> <i>Today, the average American buys 68 new items of clothing per year.</i><p>> <i>“You wonder, do people in America have so much money that they can just wear things once and then throw them away?”</i><p>I uh… I too would like to know. What scares me is that the use of whatever demographic is causing that average has to be way higher than the actual average, but this feels like it has to be bimodal.<p>And there are lots of these numbers in the news. The "average American" produces an obscene amount of food waste too, far beyond what I feel I actually produce, as best as I can estimate it.
I think people should really talk about mass market fashion vs luxury fashion. Many people seem to think that buying LVMH clothes or other luxury brands is somehow more ethical when those brands can be even worse. Those brands just sell far fewer items so it's not the same amount. If 99.9% of clothes are fast fashion than 99.9% of left over clothes should also be fast fashion, it's actually more like 100% as luxury brands will just destroy unsold merchandise usually to prevent damage to the brand.<p>I'm a guy so clearly things don't change as much but almost every piece of clothing I own is "fast fashion" that I'll wear until it's ruined. Consumers are told constantly by the media, social media and brands that they need to continuously change or be out of fashion and "cringe" or "cheugy". I think fast fashion companies in general are one of the least to blame for these trends, they seem to just copy quickly what is deemed as good but others.<p>Kmart in Australia is a good example. Most stores sell crappy out of date stuff so you have to shop online but Kmart has heaps of good cheap stuff under the Anko brand. From $3.70 t-shirts with a good fit, to $50.00 air fryers to nice containers to store stuff in. IMO it's a big win for most people to have cheap good stuff to buy. If it wasn't for Kmart it would be far harder to not be "cringe" while being poor. If the coolness industrial complex decides that this stuff is not good then Kmart would need to get rid of stock to replace it with new cool stuff. Is that Kmarts fault? I don't think so.
<i>In Ghana, imported secondhand clothes are called obroni wawu, dead white man’s clothes. In Malawi, they are kaunjika — literally “clothes sold in a heap.” In Mozambique, they are known as calamidade, calamity, for their historical association with disaster relief aid.</i><p>Fascinating article if only for such an interesting glimpse into Africa and African culture and how it is being shaped by its relationship to the larger world.
Donations of clothes from the West can also undermine local clothing industries.<p>This also happened with "cheap" milk powder from the EU to (iirc) Ghana.<p>Ghana was helping to finance the EU's overproduction of milk.
Hopefully the climate change issue could motivate to change this. Even if this stuff is piling up in a place sight unseen from the origin, it's still coming back to that origin in ways which we don't well understand.<p>Just as the pandemic accelerated global cooperation and change, so could the climate issue. If the US wanted to shut down this problem, regulators could find the key spot to put a bullet into. Ideally the US would take the responsibility that comes with globalism after nuking the world with trash.<p>Trash is how I view everything I buy. I'm walking into a store to buy trash. It doesn't matter that I still wear a belt daily which I have had for 15 years and much of my clothes are seriously straining from overuse. It still goes to trash eventually. If I take it to my grave, then I'm trash wrapped in trash. When I first stayed in a developing country, there was no trash service for much of the region. If you wanted to get rid of something, you burned it. Today I do all my shopping considering what it would be like to burn it. Car shopping would be so much fun.<p>Don't think it matters what we do individually. This needs to be an urgent thing taken at levels where people actually have power to change things.<p>Also, I think the issue is that this is essentially a scheme to cheaply get rid of trash. You could probably pay these importers to take the trash and it would still be worth it. "You mean, you'll pay us to take our trash?! Thank you so much for solving that nightmare of a problem for us. This was looking REALLY expensive for us to deal with in our own country."
The whole commercial system is so full of perverse incentives. It is absolutely horrible what we do to your planet but there is so much momentum behind this. Someone near me loves to throw things away. I kid you not. Mountains of disposables, perfectly good stuff gets replaced just to get something new. And let's not get started about the amount of food that goes into the waste bin even though there is nothing wrong with it other than that an expiry sticker says it is now one day over time.<p>Personal status report: articles of clothing bought in the last year: 0. Articles of clothing bought in the last three years: still 0. And I don't think I'll be buying any for the next year either and then likely I'll buy some underwear and socks.<p>But for my kids (who are growing quite rapidly) it is a completely different story and I suspect that that is one factor that pushes up that average.
Once an item of clothing wears out too much to wear in public, I wear it around the house or sleep in it. During the pandemic I've rarely had to wear `decent' clothes. On video calls I just temporarily put on a non-worn-out top over whatever I'm wearing.<p>Unfortunately I do have to buy replacement footwear quite regularly (50+ miles on foot per week). But a worn out pair of shoes does for working in the garden, and worn socks as slippers round the house.<p>So, eventually, my clothes end up in UK landfill, once they are too worn out even for me (which can be after decades).
I have started buying clothes from USA _because_ they are of higher quality. Even though they are made in my India, they are usually not available for sale here. The quality and variety available for exports is drastically different from what is available for the local market. Mine have lasted at least 2-3 years before I buy a new set of clothes.<p>I wonder why there is a huge churn in USA to keep buying new clothes. Is it just more affordable/cheaper to buy than to mend your clothes? Easier access that makes it binge buy quickly? Too many special occasions? I am confused cos I feel they haven't seen inferior quality of clothing that they don't keep their belongings longer.
> If you live in the West, chances are at some point you have stuffed your used clothes into a garbage bag and hauled them off to a Goodwill or the Salvation Army.<p>Please don't let this article put you off donating clothes to good causes. I know that (for instance) in the UK the Red Cross sells as much as it can, and only the unsellable stuff (ripped, stained etc) goes out to 'rag' with the recyclers. Clothing is even cycled through different shops if one can't sell it. So I'm really not sure that 10-20% figure holds up globally.<p>Something this article glossses over is that this stuff is not just being dumped - it's being bought. I think it's wrong that (for instance, in the article) the US interfered in law-making in various places to veto restrictions on the trade, of course. But fundamentally, the countries need to get a handle on dumping and start factoring that into the price of doing business.<p>Yes, westerners could buy less crap, and they could also do more shopping for used stuff themselves. But that's only part of hte picture.
Everything that gets produced eventually lands in a dump. The moral justification for shipping stuff your nation has no use for anymore, i.e. your garbage, off to Africa needs to be discussed. Some of that stuff will find second use, which is good in some ways and bad in other ways, but whether that happens or not, everything that gets shipped to Africa will end up in a dump in Africa sooner or later - unless it gets shipped away again somewhere else.
Growing up, it was completely normal to look at my older brothers clothes and pick which I wanted 2 years before it was handed down to me.<p>Then we got MTV. When our mother travelled on business, we would make print outs of shoes and clothing that we wanted. God forbid someone caught you with an off-brand shoe at school now that the poorest kid under the hot sun of Saudi Arabia was fashion aware. It was wasteful, it was expensive, it was less than 5 items each a year.<p>I can't even imagine what it's like to buy 68 article of clothing a year. But then again a wise author once said: "Ending is better than mending."
That's conspicuous consumption gone mad, it seems to me too many people have far too much disposable income.<p>What is it about people that they cannot be content with their clothes in that they have to change them long before they're worn out? This is fashion gone mad.<p>I never throw out clothes, and I can keep the same items for many years - I've still got jeans, BD dungarees, etc. that I bought over 20 years ago. When they eventually become threadbare I tear them up for cleaning rags.<p>What the hell is wrong with these people that they can be so wasteful?
The weird part of this isn’t that fast fashion generates a lot of trash. Almost every part of the American lifestyle generates tons of waste. The strange part is that the US strong arms African countries into buying the “donated” garments from textile recyclers. I’ll be throwing my used garments directly into the landfill in the future.
Sounds a lot like clothing is now “post scarcity”.<p>I’d have thought that was a positive thing but from the articles moral panicky tone, I guess it’s just another thing we need to feel guilty about.
I'm in e-commerce, and reading through this thread I think many people have the misconception that people make purchases to solve problems and want that solution to last as long as possible.<p>In reality, and this is something I spent a long time coming to terms with, much shopping is done because it's fun. Spending money isn't a cost - it's the whole point of the exercise.
I refuse to fault fast fashion for these issues when the amount of trash free t-shirts given away for free at any conference could probably build a mountain on its own.
Can "this" and "this" and "this" be donated somewhere and put in good use ?<p>Chile’s desert dumping ground for fast fashion leftovers<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29155488" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29155488</a>
[1] <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/11/8/chiles-desert-dumping-ground-for-fast-fashion-leftovers" rel="nofollow">https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/11/8/chiles-desert-du...</a>
The article describes a world of affluence, reaching deep into the poorest parts of Africa. Gone are the days when people would have to be naked when they washed the only piece of clothing they owned.<p>Somehow this eradication of third world poverty is bad. Because everything is bad if you want to think of it that way.<p>Just one point: Clothing ending up in landfills are a form of carbon sequestration.
Very relevant <a href="https://www.reaktor.com/blog/why-ive-tracked-every-single-piece-of-clothing-ive-worn-for-three-years/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reaktor.com/blog/why-ive-tracked-every-single-pi...</a>
Why I’ve tracked every single piece of clothing I’ve worn for three years
I've taken to buying almost all my clothes second hand recently, both for this reason and I find the selection and styles far better than what fast fashion provides. Thrift stores like Goodwill provide some gems, but the best shopping comes from we-buy-your-clothes type places like Buffalo Exchange and Crossroads, and the prices are better too!
> As it stands, lax customs enforcement — along with spotty infrastructure and the prevalence of cheap Asian imports — has made it difficult for Africa to develop a garment industry of its own.<p>Local producers are great, but they're outnumbered ten thousand to one by local consumers. How the world would be any better if some of the world's poorest were forced by their governments to pay <i>extra</i> money to buy inferior clothes, while some small-time politically-connected tycoon profited from it? That's not really how prosperity works.<p>Scale back your consumption here in the US, go ahead, that's fine, but let's not pretend that the bales of clothing <i>smuggled</i> over the border into South Africa are harming anyone but the comfortable.
> To be sure, the availability of inexpensive clothes isn’t entirely a bad thing. In a country like South Africa, where more than half of people live below the poverty line, demand remains brisk, and some Western castoffs have become wardrobe staples for people who might not be able to afford new clothes.<p>Ah...not quite. The problem is, these leftovers from The West ultimately undermine the local economy. So, for example, locals can't work in a local clothing factory because there's no market. That market is already monopolized by much more inexpensive donation clothes.
How is this a problem? They get free clothes they would otherwise never be able to afford. Perhaps they should be grateful instead of expecting everything to be free forever.
I don't give two damns about fashion, but I would like good long-lasting clothing. Any suggestions on where I can find that (once my current stock wears out)?
Many fashion moguls adorn varius "richest people" lists.<p>I think it's a good rule of thumb to pay close attention to any industry that produces disproportionate number of billionaires. Because there might be some societal or ecological cost involved that the marked should be made aware of with through taxes or regulation.<p>Fasion and real estate should be some of the prime targets for investigation.
It would be great to see systems like this automated recycling system scale up: <a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/90616764/bring-your-old-clothes-and-this-in-store-recycling-machine-will-turn-them-into-something-new" rel="nofollow">https://www.fastcompany.com/90616764/bring-your-old-clothes-...</a>
> the fashion industry is responsible for one-tenth of the world’s carbon emissions, according to the U.N. Environment Program — more than international flights and maritime shipping combined<p>I think we need clothing that lasts longer. If you are clothing shopping for fun, your actions aren't harmless.
Weird article.<p>Poor people get good condition, fashionable recycled clothing for a few cents, and this is somehow a bad thing?<p>Does africa really need to be in garment production? Could they compete with vietnam/bangladesh?Banning imports and mandating locally produced clothing is likely just going to lead to forcing poor people to pay 10x more with no improvement or even worse quality.
Related, <i>Clothing Poverty: The Hidden World of Fast Fashion and Second-Hand Clothes, by Andrew Brooks</i> examines this world of considerable waste.
Regulate fashion.<p>For example you might make destruction or stockpiling of unsold clothes a crime. Also ban exporting clothes that were manufactured abroad.
We could dump ten times the clothes and it wouldn't matter. Landfill space is not at all rare, it wouldn't even be a huge engineering project to build a hole big enough to house all human trash for the next hundred years.<p>Frankly, the gains from having cheap clothing and letting people express themselves far outweighs the downsides from the waste.