Burn After Wearing
grist.org213 points by onychomys 14 days ago
213 points by onychomys 14 days ago
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.
That sounds like a false dilemma. Surely there are more options than just having one set of clothes or having enormous amounts of clothing waste.
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.
Also, define oversupply: +1%, 10%, 50%?
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.
That's true, people do like their fashion.
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.
Truely yes, but I don't think it helps any more.
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.
This claim is often repeated, but what I buy from H&M lasts years and years.
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.
Are you using them regularly in physical labor though?
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.
So many years in my case that I'm really not sure that the counter would still hold.
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.
Is there a gender based point being made here? It feels like the only reason to mention she was a woman.
Yes. Females buy more clothes and the cultural stereotype is that they have a better clothing taste then men generally.
Also, let people tell stories however they feel like they want to tell them.
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?