'No One Wants Your Used Clothes Anymore' (bloomberg.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: For decades, the donation bin has offered consumers in rich countries a guilt-free way to unload their old clothing. In a virtuous and profitable cycle, a global network of traders would collect these garments, grade them, and transport them around the world to be recycled, worn again, or turned into rags and stuffing. Now that cycle is breaking down. Fashion trends are accelerating, new clothes are becoming as cheap as used ones, and poor countries are turning their backs on the secondhand trade. Without significant changes in the way that clothes are made and marketed, this could add up to an environmental disaster in the making. [...] The tide of secondhand clothes keeps growing even as the markets to reuse them are disappearing. From an environmental standpoint, that's a big problem. Already, the textile industry accounts for more greenhouse-gas emissions than all international flights and maritime shipping combined; as recycling markets break down, its contribution could soar. The good news is that nobody has a bigger incentive to address this problem than the industry itself.

Comments

Fashion or need?

[OffTheLip]

I can't believe there are not plenty of poor areas of the world that are more concerned with meeting human needs rather than catering to fashion taste.

Re:Fashion or need?

[TheRaven64]

The materials costs of new clothes is tiny. The costs are either labour or capital costs of machinery. In the very poor places that are the recipients of second-hand clothes in large quantities, the cost of labour is very, very low. Shipping them fabric costs less than shipping them second-hand clothes (because it can be transported more densely in rolls) and the cost of making the fabric into clothes at the end is negligible, as is the cost of mass producing fabric. When your entire supply chain for both new and second-hand goods is dominated by the cost of transportation, there's little incentive for a second-hand market to exist.

Baloney.

[Anonymous Coward]

The amount of Thrift stores around me has drastically increased in the past decade. My wife lived in Rome for years, and there's daily street fairs where there's many many used clothes being traded.

The article references used FIBERS, totally different from clothes. I see no evidence that thrift, or open air market prices are anywhere near the prices of new clothes. Used fibers turned into new clothes/goods are a different matter. I suspect the fibers will be used for something even cheaper. Insulation?

Re:Baloney.

[Mashiki]

Yeah, in Canada it's so cut-throat for used clothing that there's been incidences of "box poaching" by companies. In most cities there's a booming business in thrift stores, and before someone brings up the "but the Goodwill in Toronto..." the people who were running it literally ran it into the ground, took money, pilfered the poor, and the board paid themselves extravagant amounts of money while the workers worked either for minimum wage, or donated their time. Then tried to scrub all the financial information that they could to cover up the fact that they had pilfered money.

I suspect the fibers will be used for something even cheaper. Insulation?

Partially, it's mixed in with newspaper fiber already for blown insulation because some fire retardant chemicals stick to it easier. The fibers can also be added to a lot of the new laminate framing/beams to add extra strength or be reduced and used as a binder when the laminate is compressed. There's also the possibility that it could be rendered down and reprocessed into partial new-fill, or mixed in with fertilizer. Something that's common with cotton already.

Re:Lies

[postbigbang]

The thrift stores are thriving, and so I wonder about the motivations of the poster-- propaganda? I think the used clothing stores are thriving and cutting into the margins of the highly over priced brand-merchandized disasters marketed in dying malls, and on-line.

Goodwill, Salvation Army, St Vincent de Paul, Amvets, all of these organizations have pretty efficient operations for re-purposing or selling clothes, at least in the USA.

Like you, I believe the BS agenda is behind the scenes here. Follow the money-- or efficiency of it.

Re: Naked time!

[edtice1559]

Well I can't help much with dresses. But men's clothing is also *sized* in an intelligent way. Jeans have two numbers, waist and inseam. These are measured in inches so there's no "vanity sizing." Of course there really is no such thing as a pair of "men's" jeans. Women are welcome to buy and wear them. I've never seen a store refuse a sale to women just because they came from the men's department.

Re:Lies

[nevermore94]

My wife works for the state office of Goodwill in our state. We live in a northern state where it gets COLD. They get far more clothes donated to them than they can resell or even give away. They actually have to resort to bailing clothes like hay just to store them in rented or purchased old semi trailers. More beat up clothes they send away to be cut up into rags or stuffing as mentioned. They have had to reduce the days that they will accept donations because it takes their staff so long to sort and process the tide of donated clothing. And yet, no one is coming in to get them here. So, then it comes down to shipping. They have to pay companies to take away their bails of clothes to other states with higher need so that someone else can unbail and go through all of the clothes again to try to get them to people who need and want them. They barely break even with the clothes they can sell to pay for taking away the clothes that they don't.