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You both are being downvoted because this is the Garbage Trade. You want to dump your garbage, you pay the disposal fee. If there is something unfair about this

You both are being downvoted because this is the Garbage Trade. You want to dump your garbage, you pay the disposal fee. If there is something unfair about this deal, we can dump this garbage on our own domestic soil. Unfortunately domestic disposal fees are much higher than these African sites. Why is there so much clothing garbage? Fast Fashion. Fun fact: 90% of the clothing donations go to these African dumps [0]. As such this will continue until Africa bans clothes disposal entirely just like China banned electronic waste, or the West regulates Fast Fashion. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6R_WTDdx7I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6R_WTDdx7I

LatteLazy 3y ago
If this stuff is garbage, just stop buying it. As it is, the very people paying for it, are explicitly asking for the trade to continue. They just want a subsidy on top. Alternatively, we could just ban the export. But since that is the opposite of what the people in the article want, it might not be what they want...
- JamesLeonis 3y ago
  > If this stuff is garbage, just stop buying it. As it is, the very people paying for it, are explicitly asking for the trade to continue. It's like saying businesses shouldn't pay to dispose of e-waste because r/homelab exists to buy on a secondary market. The African traders are selling disposal services. You are somehow hung up that this garbage has value by the simple fact that people pick through it and make markets after disposal. Again, the West can simply stop paying for foreign disposal service and dump it domestically. Either way, its garbage to the exporter and no tiny Marginal Utility squeezed at the end is going to change those dynamics.
  - LatteLazy 3y ago
    If they are supplying waste disposal why are they selling the waste? And why are they paying to receive it? But that is fine. If the government of Ghana wants to ban or regulate this process they should. That is not the EU's issue. As it is, they seem happy with the current setup.
  - cthalupa 3y ago
    > It's like saying businesses shouldn't pay to dispose of e-waste because r/homelab exists to buy on a secondary market. This is an awful analogy because something like r/homelab is a tiny and insignificant fraction of a market for things like e-waste. This is not the case in Ghana, where about 40% of the clothing is immediately trashed and the other 60% is at least attempted to be sold. https://deadwhitemansclothes.org/intro https://deadwhitemansclothes.org/intro provides a pretty solid introduction to the whole situation. >Super importers/European exporters work with local Ghanaian importers to move shipping containers full of bales into the center of Accra, along Ghana’s southern coast. Local importers work with middlemen/women to market individual bales. Kayayei (singular Kayayo), or head porters who are mostly women from the north of Ghana, move bales to retailers and storage managers. Retailers often work with tailors to alter garments to fit consumer demands. The consumer buys products for herself, or for resale amongst friends, family and a growing web of social media connections. What is leftover is picked up by waste managers or sent to rebalers who package items to be put back on trucks to ship to neighboring countries where the process starts all over. In some cases a local not-for-profit group might pick up some clothes from the market to distribute to clients for free. Most clothes end up in this system after the initial manufacture, sale and first life, when they are donated to a not-for-profit or a licensee of a not-for-profit in the Global North. The idea that this is bought solely as waste and the market is made up of people picking over things in a landfill simply isn't correct. It's a sophisticated market with multiple tiers and most of it built around the idea of selling the clothes second hand. It does ultimately generate a significant amount of waste, and people do then go pick through that waste to try and find things missed by all these other tiers, but that's a far cry from this being the same as being just a disposal service. This isn't to say a lot of your core point isn't correct - this is still an unsustainable solution, it still harms a lot of everyday people, etc. There is almost certainly a moral responsibility for the rest of the world to do things differently here, because for whatever reason, be it corruption or lack of funding or insert whatever other reason you would like, the government of Ghana is not regulating business in a way that is best for the people in their country, and we shouldn't perpetrate harm on people just because their governments can't do a good enough job. But the fundamental point this thread has been about is that the article goes out of it's way to avoid discussing the details of the situation - it makes it sound like all of this disposal money is paid to someone, somewhere, totally unrelated, and the clothing just magically appears in Ghana. That's not the case. This is business, through and through, and the businesses buying all of this in bulk could 100% stop buying it at this price. They could 100% refuse to take it unless higher prices were paid that could allow them to properly dispose of it. But they don't, and the government of Ghana isn't forcing them to. The story would be stronger if it explained the actual situation there, instead of leaving out some of the most important context around understanding what is actually occurring.
randunel 3y ago
> Retailers buy and sort through 55kg (121lb) bales of clothing – most of it is either “deadstock” (clothes kept in warehouses and storerooms for years but never worn) or items donated to charities or left in recycling bins. About 6m of the better-quality items are sold or upcycled in the market every week. They're not only purchasing, but they've built an entire local industry around it. This is not "EU member states paying African countries to take in rubbish", this is African businesses buying deadstock and recycled clothing and making a living out of them.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Deadstock might be fine, but most of that is first gone through outlets. The donated and charity stuff is largely garbage. Poor quality, worn out or outright dirty. And just because some barely scrape by by sorting garbage doesn't make it valuable or value building industry. What a local manufacturing economy could be. When sufficient quality locally is reached they could start exporting that stuff.
- laratied 3y ago
  If you want to know anything about Africa you have to read news from Africa. No one in the west reads anything but the most sensationalist bullshit so you can't blame reporters for writing it. The real story is just never interesting enough.

LatteLazy 3y ago

If this stuff is garbage, just stop buying it. As it is, the very people paying for it, are explicitly asking for the trade to continue. They just want a subsidy on top. Alternatively, we could just ban the export. But since that is the opposite of what the people in the article want, it might not be what they want...

JamesLeonis 3y ago
> If this stuff is garbage, just stop buying it. As it is, the very people paying for it, are explicitly asking for the trade to continue. It's like saying businesses shouldn't pay to dispose of e-waste because r/homelab exists to buy on a secondary market. The African traders are selling disposal services. You are somehow hung up that this garbage has value by the simple fact that people pick through it and make markets after disposal. Again, the West can simply stop paying for foreign disposal service and dump it domestically. Either way, its garbage to the exporter and no tiny Marginal Utility squeezed at the end is going to change those dynamics.
- LatteLazy 3y ago
  If they are supplying waste disposal why are they selling the waste? And why are they paying to receive it? But that is fine. If the government of Ghana wants to ban or regulate this process they should. That is not the EU's issue. As it is, they seem happy with the current setup.
- cthalupa 3y ago
  > It's like saying businesses shouldn't pay to dispose of e-waste because r/homelab exists to buy on a secondary market. This is an awful analogy because something like r/homelab is a tiny and insignificant fraction of a market for things like e-waste. This is not the case in Ghana, where about 40% of the clothing is immediately trashed and the other 60% is at least attempted to be sold. https://deadwhitemansclothes.org/intro https://deadwhitemansclothes.org/intro provides a pretty solid introduction to the whole situation. >Super importers/European exporters work with local Ghanaian importers to move shipping containers full of bales into the center of Accra, along Ghana’s southern coast. Local importers work with middlemen/women to market individual bales. Kayayei (singular Kayayo), or head porters who are mostly women from the north of Ghana, move bales to retailers and storage managers. Retailers often work with tailors to alter garments to fit consumer demands. The consumer buys products for herself, or for resale amongst friends, family and a growing web of social media connections. What is leftover is picked up by waste managers or sent to rebalers who package items to be put back on trucks to ship to neighboring countries where the process starts all over. In some cases a local not-for-profit group might pick up some clothes from the market to distribute to clients for free. Most clothes end up in this system after the initial manufacture, sale and first life, when they are donated to a not-for-profit or a licensee of a not-for-profit in the Global North. The idea that this is bought solely as waste and the market is made up of people picking over things in a landfill simply isn't correct. It's a sophisticated market with multiple tiers and most of it built around the idea of selling the clothes second hand. It does ultimately generate a significant amount of waste, and people do then go pick through that waste to try and find things missed by all these other tiers, but that's a far cry from this being the same as being just a disposal service. This isn't to say a lot of your core point isn't correct - this is still an unsustainable solution, it still harms a lot of everyday people, etc. There is almost certainly a moral responsibility for the rest of the world to do things differently here, because for whatever reason, be it corruption or lack of funding or insert whatever other reason you would like, the government of Ghana is not regulating business in a way that is best for the people in their country, and we shouldn't perpetrate harm on people just because their governments can't do a good enough job. But the fundamental point this thread has been about is that the article goes out of it's way to avoid discussing the details of the situation - it makes it sound like all of this disposal money is paid to someone, somewhere, totally unrelated, and the clothing just magically appears in Ghana. That's not the case. This is business, through and through, and the businesses buying all of this in bulk could 100% stop buying it at this price. They could 100% refuse to take it unless higher prices were paid that could allow them to properly dispose of it. But they don't, and the government of Ghana isn't forcing them to. The story would be stronger if it explained the actual situation there, instead of leaving out some of the most important context around understanding what is actually occurring.

randunel 3y ago

> Retailers buy and sort through 55kg (121lb) bales of clothing – most of it is either “deadstock” (clothes kept in warehouses and storerooms for years but never worn) or items donated to charities or left in recycling bins. About 6m of the better-quality items are sold or upcycled in the market every week. They're not only purchasing, but they've built an entire local industry around it. This is not "EU member states paying African countries to take in rubbish", this is African businesses buying deadstock and recycled clothing and making a living out of them.

Ekaros 3y ago
Deadstock might be fine, but most of that is first gone through outlets. The donated and charity stuff is largely garbage. Poor quality, worn out or outright dirty. And just because some barely scrape by by sorting garbage doesn't make it valuable or value building industry. What a local manufacturing economy could be. When sufficient quality locally is reached they could start exporting that stuff.
laratied 3y ago
If you want to know anything about Africa you have to read news from Africa. No one in the west reads anything but the most sensationalist bullshit so you can't blame reporters for writing it. The real story is just never interesting enough.