 4y ago
I think those are some concerns and it's useful to consider each of them. One is the cost/harm of producing them and another is how long they last versus the environmental impacts after they're discarded. for example, IKEA furniture is designed to be cheap which means there are certain styles/materials/etc. that you can't get there but it's solid and 20 year old IKEA furniture which has been used daily is common (and there's a lot of considerably more expensive stuff which isn't as well made), their kitchen stuff lasts just as long as stuff costing 1-2 orders of magnitude more, etc. IKEA is affordable no-frills but generally gives a solid value for the money, has a reasonable service life compared to the alternatives, and doesn't have an unusual level of hard to recycle / reuse or pollution prone components compared to the alternatives. Fast fashion has the problem that all of the costs of making it have to be amortized over just a handful of uses. If I buy a bunch of cheap cotton shirts at Costco, they're never going to look as nice but they can be worn hundreds of times, and being 100% cotton they won't pollute waterways for centuries after being worn a couple of times. The same applies for home materials — yes, we need to improve the manufacturing for many things but if it's something which has a service life measured in decades there is a lot of lower-hanging fruit like reducing use of one time-use plastic by the people who live in that house since that'll be a small mountain of landfill space compared to, say, vinyl siding. Farming is tricky because “organic” means different things to different people and a lot of that is aspiration. Organic farms can be almost as harmful to the environment around them, cause just as much pollution trucking things around, treat their workers just as poorly, etc. or they can be improvements on at least some of those points. I think it's quite reasonable to expect the discussion around those topics to continue but that also speaks to the need for regulation — consumer buying habits just aren't enough to replace things like regulators routinely auditing for worker safety, pollution, etc.

XorNot 4y ago

IKEA is disposable based on price, but I'd definitely not say they're low quality. IKEA is damn durable for what it is.

Ekaros 4y ago
IKEA has range of quality. The cheapest stuff is cardboard or poor quality mdf that disintegrates from most damages. On other hand some of the somewhat more expensive products are lot sturdier and longer lasting.
southerntofu 4y ago
> IKEA is damn durable for what it is It's still very not durable. Do you imagine Ikea furniture passed down from generation to generation? Besides the obvious problem that all IKEA furniture is bathed in various chemicals that slowly kills your entire family, the furniture is just not solid enough for this process to take place. I can't count how many IKEA furniture i've stupidly damaged over the years, and i can even less so count how many i've seen on the street headed straight for the landfill (or local waste disposal equivalent). Traditional furniture is heavier and more expensive, but the wood can usually be reused, and certainly keeps solidity/value over time.

uxp100 4y ago

Clothing is called out because it’s environmental footprint is often estimated as being surprisingly high, and there is a certain pattern of consumption that encourages buying tons of extremely cheap clothes and wearing them only once. For the first point, well, it might be an over estimate, or focused on environmental harms that are imo less important (landfill waste vs carbon footprint). But I’m not sure, I’ve read and forgotten a few of the articles, they were popular a year or two back. For the second point, everyone loves beating up on the imaginary 18 year old girl who buys on shein every day, but I don’t really know how many of those people exist. Some? Probably not that many?

acdha 4y ago

I think those are some concerns and it's useful to consider each of them. One is the cost/harm of producing them and another is how long they last versus the environmental impacts after they're discarded. for example, IKEA furniture is designed to be cheap which means there are certain styles/materials/etc. that you can't get there but it's solid and 20 year old IKEA furniture which has been used daily is common (and there's a lot of considerably more expensive stuff which isn't as well made), their kitchen stuff lasts just as long as stuff costing 1-2 orders of magnitude more, etc. IKEA is affordable no-frills but generally gives a solid value for the money, has a reasonable service life compared to the alternatives, and doesn't have an unusual level of hard to recycle / reuse or pollution prone components compared to the alternatives. Fast fashion has the problem that all of the costs of making it have to be amortized over just a handful of uses. If I buy a bunch of cheap cotton shirts at Costco, they're never going to look as nice but they can be worn hundreds of times, and being 100% cotton they won't pollute waterways for centuries after being worn a couple of times. The same applies for home materials — yes, we need to improve the manufacturing for many things but if it's something which has a service life measured in decades there is a lot of lower-hanging fruit like reducing use of one time-use plastic by the people who live in that house since that'll be a small mountain of landfill space compared to, say, vinyl siding. Farming is tricky because “organic” means different things to different people and a lot of that is aspiration. Organic farms can be almost as harmful to the environment around them, cause just as much pollution trucking things around, treat their workers just as poorly, etc. or they can be improvements on at least some of those points. I think it's quite reasonable to expect the discussion around those topics to continue but that also speaks to the need for regulation — consumer buying habits just aren't enough to replace things like regulators routinely auditing for worker safety, pollution, etc.