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> 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 bus

> 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.
- JamesLeonis 3y ago
  > 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. I'm sorry, you are correct. I got wrapped up in the metaphor and forgot the point. I think we fundamentally agree. At the core we have commodities whose market value is driven aggressively below the cost to bring it back into the market. The forces causing this are legion and (unfortunately) economically rational in broad strokes. The "disposal" acts like a subsidy that inflates the market value enough to bring those costs back into profitability, or at least cover the final disposal cost. Take everything above to its logical conclusion, the customer pays for disposing unsold inventory via margins and the citizen pays to donate via taxes. Even this price is pushed down by corruption at the expense of people in Africa and fuels all the behavior above. In all of our defenses, we're here deep in the weeds on HN precisely because this outcome is madness!

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.

JamesLeonis 3y ago
> 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. I'm sorry, you are correct. I got wrapped up in the metaphor and forgot the point. I think we fundamentally agree. At the core we have commodities whose market value is driven aggressively below the cost to bring it back into the market. The forces causing this are legion and (unfortunately) economically rational in broad strokes. The "disposal" acts like a subsidy that inflates the market value enough to bring those costs back into profitability, or at least cover the final disposal cost. Take everything above to its logical conclusion, the customer pays for disposing unsold inventory via margins and the citizen pays to donate via taxes. Even this price is pushed down by corruption at the expense of people in Africa and fuels all the behavior above. In all of our defenses, we're here deep in the weeds on HN precisely because this outcome is madness!