Fuck. This is such a waste to people who need clothes and of material. This reminds me of the recent ABC (US) investigation about bag recycling where most of the bags were going to incinerators, landfills, or being covertly shipped to Indonesia and Malaysia for "recycling".
My understanding is that these days clothing is so cheap that there really isn't a lot of people who lack clothing anymore. Even in the poorest corners of the world, people have a few sets of clothing and maybe even shoes.
This is huge progress compared to the old days, when many people only had one set of clothes, and had to wash them naked.
If the price for this is a lot of clothing trash, that seems a pretty great bargain to me.
In order for everyone to have clothes there needs to be an oversupply of clothes. It seems a shame to burn, but I don't know if warehousing makes sense or if there would be any benefit to just leaving them in the open.
> In order for everyone to have clothes there needs to be an oversupply of clothes
Not sure why that would be the case.
For example, consider if everyone had as much clothes as they need. Then only occasional replacements would suffice, which is a quantity significantly less the total amount required if each person lacked sufficient clothing.
Or consider some regulation: 97% of stock must remain on the shelves and sell before new stock is brought in. That will certainly put a break on fast fashion.
It's the same reason why there has to be an oversupply of water for everyone to have water. We don't have any way to teleport items to exactly where they need to be when they're needed. Our logistics isn't infinite, and neither is our knowledge of where everything is. With so many humans who need clothes (that is every single one of us), it's not that surprising for 50 tons of clothes to end up in a wrong place, wrong time kind of situation.
Clothes aren't totally fungible, after all. I think burning food is much worse. I know the big burning pile look bad there... but how big is it really? The article says between 11k - 59k tons. I'll go with the high end and assume 50k metric tonnes. Assuming 150 grams per item (weight of a tshirt) that's 6666 items per tonne, which is about 333 million items in the pile. In the grand scheme of things, it's not that much. I think 5% oversupply is probably a floor for clothes. Any less than that and we're looking at shortages at retail. Say 5 billion humans each own 50 kilograms of clothing, which is ridiculously low balling it, that's 250 billion tons. And I'm not even talking about our shoe supply here! It must take tens of millions of tonnes of production each year to sustain that, and it's not like it gets instantly teleported to the consumer.
If whoever owned that pile could get even 50 cents per piece for them, they probably would rather have taken the money. I think burning is probably wrong though, better it be dumped in pits and left there as is in case one day an economical way to use the material emerges in the future. I get the feeling to reduce waste, I really do, but I don't like your idea of regulation on this. It'll only deprive the poorer among us of access. I'm willing to accept some waste so that people on a tight budget can dress themselves with style and feel good.
> For example, consider if everyone had as much clothes as they need. Then only occasional replacements would suffice
The challenge is that clothes rapidly progress beyond "need" into "wants". Being "fashionable" is very roughly a human constant. One of the very very first things that we industrialized was textile and clothing production, and then we continued to keep facing fashion and clothing churn.
I think it would very challenging to regulate clothing into a strict need.
But, again, it's not a choice between no fashion and ultra fast fashion (sell 10% of stock and throw away the rest). We can make clothes that are more durable, more customizable, we can have regulate how fast should fast fashion be, and, of course, regulate how waste should be treated.
Btw, I bet if you throw all that waste in a chemical reactor with a hydrogen source you can revert it back to hydrocarbons. I'm not a chemical engineer and I might be wrong, of course.
The problem with most of the fast fashion is that the clothes don't last very long, at only a handful of uses, so its only cheaper if you need lots of different outfits. If you are hanging on by a thread, then you need cheap outfits that last for as long as possible.
The claim about fast fashion not lasting long is not necessarily about quality or durability. It’s more that the business model is about chasing short-lived trends such that the clothes are thrown out by stores or consumers after a short time because the trends they were following passed.
Yep, and "fast fashion" originally meant quickly copying catwalk trends and getting them to consumers quickly. It's now somehow morphed into meaning clothes that are quickly thrown out but without anyone actually demonstrating that is actually happening.
> quickly copying catwalk trends and getting them to consumers quickly
That's not much morphing, the goal is to have clothes that are quickly obsoleted for people who can now immediately keep up with the trends. Those people can be a minority of their customers but buy far more by volume, don't wear clothes until they wear out, and need to dispose of out-of-date clothes. If they push enough consumers to fast fashion then there is a vast excess of used clothes that need to be thrown out.
I must say: things from H&M hm have regularly been holding up longer than other way more expensive brands. Sometimes they don’t really fit right anymore, but no holes or stitches that come loose.
and I keep wearing my clothes despite the many holes they have, as long as no private bits poke out. I got laughed at by a female friend for it, so I pointed out her jeans have holes as a design choice. She did acknowledge the irony in that.
Thanks, that makes sense. It was indeed a point playing with a gender stereotype. I wonder if the woman GP was friends with would be accepted by society so readily if she put in so little effort to her clothes and appearance as he did. I doubt it, and that makes the remark a little bit uncomfortable to read honestly.
I'm not sure what your last remark is meant to imply but it feels quite rude. It's normal to be curious and ask people to expand on or clarify what they're saying, especially on a site where the main posting guidline is "intellectual curiosity." I don't appreciate your directive in this case, as I don't feel I was blocking anyone from sharing their story with the question I asked.
But, if we're being prescriptive, the term "women" is generally more accepted when talking about humans. "Females" is regarded by many as dehumanising.
> I wonder if the woman GP was friends with would be accepted by society so readily
I don’t think „society“ accepts an adult man who is dressed in rags either. At best people will think you’re some kind of hippie, at worst actively avoid you.
In m experience does not apply if you are a student or below 30.
We weren't talking about rags, we were talking about worn clothing. The original comment seemed to suggest that the most pushback he experienced was the comment from his friend which the was able to shoot down. I'm sure that if he was being seriously shunned in the way you're suggesting he would have felt compelled to change his habits.
The expection for women to put more effort into their appearance than men is well understood. Do you disagree?
I meant that it is possible taskforcegemini looked like they were wearing rags in a “not having themselves together” way, whereas the friend’s clothing with intentional holes can look like a “have themselves together but wear it as a style choice” way.
It is or was very common to see men wearing clothing with tips and tears as a style choice, so I would not say men cannot get away with it. It just depends what the totality of the look is.
Ah, so basically she took on the labour of both her own and her friend's presentation, and he still managed to both belittle her for it and to feel bold enough to share the story putting her as the butt of a joke about "females."
I just took a look at /newcomments and I counted fourteen assertions being made, none of which were evidenced and most of which relied on tropes relating to things like capitalism or working culture. This is the norm on this site, and as such I find it remarkable that you've singled out this particular instance of it.
There's an interesting topic for discussion in regards to measuring social phenomenon and it feels out of keeping with site guidelines that you wouldn't engage on that basis but rather begin with complete dismissal.
I'm always happy to be challenged in my views. As I say above, there was no challenge from yourself, only dismissal.
Your comments have now become personal and derogatory and I am not willing to have a conversation like this at all, so I will do as you say and go away, or "shut the f up" as the other commenter said.
I'm not sure what gives you the right to tell me my views aren't welcome here. I've kept my comments within the site guidelines while you have not. Is this your personal echo chamber where others aren't welcome? The boys club where laughing about "females" goes ahead without comment? It must be that way since you targeted the single critical voice in a thread with at least 2 other examples of what you're ostensibly complaining about that you chose to ignore. You wouldn't even have the decency to respond to anything I said, again straight to dismissal and telling me to leave. So much for being challenged.
Depends on what they are. I don't buy most fashion things. Sure, I have a few nicer pieces of clothes for special events where I'm expected to dress up. But most of my stuff is budget/practical and lasts a long time. I have a winter coat over 20 years old and even my good suit is over 12 years old (re-tailored). Shoes tend to wear out the fastest since worn out insoles can lead to medical issues rather quickly. However, some shoes can be extended with replacement insoles.
It depends. I do replace insoles sometimes. It seems like many of the athletic shoes tend to have the fabric wear through or the tread wear off in about 1-2 years depending on the design and materials. Dress shoes tend to last a year or two longer for me, until the leather gets too bent up looking. Some of those designs have sewn and glued insoles which are not easy to replace.
Not in my experience. The current shoes I wear everyday are some random Nike runners (I don't use them for running), and I've worn them pretty much every day for about 3.5 years now without issues with the soles. I do around 15-20k steps per day for reference.
That's not true in my experience, but the point was more about environmrntalism. I don't need an entire pair of shoes' material to be sourced, prepared, transported etc. just because my soles are wearing down.
I often hear this argument but from my personal experience it is wrong.
Doing a full repair of shoes cost me like 20-40€ (soles, insides, small holes) and lasts for 3+ years.
Yes, in Europe this is no big deal. In the US there are very few shoe shops that will do this kind of work. When you find one, they typically charge a lot - $100+.
That's a problem in and of itself I think. We need to shift attitudes more towards repair, and as part of that we need skilled tradespeople who can repair stuff.
Before we can do any of that we would need to fix the race to the bottom mindset. Even with new materials and shipping, it's cheaper just mass produce in a third world country than to pay someone's labor to repair here. That's going to take changes to global trade and domestic income/pay.
The litmus test on this used to be those NFL Superbowl shirts for the losing team. To facilitate quick merchandising, they would print both teams as being the superbowl champions then whichever team one, sell that t-shirt. The losing teams 'champion' shirts would pop up in photos six months to a year down the road, being worn by children in third world countries. You don't see that anymore.
It’s not the bargain you think it is. These people pay a steep price to make our cheap stuff. They’re surrounded by plastic trash. And just like in the article, because there’s no waste management in these developing parts of the world, they just burn the trash to get rid of it.
In any event, having all these clothes is just a part of life that we’ve gotten used to. I’ve never heard anyone complain about a lack of clothes or shoes unless they were suddenly deprived of them.
I think this situation also demonstrates how it isn't so simple as just getting it to people who might need / use this stuff.
I did a big remodel recently, I had a bunch of perfectly good hardware, an entire kitchen of appliances, cabinets, etc, and such items.
People told me all about "oh someone might use that", and I'd ask if they would use it, everyone said "no, not me". The local re-use non profits all had big lists of things they don't want, because nobody actually wants them.
You might be interested in Renovation Angel [0] and the Habitat ReStore’s [1] efforts in this space. It certainly takes a nonprofit equipped to handle this kind of donation, but they’re around in some places.
Habitat ReStore turned me away multiple times with brand new light fixtures and other new materials after a remodel. Both times they were at capacity. At some point my need to be rid of the excess thing exceeds my desire to do the right thing and warehouse it until they decide they’re ready for it. Into the landfill they went.
My wife has found a local “Buy Nothing” Facebook group that she posts all sorts of stuff like that on. Most of the time someone is happy to jump in and take things like that off our hands.
List on Facebook Marketplace for free, usually spoken for within the hour (in my experience with surplus or unneeded building materials, fixtures, etc).
Hehe that's what Craigslist is for. I've taken stuff like old formica counters and sinks for reuse. I've also sold things like old toilets. If there are people buying old used toilets, there are people who will take anything that is functional.
Ironically I've been trying to sell a few brand new items that I don't need, like a keyboard and mouse, but nobody wants those.
This is a human organization problem that could be mostly solved by technical means. For example, a way to notify big nonprofits that give things to the homeless and ask them to come to a specific location at a certain time to get whatever they want.
I think the re-use people were likely honest when they said nobody wanted that stuff. I don't think there's a magic technical solution.
I suspect too that the needy and poor are really the last people with the room and time to stash away a bunch of things they're not using but maybe one day someone will show up and install them... and hopefully they still work.
I don't know. It's probably a problem of effort -- if you need a sink, do you buy a new one, or spend tons of time perusing various used-stuff markets looking for something suitable? There may be an opening there for technology to solve it.
Sinks generally don't just break. If you're buying a new sink, it's likely to replace a perfectly good used one. So having an ability to easily find even more used sinks wouldn't really change much. Never mind if you're going to spend the effort/money on the work of swapping a sink, you might as well pay a little more for a new sink.
ReStore has their niches, but overall there's a large feel good hopecycling dynamic as well. So many used furniture sets just sitting around indefinitely.
Exceptions of used things people seek out basically prove the rule - things that you can't get any more (solidly built, repairable appliances, wide lumber, etc), or vintage styles coming back around into fashion.
I think we just identified the problem: people who are homeless would really benefit from being able to make food, but they can't plug in a stove no matter the cost.
I listed my old kitchen stuff on Facebook. People paid something for the microwave, an old gas hob, an extractor hood, and a few other bits.
Then most of the cabinets were taken away for free by a guy who was setting up his garage to brew beer, and some builders who were putting together a staff kitchen for a (presumably pretty penny-pinching) local business owner.
Put it out by the curb with a $10 sign on it. Someone will steal it within the hour. Easiest way to get rid of stuff. Worst case scenario someone gives you 10 bucks for it. No one wants free stuff but if it has any value associated people will want it.
Fortunately / unfortunately I'm in a isolated little development, if my neighbors don't want it that's kinda the end of the story as they're also the only folks who will see it on the curb ;)
People tend to overestimate the costs of production versus recycling. You could easily spend, in terms of CO2, vastly more resources trying to sort, clean and ship around this stuff, rather then just setting the pile on fire - particularly if it's principally organically-derived fibers (cotton) and not synthetics.
Perhaps the economic calculus is to keep prices of existing clothing high by destroying excess inventory rather than selling at steep discounts to encourage purchase at a S&D intersection via sell-downs, selling this inventory to secondary markets like Ross, TJ Maxx, Salvation Army, and Goodwill, or giving it to charity. It seems like such a waste that could've been captured and used more efficiently. It was perhaps the most expedient action used by a small number of less than resourceful corporate employees trying to write-off excess inventory.
The case of plastic bag recycling is outrageous deception.
I walked by an HM that had trash bags filled with new condition shoes. I started looking through them before I realized they had stamp cut holes through the soles so people couldn’t use it.
If the margins are high enough, then it's optimal to overproduce and then sell to everyone who will buy at a certain price point. If discounts will reduce your ability to sell the same brand in the future at that price point, it can be financially optimal to destroy it instead.
And what about competing clothes sellers willing to sell at lower margins and hence lower prices to customers?
The reason this works with clothing for some brands is that some utility of the clothing is in the signaling it provides to the humans wearing it, and the signaling comes from the scarcity of that type of clothing.
A clothes seller selling clothing that signals the wearer is able to afford a more scarce type of clothing is thus ruining their own products’ value proposition by decreasing the scarcity of the clothes.
That is why it might be better to destroy than see it on sale at TJ Maxx or Walmart or whatever cheap store.
Bottom line is clothes sellers are catering to what clothes buyers want. They are not stupid about how to operate their business.
And o11c’s comment about glass makers breaking windows is irrelevant since the glass maker does not own the window they are breaking, whereas a clothes seller owns the clothes they might be destroying.
The BASF in Germany burned 1 month of cerosine for Frankfurt airport because there were no flights while lockdown. Why didn’t they store it? Because storing is more expensive than burning it. Maybe the same happens to clothes.
Chances are that a good portion of that clothing was offered to or went to local secondary markets before being sent overseas. (That isn't to say that it was offered for sale. But there is too much for them to handle, particularly since they don't want to dilute their own prices.)
If it was useful/needed, it wouldn't be laying in unguarded piles in the desert. What's left over is the stuff that's so useless that even the poorest scavengers aren't interested in it.
Even if it might be useful elsewhere, it isn't in that other place because it's so worthless that transporting it isn't worth it. "Would be" useful elsewhere just means "useless where it is".
Just like most of the stuff that Amazon gets criticized for throwing in the trash is likely either stuff that's unsafe or so worthless that the pallet-of-random-crap buyers don't want it.
I know a guy who knows a guy, and he says that guy takes medical waste and basically dumps it into the sewer. I don’t know if that’s a euphemism for a river or burying it in the landfill. But basically his business is to have others pass the buck on regulated disposal to him, who then just dumps it. I’m sure this type of thing is fairly common.
The guy I know is in the US, but he deals with a lot of Canadians also. His business is gray (think something like marijuana but not that) where it’s sort of legal in some places but mostly not. One time we were at a bar and his friend came who was wearing a patched biker jacket, I did not recognize the gang. But the guy was totally nice.
I have had a few weird situations with organized crime and my hunch is they are way, way bigger than society understands. Like the American Mafia was way too public, the FBI nailed them, and now the smart criminals just don’t exist in any form in the public consciousness. I think OC now exists as legitimate business but it’s just a few layers removed. So they might operate a doctors clinic, but the real point of it is to milk Medicare for scams, and things like this. But on paper it seems correct
It wouldn’t be so appalling if the clothes were made from sustainable, biodegradable materials.
I appreciate that the article calls out the trash as being like an oil slick, which is a sticking point I think we all can be upset about, and use our agency to demand change.
Don’t buy plastic to wear. Tell manufacturers (brands) they are grotesque for using plastics in clothing.
For the past few years I've tried to buy socks, underwear and even T-shirts without any plastic in them.
Turns out to be extremely hard, borderline impossible in many countries (including US and EU).
It gets even worse if someone doesn't want to buy online and wants to find a local shop then the chances go even lower. I'm not I've seen an 100% cotton product in ages in a physical store.
If you wear more classic mens clothing you can dress pretty much 100% in linen, wool, cotton, silk, leather and various brass/steel buckles. 100% merino wool (winter) or linen/cotton/silk blend (summer) for socks, underwear and t-shirts. 100% cotton and linen for shirts and trousers. 100% wool knitwear, suits, formal trousers, jackets and winter coats. 100% leather shoes.
Not to mention the clothes themselves last decades.
These kind of places always seem so surreal. They’re like a place you’re not supposed to go, a place where deleted things end up. No humans around except for a few scavengers. Where are some other interesting remote dumping grounds like this where piles of discarded items just sit around abandoned? Is there a dry desert somewhere with a bunch of old beige computers just laying around?
Garbage can be found just about anywhere now. There is a TV show called Alone where people try to survive off the land in remote locations. There’s a limit to how much stuff a person can bring with them but they are allowed to use any items they find. In almost every season someone finds something that was dumped. The whole world is becoming a garbage dump. There are giant garbage patches in the oceans now. It’s disconcerting that we have done so much damage to the planet.
The weird thing to me is that we have those places everywhere and don't think twice about it. The only difference is that we cover the garbage with dirt. They are called "landfills" but they are really just mountains of garbage.
There are other differences. The garbage being discussed was sorted, baled, and shipped to markets with the pretense that it was going the be recycled or reused. (To be fair, a fraction of it was.) It diverted garbage away from our landfills, dumping it where it was beyond "out of sight, out of mind." The intent is entirely different.
Actual landfills are, at least where I live, heavily regulated and use quite a lot of technology and engineering to minimize their impact. And landfilling itself is actually being abandoned here, AFAIK you can’t start a new landfill anymore and the costs of landfilling will be artificially jacked up in order to soften the final ban in ~6 years.
Similarly, I strongly believe we should sort our recyclables, even if they end up getting buried in adjacent pits. It's reduced entropy, save that energy for later.
> I believe that waste should be stored until something useful can be done with it --- on a long enough timescale, everything gets recycled eventually.
What happens if we assume the statement is true (as a thought experiment) and explore the ramifications? I see three key follow-up questions?
1. What valuation is implied by the above statement?
2. What do we mean by "waste"?
3. What are the salient differences between _burying_, _storing_, and _burning_?
Some answers to each:
1. It requires the future value, for some unbounded `t`, to exceed the present value. For this to be sensible, the cost of storage cannot dominate.
2. What is waste now is a function of our current economics* and technological level. Storing something indefinitely is an implicit bet that future changes to economics and/or technology will make recovery of item worth it relative to the cumulative storage and opportunity costs (including compounding).
3. In a broad sense, entropy. This applies to both the item stored (its internal state) and the energy required to locate it (i.e. location indexing). Put another way: entropy maps to more concrete concepts such as: cost of recovery, expected degradation, and ability to locate later.
* I don't mean to imply a narrow view of economics. What I actually mean is closer to the considerations from _political economy_.
For a fixed budget, given all of humanity's goals, would storing waste be the rational thing to do? Among other things, it depends on what we classify as waste. Additionally, absolute claims are unhelpful in a world where we need to make relative comparisons.
I would argue that a pile of textiles might be slightly less toxic. But yes, obviously we can’t just dump everything into the ground and ignore the problem.
Meanwhile, in every city everywhere, we bury mountains and mountains full of arbitrary garbage. This stuff is not buried and a lot ended up burning. At least it's sorted! And arguably burning it could be better than burying it.
I'm confused by this stance. How could burning it be better than burying it?
If you bury it it's (relatively) inert and all stored neatly in one place. Whereas if you burn it you release it in the atmosphere, release carbon and probably not-so-great residues everywhere.
If you bury it, you slowly leak all kinds of toxic stuff into groundwater and soil around. If you incinerate it, you recover some heat used for district heating and you have controlled circumstances - filter and monitor emissions.
And in some very flat countries, those landfillhils become nice recreational landscape features, for example, the "Col du VAM"¹ in Drenthe, the Netherlands.
This is where waste to energy plants should be used. It is a shame the unusable clothes are not burnt directly at the source to create electricity and remote heating. Instead it is shipped to the other end of the world by boat and truck and then burnt in open nature for no good.
I asked an LLM: "if there was infinite technology and no limitation on science or physics what would be the most ecological way to dispose of garbage" this was the response:
Complete Material Recovery: Every scrap of waste could be broken down at the molecular or atomic level and then reassembled into raw materials. This would be a perfect form of recycling where nothing is wasted, and materials are perpetually reused.
Energy Conversion: Garbage could be converted directly into clean energy through highly efficient processes, perhaps even approaching 100% energy conversion without any emissions or residues.
Biological Integration: Waste could be processed using engineered organisms or bio-systems that decompose or transform all types of waste into environmentally beneficial substances, like nutrients that support ecosystems rather than disrupt them.
Space Disposal: With no limitations, safe disposal methods could involve sending waste to the sun or other celestial bodies designed to safely contain or annihilate it without any impact on Earth or its environment.
> Biological Integration: Waste could be processed using engineered organisms or bio-systems that decompose or transform all types of waste into environmentally beneficial substances, like nutrients that support ecosystems rather than disrupt them.
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