Slashdot Mirror
'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.
So you're saying we could cut out a major source of greenhouse-gas emissions by just going naked all the time?
North Korea has made a credible threat to drop Disco on the USA.
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.
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?
Hold on to your out of date clothing. They will be back in style in 10 years.
Or simply wear them. If your friends judge you buy your clothes, they're not your friends.
What am I supposed to do with all my old leisure suits? Some of those fabrics could survive a direct nuclear strike.
First law of people: People are generally stupid.
I just wear my clothes until they break down naturally and are shed in the next molting cycle.
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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.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I volunteer at a local food pantry that also makes donated clothes available to its clients. I generally only volunteer once a week, but I see a lot of people lining up to get clothing...whether it's for themselves or someone else.
Maybe other countries don't need/want our used clothing as much, but there's still a demand/need in the USA at least.
Give a hand, not a hand-out.
When I read the original article, I get the idea that a lot of it is based on this one disaster relief blanket maker's tale of woe, discovering that they were booted out as the preferred provider of their recycled blankets made from worn out clothing material. I can't help but wonder if there's more to their story than what they reveal here, since they stated the Chinese product being purchased instead is still 50 cents per blanket more expensive than what they were selling. Don't these things generally get contracted out to the lowest bidder?
Maybe their recycled blankets weren't as durable as the new Chinese ones? Or maybe they weren't as warm or comfortable?
Additionally, I agree with another Slashdot poster who found it rather hard to believe that all over the entire world, we've actually reached a point where concerns about fashion trump any interest or need for cheap, used clothing? Here in America, I find that at least in my circle of friends (including the people I communicate with via social media), few of us are fashion conscious at all. I have a couple of female friends who are, but more of them actually tell me they just want clothing that lasts. They hate spending large amounts of time picking out clothes that fit well and look good on them, only to have their favorite selections wear out and need replacing again after a year or two. The guys I know pretty much all just have a need for "business casual" clothing plus comfortable, casual wear for weekends and days off work. It's all about buying what's reasonably priced while fitting the category they're seeking. "Fast fashion" has no role to play there.
Because Everytime at the local thrift stores was too ratty to wear. Part of that is cloths are made more cheaply now (thanks fast fashion) and part of that is the thrift stores eBay all the really nice stuff. I suspect if your poor that's got to suck. When I was a broke ass college kid I could get something ok for a job interview for $20 bucks. Nowadays that stuff is on eBay for $100 or more...
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"And mixes, which are most clothes today, are often hard to recycle."
Leviticus tried to warn us.
Hold on to your out of date clothing. They will be back in style in 10 years. This is why I don't buy name brand clothing. It doesn't have any more quality and hearing people say "cool jacket" is only nice for so long.
Funny you say that. Back in the early 1970's, I was in Rome, and saw an older homeless gentleman in an old suit, probably 30 or 40 years old, because it had wide lapels ... just like what had recently come back in style!
I think I saw the youtube video of you fighting him for that jacket. Kudos for your win!
It's hard to tell, though; it appeared to be originally recorded in 8mm.
Friends have very little in the way of influence on your life. It's the strangers who judge you that are the problem.
In the book Brave New World the hypnotically-implanted mottos included "ending is better than mending" and "the more stitches, the less riches."
They are all made in the same factory in Bangladesh for 20 cents worth of materials and one cent worth of work. NONE of them are worth $50.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Most of the clothes I buy are 100% cotton. Can't you just shred cotton, wool, linen, silk, rayon, etc. clothes and scatter the bits into the wind? They're natural fibers. That's what would've happened to the material anyway if they hadn't been turned into a textile. These things have been growing and dying for millions of years, and we're not buried up to our ears in them. So I assume bacteria are able to decompose them and re-enter the natural food cycles.
So what is this big incentive for the industry? They do not care that second hand are thrown away instead of used again. They even would welcome it. "Pleasy buy my stuff and throw it away without wearing it." "Please use it as a fule source." All things they would be totally ok with, as long as you give them monies.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The problem is that cheap new clothes are generally really poor quality. I have bought used clothes that were high-quality and last much longer than new ones would, for about the same price. The problem is there's a lot of garbage clothing to sift through to find the good stuff, but I enjoy that sort of treasure hunt.
Of course, the fashion industry doesn't want people to keep clothes for a long time. I'd say that's the real culprit.
So wouldn't making the recyclers more efficient reduce their costs as well?
And how do you propose to do that? Recycling means you get a mixed bag of everything people gave you and you never know what they were thinking. As an analogy, around here at Christmas time there's a donation box for gifts for the poor and because of the personal touch it encourages more and bigger contributions than paying donations. They wrap it up nice and pretty like it's ready to go from secret Santa to straight under the Christmas tree, on the card you're supposed to write the target age/sex.
Do you know what happens to all those presents? They're unwrapped, unpacked, inspected, reviewed for age/sex appropriateness, repacked and re-wrapped. And not just because some people have a bit strange ideas about what's really fit for a Christmas present or useful for a kid. But because there's always some ass hat with mental problems who'll wrap up a broken PlayStation or sex toy or dog poop and a note that says here's a little shit for a little shit. The system only works because they got volunteers willing to perpetuate a fantasy while shielding the recipients from what would actually happen.
You just can't get away from that individual checking of everything. It's the same thing that's killed much of the repair business, if your toaster is broken go buy a new one. Even if it's just a tiny fix the repair guy has exhausted the budget almost before he can get the lid off while a thousand rolled off the assembly line in China. And if the market doesn't care the manufacturer doesn't care about making manuals, parts and equipment etc. available either. Huge, controlled environments with identical items have economics of scale. Small, uncontrolled environments with mixed items don't.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Why would you care about what strangers think of you? If they think you're horribly out of fashion, what influence will their negative opinion of you have on your life? For 99% of strangers, the answer is "none." After you've walked away from them, you might never see those strangers again. (And, if you do, the two of you might not even realize you've seen each other before.) So if a stranger is going to judge you based on your clothes, let them go right ahead. I'm sure some strangers judged me negatively because I'm a man in my 40's who wore a Harry Potter Entering The TARDIS t-shirt, but I don't care because I like that shirt.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
17th century coats (think Pirates of the Caribbean) would be good too! Men's grey business suits are just boring.
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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.
Nevermore.
Average clothes are definitely far less durable today than 20 years ago. They appear to cost less, but I believe cost more over the long term. My jeans used to last about 150 wear / wash cycles and now seem to be good for only half that. Other clothes are far less durable than that.
It seems as though we've entered into an age where having the latest clothes is more important than how much they cost. This turns durability into something the average consumer has no desire to pay extra for. Why pay more to facilitate donating?
The ultimate evolution of this would be to have a brand new outfit every time you dress. There could be a market there for a home grown clothing industry.
Manufacturers based in the US can't compete in the clothing industry as it exists. So, perhaps they should seek instead to disrupt the industry.
We should seek to develop a device similar in size to a washer-dryer combination that will break down old clothes and create new ones. It would likely need to have supplies in canisters that are replaced. There would also likely be components that can't be recycled in the machine and must be removed to a depot for recycling. So, a service would cart away collection canisters and install new supply canisters periodically.
The business would shift from manufacturing clothes overseas to manufacturing sophisticated machines and recycling supplies locally. Also, clothing design would be a completely separate largely community-based, open source activity that these suppliers would no longer have to concern themselves with.
3D printing technology which has already shown an ability to create crude clothes would be a promising starting point for this. Ultimately I think a tech that could break material down into fibers, reform fibers into threads, and weave new clothes, perhaps from many micro threads instead of long ones, would produce better feeling, seamless clothes than a print from drops approach.
Getting there involves shifting from designing machines that automate human activities (which is what the current clothing industry does) to designing a whole process including the end product that is optimized for real-time on-site production of single-use outfits with full recycling.
I only care because strangers are the people who sit on the other side of the table in job interviews
As someone who does job interviews:
For a job interview, don't wear fashion if you want the job.
It's anticipated that you, if male, wear a conservative suit, shirt and tie, unless health or poverty reasons prevent it. Whether it's new or three, five, ten or twenty years old isn't going to be noticed.
If you, on the other hand, wear what stands out as haute couture, you're going to be seen as someone self-centered with more expensive tastes that we'd like to pay for. If you don't even de-tag the suit jacket, you'll label yourself (no pun intended) as ignorant of etiquette too. Which might be OK for an office or floor job, but not if you're expected to meet customers.