Dead White Man's Clothes: The Environmental Disaster Fuelled by Used Clothes

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alex123711
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Dead White Man's Clothes: The Environmental Disaster Fuelled by Used Clothes

Post by alex123711 »

I just watched this and it's quite alarming the amount of clothes that end up in the ocean, and that's just one area. They mentioned it's the big fashion companies who are the problem as they overproduce by 60% as part of their business model.

What are some ways to try and avoid this? Buy only from sustainable companies?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bB3kuuBPVys

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TheWanderingScholar
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Re: Dead White Man's Clothes: The Environmental Disaster Fuelled by Used Clothes

Post by TheWanderingScholar »

alex123711 wrote:
Sat Aug 14, 2021 7:57 pm
I just watched this and it's quite alarming the amount of clothes that end up in the ocean, and that's just one area. They mentioned it's the big fashion companies who are the problem as they overproduce by 60% as part of their business model.

What are some ways to try and avoid this? Buy only from sustainable companies?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bB3kuuBPVys
Honestly? Buy from smaller players, where clothes are more expensive as part of their business model, and use your clothes until you drop.

I still wear shirts several years old and honestly upgraded my wardrobe because of my new job.

As I get in a better position, I do plan on upgrading my clothes to something more sustainable, retiring clothes for indoor use, then to rags.

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Ego
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Re: Dead White Man's Clothes: The Environmental Disaster Fuelled by Used Clothes

Post by Ego »

alex123711 wrote:
Sat Aug 14, 2021 7:57 pm
What are some ways to try and avoid this? Buy only from sustainable companies?
Level 1
Catch the clothing in the stage just before it is shipped to Africa and create your wardrobe from there.
https://youtu.be/QqIKKcoJ8C8

Level 2
Become friendly with others at the bins. Notice what they are looking for and let them know what you like. Trade.

Level 3
Pick clothing you know would be valuable to others and resell it so that they can also avoid buying new.

Level 4
Buy slightly damaged items and repair them for resale.

Level 5
Play a part in changing the culture so that buying second-hand goes from embarrassing to cool.
https://youtu.be/ukHGpMj8PRw

Level 6
?

SavingWithBabies
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Re: Dead White Man's Clothes: The Environmental Disaster Fuelled by Used Clothes

Post by SavingWithBabies »

Also dispose of clothes too soiled for reuse properly (don't donate them). Maybe too much information but I have a number of shirts where the armpits had some kind of odd chemical reaction when washed due to combination of antiperspirants/detergent/water minerals. The shirts are otherwise fine and I've tried a lot of methods to fix them but I'm resigned to letting them go now (I did realize I could use much much less antiperspirant and that seems to be the key for me to avoid the issue or at least minimize it but it's only helpful for new clothes).

I'd guess the unusable clothes in the video were often from estate donations when someone passed away and they had to clear out a whole house but I don't doubt some people donate unusable clothing for the tax write off (if that's still a thing).

flying_pan
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Re: Dead White Man's Clothes: The Environmental Disaster Fuelled by Used Clothes

Post by flying_pan »

SavingWithBabies wrote:
Sun Aug 15, 2021 1:43 am
I'd guess the unusable clothes in the video were often from estate donations when someone passed away and they had to clear out a whole house but I don't doubt some people donate unusable clothing for the tax write off (if that's still a thing).
Some people donate unusable things just to feel good, not just clothing. E.g. my wife's mother would donate literal trash (and she does not know about tax write off) since it feels like you are helping your community as opposed to contributing to the problem of filling the landfills.

Personally, as somebody who got a lot of clothes from thrift stores, I feel their value is a bit lower than buying new from deep discount chains. I am not sure how it affects it environmentally.

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Seppia
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Re: Dead White Man's Clothes: The Environmental Disaster Fuelled by Used Clothes

Post by Seppia »

I don’t know why, but I have a mental block with getting clothes second hand unless it’s from family (I still have a magnificent wool sweater from when my dad was 27, a couple cachemire gilets from my grandpa etc, back from the time when most clothes were made to last).

The best I can do is I never buy anything full price (I cannot remember the last time I did that, probably 15 years ago), I try me best to only buy what I need, I buy good quality (doesn’t always equal expensive) so that I need to replace less often, and I use my clothes 100%

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unemployable
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Re: Dead White Man's Clothes: The Environmental Disaster Fuelled by Used Clothes

Post by unemployable »

Men? Men consume the majority of the world's clothes? Now that's a new one. Someone tell the world's leading fashion designers and magazines.

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Sclass
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Re: Dead White Man's Clothes: The Environmental Disaster Fuelled by Used Clothes

Post by Sclass »

Interesting. I intercept a lot of garments in our home before they get donated. I turn them into rags for my automotive work. I seem to use them all up and I need to supplement with paper towels. My wife guilt tripped me that some person in the third world would get to wear the garment if I didn’t slice it up into shop towels and saturate it with oil. Maybe giving it away makes her feel better about constantly updating her wardrobe. She’s actually quite irritated that I “waste” these clothes as shop towels.

My response is it helps me to have a clean shop. It doesn’t help me to dress some stranger half way around the world.

Lunch conversation today was over the markets that trade all the returned merchandise accumulated by retailers. People don’t seem to understand what happens when you return some shirt that you didn’t like after wearing it once. I brought up “my friend Ego” at the tianguis and the underground economy in all this stuff. I think to a lot of middle class people the stuff gets dropped off at a FedEx box with an Amazon return label and it’s gone.

Toska2
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Re: Dead White Man's Clothes: The Environmental Disaster Fuelled by Used Clothes

Post by Toska2 »

I have done community service in goodwill and salvation army. We had clothes bursting at the seams literally. We gave up sorting and putting stuff on the racks as they were full. 9-5 was opening bags of items cutting them up and shipping them out in boxes. They went from Michigan to Mexico as rags, maybe later to be chopped into sound deading mats in your "made in mexico" ford. A semi trailer plus a week for just goodwill from a town of 20,000. This was 20 years ago.

My only new clothes are undergarments, boots and winter gear. Everything gets worn to threads, my image be dammed.

ducknald_don
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Re: Dead White Man's Clothes: The Environmental Disaster Fuelled by Used Clothes

Post by ducknald_don »

Toska2 wrote:
Mon Aug 16, 2021 5:42 pm
Everything gets worn to threads, my image be dammed.
This is the key point. I don't feel guilty buying my clothes new because I know they won't leave the house until they are completely used up. @Ego's suggestions are thought provoking but you are venturing into cleaning up other people's waste which I'm not particularly interested in.

horsewoman
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Re: Dead White Man's Clothes: The Environmental Disaster Fuelled by Used Clothes

Post by horsewoman »

Thank you @sclass for the timely reminder. My husband is now once more equipped with a nice stack of rags for his shop.
Since everyone in our family of three prefers hand-me-downs (much softer on the skin and harmful chemicals are long washed out) we have a lot of clothes that are too threadbare to donate.

Pro tip - look for an used electric rotary cutter. Cutting up lots of fabric can be very hard on the wrists with regular scissors. With the electric cutter it's a breeze! (I know, not very ERE, but my wrists are already pretty damaged from back when I worked as a tailor. It's just not worth it for me.)

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Ego
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Re: Dead White Man's Clothes: The Environmental Disaster Fuelled by Used Clothes

Post by Ego »

Sclass wrote:
Mon Aug 16, 2021 3:37 pm
I brought up “my friend Ego” at the tianguis and the underground economy in all this stuff. I think to a lot of middle class people the stuff gets dropped off at a FedEx box with an Amazon return label and it’s gone.
Hah, your poor wife! I think you are right about returns. It has become common for people to order multiple sizes of a particular garment online with the thought that the one they return will be sent to someone else. The truth is, if it has been removed from the cellophane sleeve it will enter the second hand market. Post-covid it is likely that every return is deemed unsellable. Goodwill has an entire division that deals in these supposedly unsellable items from corporations. Tax policies encourage it. The big retailers make their profit on memberships so the merchandise is simply the carrot to keep the annual fees rolling in.
ducknald_don wrote:
Tue Aug 17, 2021 3:17 am
@Ego's suggestions are thought provoking but you are venturing into cleaning up other people's waste which I'm not particularly interested in.
Yes, cleaning up other people's waste is exactly what it is.
From the ERE Book

An ecosystem has four components, which form a cycle: Abiotic (resources), producers, consumers, and decomposers. Modern economics only considers two of these relevant: producers and consumers. It ignores the finite abiotic resources and presumes that their only limit is the producers' ability to turn them into commodities. Similarly, consumers and producers ignore decomposition. Once our waste and detritus is dumped into landfills, lakes, rivers, and the atmosphere, and is out of sight, it is, for all intents and purposes, out of mind.
Decomposers are seen as the filthy and vermin infested. The bottom of society. There has been a concerted effort in the West to create a population who believes this. Germaphobes who experience extreme anxiety at the thought of using a public toilet, eating something not hermetically sealed or wearing clothing that someone else wore before them. People who have been engineered to be afraid of invisible goblins. These engineered humans are easy to divide, isolate and then lead around by the nose. Eventually they are so well trained they become the guards in their own concentration camp.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4lvOjiHFw0&t=4738s

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Sclass
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Re: Dead White Man's Clothes: The Environmental Disaster Fuelled by Used Clothes

Post by Sclass »

WTH was that? I watched five minutes of that conversation and I’m exhausted.

Salathor
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Re: Dead White Man's Clothes: The Environmental Disaster Fuelled by Used Clothes

Post by Salathor »

I have been having great success lately with getting clothes free off of the street, found in boxes outside of people's houses (either marked free or clearly destined for the garbage). I'm an unusual size (6'2" and 160#, so like a medium/small large but long) and have managed to avoid buying ANY new clothes other than undergarments, socks, and shoes for several years now (including my work shirts). I wouldn't mind wearing used undershirts (I do have some used underpants) but I never seem to find them, and the ones I find aren't the 'long' fit so they ride up above my bellybutton, which is embarrassing.

I'm still waiting for our local goodwill outlet to reopen but they have not been able to get anyone to come back to work :-(

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Ego
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Re: Dead White Man's Clothes: The Environmental Disaster Fuelled by Used Clothes

Post by Ego »

Sclass wrote:
Tue Aug 17, 2021 3:04 pm
WTH was that? I watched five minutes of that conversation and I’m exhausted.
Hah! Magnificent, no? :lol:

Roger Ebert's top film for 1981. Directed by Louis Malle. Not much to do with clothes except maybe for the NYC styles in 81.

AmazingRadish
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Re: Dead White Man's Clothes: The Environmental Disaster Fuelled by Used Clothes

Post by AmazingRadish »

Ego wrote:
Sat Aug 14, 2021 10:03 pm

Level 3
Pick clothing you know would be valuable to others and resell it so that they can also avoid buying new.
I think Level 3 from @Ego's post is the sweet spot. There are many brands now compared to even 5 years ago that meet the criteria of sustainability, quality construction and a brisk resale market. I've been able to get my daily basics down to $.02/wear and fancy pants and blouses costs can often break even when sold on the second hand market.

Before I would have said I'm hard pressed to believe its the amount of men's clothes causing the problems but anecdotally, I've recently traveled with family and every single male brought more clothing, shoes and personal care items than the females. I think it's an interesting change in the symptoms and broad psychology of overconsumption. I wonder what other changes in overconsumption we'll see as we migrate out of hiding.

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Sclass
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Re: Dead White Man's Clothes: The Environmental Disaster Fuelled by Used Clothes

Post by Sclass »

I stumbled across the video in the OP yesterday while surfing around.

There is something corrupt happening in Ghana’s government. Right, no kidding it’s a third world country. Seriously somebody in control is letting people from first world countries use this place as a dump. Fast fashion has simply gotten ahead of the demand.

From what I could see in the video, the end users of the clothes were finding that a smaller and smaller portion of their feedstock was useful and they were getting frustrated. They were probably used to higher quality discarded garments in the past but now they open the bales and half of the stuff is trash.

And that’s what fast fashion is. The fabric is cheap trash that you wear twice then toss. To keep it cheap it is mostly synthetics made from cheap crude oil. Sewn up in the third world and discarded in the third world. Basically these Ghanaians are dealing with the same problem Asia had a few years ago with “recycled” plastic bags and bottles. Eventually the powers at be will have to stop admitting useless trash into the country like China did with shampoo bottles. In the meantime the end users will make mountains of old clothes and dump them in the sea. They will bid less at their markets and it will feed back to the Goodwill store in Michigan. It may create a recycling crisis like we’ve seen in plastics the last few years.

Half of this trash cannot even make decent cleaning rags. Not absorbent enough.

I forgot to say a smaller and smaller number of my wife’s discards can be cut up into rags. Most of the polyester crap she gets from Target.com doesn’t absorb enough oil to make it useful for cleaning up my shop. I’ve noticed this change over the last decade. More trash fabric. She probably gets tired of wearing the “plastic bag” and then donates it. When I dig through our trash for rags I touch the stuff and wonder how people wear this plastic bag. The answer is they wear it twice and toss it.

Our trash can is full of cheap vinyl jackets (look leather), vinyl handbags and plastic blouses and pants. I don’t get too mad because it doesn’t show up as signal on our credit card bill. It gets lost in the noise of household purchases at Target.com. Meaning it’s dirt cheap.

But it had a moral and environmental cost. I think it’s time for a talk about sustainability in my home.

chenda
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Re: Dead White Man's Clothes: The Environmental Disaster Fuelled by Used Clothes

Post by chenda »

Washing such clothes also leads to microfiber pollution, millions of plastic particles which end up the water supply as they are not filtered out anywhere.

My point though is why the hell is any of this plastic been sent to places like Ghana in the first place ? And how does so much of it end up in the sea for all eternity ? Most people are pretty diligent about using recycling bins and get reassuring images of their plastic bottles been reincarnated.

Frita
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Re: Dead White Man's Clothes: The Environmental Disaster Fuelled by Used Clothes

Post by Frita »

chenda wrote:
Sat Sep 18, 2021 5:11 am
Most people are pretty diligent about using recycling bins and get reassuring images of their plastic bottles been reincarnated.
Hm, that seems to be part of the unintended problem with saying, “ refuse, reduce, reuse, repurpose, recycle.” It is not a multiple-choice situation but a hierarchy.

Just driving one’s flex fuel car to some big box store and buying 24 packs of plastic-wrapped water bottles to suck down and recycle does not cut it. For some people, this is the height of sustainability and a source of great pride.

Also, regarding recycling, I often wonder if those bins actually get recycled. How easy would it be to just go to the landfill?

Another thing I notice is fast home decor and furnishings in the same vein as fast fashion. In our college town, there has been a shift to students buying junky crap and having it be in such poor condition that no one wants it off the street. This is in contrast to older pieces that were well-made and still in circulation after decades. Also, I gather that people “redo” their kitchens with new colored small appliances, matching utensils and towels, etc. In the process, they unload the previous stuff from a year or two before. I think the same thing goes on with every room in the house. Has this increased with people having to stay at home in the past 18 months?

chenda
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Re: Dead White Man's Clothes: The Environmental Disaster Fuelled by Used Clothes

Post by chenda »

Frita wrote:
Sat Sep 18, 2021 8:16 am
Also, regarding recycling, I often wonder if those bins actually get recycled. How easy would it be to just go to the landfill?
Indeed. We have alternate weekly recycling/non recycling waste here although I've observed on some weeks it all gets mixed together. I don't know if it subsequently gets separated but it doesn't actually fill you with confidence.

Our local 'recycling centre' as they now call themselves (known in the vernacular as 'the dump') proudly puts up signs saying things like 89% of waste recycled this month. But it's not clear how this is measured, by weight, volume, units ? Neither is it clear how much of this is plastic recycling. It easy to recycle garden waste like grass cuttings and vegetation, not so much a toaster or other electronic goods.

(Neither do they allow pedestrian visits - you actually have to drive there and register your car number plate. It's to clamp down on commercial tradesmen masquerading as householders and dumping their waste for free. So for those of us who are car free we actually can't use the recycling centre, which is absurd.)

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