My parents started a company 20 years ago that turns old clothing into cleaning rags sold to factories, workshops, printing presses, or for materials that are not great for cleaning with, they get shredded and used for filling in things like car seats etc. Good quality clothing gets sold in second-hand shops. And you know what's interesting to me? That in those 20 years my parents never once talked about it as "recycling" - it's just good business even without looking at it from the environmental perspective.
Exactly. I'm so sick of all these stories framed as how we should all be good sumaritans and recycle. That's not the way to do it!
This stuff has value. It's a business opportunity. If you're doing it to feel good, or to make people feel good, then what you're doing will not scale.
H&M has been pushing this as “brand new” idea where if you return old clothing, you get a single-digit percent discount off your purchase. There’s some perversion in this incentive in that you are “feeding the beast”.
There could be some deliberate behavioural psychology at play as well to curb growing awareness around waste in fashion. A background feeling of guilt of buying new by the shopper is negated in the immediate act of returning old clothes or by a future consideration of the act.
The coupon typically ranges from ten to fifteen percent which isn't insignificant.
In the US I can typically sell my clothes for a decent return at my family's yearly yard sale. Anything that wouldn't sell such as old towels or items that didn't sell I can just take to h&m since they literally accept anything that is fabric.
It was even better when I was in Japan. My family always did yard sales or donated our old clothes but over there there really isn't a culture of getting things second hand, especially if they aren't in near mint condition like what you would find at BookOff or they have been specifically curated and put in a trendy store in Harajuku. My ex would just throw her old clothes in the trash until I did my research and found she could donate to H&M for that coupon. I think that's an overall net positive.
I wonder if this strategy has anything to do with H&M's noticeable drop in clothing quality over the last decade. I have H&M shirts from the late-90s and they are still holding up fine, meanwhile H&M shirts I bought 3 years ago are already getting holes and worn out, for wearing the two shirts roughly equally.
Perhaps this has to do with the "fast fashion" push to always be churning out new clothing. Sell something that loses significant value in a few years, Get the customer to return it to you for (basically) free, and the Customer buys more clothes (more profit).
Forever21, Zara, Express, and H&M are all in the "fast-fashion" store bucket now.
It’s about public companies needing to keep earnings growing. You can cut $5 of cost out of a product and lower the price $0.50.
My grandparents camp has a washing machine and fridge from the 1950s, still going strong. Meanwhile I’m on my 3rd washing machine in this house since 2010.
> H&M's noticeable drop in clothing quality over the last decade
I have observed similar quality decrease with H&M, GAP and other brands. Technically (chem.eng.), it would make sense - but one has to look into the actual process in order to get clear insight.
H&M is not "the beast". Having kids, I am very thankful for their existence, otherwise merely buying new clothes every year would probably bankrupt us.
Before you say I should buy Second Hand: many kids clothes simply break by daily use. It is already common to give old children's clothes that are still OK to friends with smaller children, so it is not like the clothes are wasted by excessive consumerism.
On the topic of sustainability it's probably warranted to call them "the beast". Fast fashion companies are a big part of the problem if you look up how much water and resources are needed to produce a single piece of clothing. Of course having cheap clothing is great for the consumer in the short-term the same way that flying short distance instead of taking the train is comfortable, or commuting with a car instead of public transport.
I don't see where in the article they show it is green washing? They only mention some criticism H&M received, including the ridiculous uproar about the "coolest monkey" T-Shirt. If that is proof for green washing, it is not very convincing.
Fast fashion - it depends on how much gets thrown away at the end of the day? Just because clothing has a heavy toll on the environment, doesn't mean companies producing it are evil. Toll on the environment or not, people need clothes.
> Just because clothing has a heavy toll on the environment, doesn't mean companies producing it are evil. Toll on the environment or not, people need clothes.
It sounds like you are taking this for granted and something that can't be changed. In fact there are a lot of initiatives and companies that work on reducing the footprint, using sustainable sources of cotton, paying fair wages, using less harmful dying methods and filtering the water used in production. If you are interested in the topic I'd suggest to start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_fashion.
As for the green washing, there are probably better sources ([1], [2]) for that but you'll find enough if you do a little research yourself.
That's all nice and well, but I am not convinced that it scales yet to a level where you can say anybody not doing it like that is evil.
In any case, if you decide on that logic, everybody who shops at HM is evil, too.
At very basic level: have these "sustainable fashion" people figured out a way to grow cotton with less energy and less pollution? If not, they don't really have a solution for anything. If they have, they will probably prevail on the market anyway, without the "fair" marketing.
And the use of "fair" usually just implies that some people want to make the rules. I honestly don't care for that label, at least when it is used in marketing. In my opinion fair prices can only be determined by markets (with externalizations being paid for via laws).
In my neighbourhood, which hosts a critical mass of environmentally-conscious parents of young children, there is a children's clothing exchange run by a local church. It is a better version of the traditional hand-me-down culture, as it provides more of a desirable selection.
We have something like this in my neighborhood too. It's hosted in someone's basement and consists of dozens of bins labelled by age/size and clothing type. It operates pretty much like a library where people take some things they like and return them when their child outgrows them. Over time I've seen the same shirt/whatever on multiple different children in the community.
This mostly works for children's clothes because children tend to outgrow them well before they wear out. It might not work so well for adult garments. I tend to keep my clothes till the patches start overlapping, then I turn them into rags for the local maker space.
That's an interesting point. A value of '0' is at least better than a negative value.
The problem here IMHO is that nobody else is seeing an opportunity to pay more than zero and make a correspondingly larger gain on the other end.
Waste is a strange thing. On the one hand, it's a physical thing. But it's also a stance about that thing. Once we label something as waste, it loses a huge part of its value in our eyes. Yet in practical terms, it never lost anything. That difference between perception and reality is a huge business opportunity.
> It's possible to combine good business or operational strategy with a value system that manages to include things beyond just dollars alone.
Sure it is, and that's fine. But the moral framing of the issue (recycling/reusing as a "good thing to do", as opposed to an economic opportunity waiting to be tapped) has the perverse effect of negating (in our head) the actual market value of the things we throw away.
To the point where Western consumers see a vast portion of the economy as intrinsically unviable and in need of support to sustain itself, when in fact (much of the time) it is not.
TBH, when it comes to this topic, I think Westerners would benefit from putting on the Homo economicus hat a lot more often. That's how most of the rest of the world thinks about it.
> But the moral framing of the issue (recycling/reusing as a "good thing to do", as opposed to an economic opportunity waiting to be tapped) has the perverse effect of negating (in our head) the actual market value of the things we throw away.
The market dynamics are one consideration that affect the moral evaluation of the situation, but there are usually others as well. If there are important aspects that the market, along with existing regulations, haven't fully integrated -- which is usually the case to one degree or another -- then one can make a moral case to not blindly follow the market's incentives alone.
If the incentives are particularly strong, the dicey part may be figuring out when and how when individuals can effectively subvert these systemic incentives or modify the system itself. I don't have clear or concise thoughts on that right now, other than believing it does occur from time to time.
It sounds like part of your argument is that the current moral values around recycling aren't fully reflecting the reality and what people actually care about (which is a larger set of things than the market fully captures). I think there is truth to that.
However, narrowly arguing about the market dynamics alone doesn't seem like the best path to me, given that we know market dynamics have their limitations.
I don't think good intentions are that ruinous. A business that's economically viable for someone who cares only for profit can still be economically viable for someone with higher goals.
Out of curiosity: if the fabric is made with elasthane or something like it, does that shredding process not release a large amount of micro particles? I could be wrong, also maybe this happens in other common processes?
So the shredding is the only part which they don't do in-house, there's an external company that does it, so I'm not sure about the answer to this, sorry. Cutting into rags is done in-house but only absorbent materials are good for this so I don't think cutting elasthane is much of an issue.
So for my parents they started by importing second hand clothing from all over Europe, it's usually sold by charities which collect it directly. Some bigger charities have a bidding process(like the Red Cross or the British Heart Foundation) some smaller ones just sell directly and it's a matter of going to them and talking to someone responsible for this side of things.
Initially they would only sort the clothing and sell on the good quality stuff to stores, lower quality to companies which processed it further, then later on they opened their own second-hand stores, started processing(cutting into rags) in-house, and well, kind of grew from there.
As for the name, 1) I don't really like sharing personally identifiable information on the internet, sorry 2) as someone else pointed out - pretty much everyone in this business is offline anyway. All you'd get by searching an address on google is the address on google maps. There is a website but it only has a single page - with address and telephone number. Nothing else has ever been needed.
Real sustainability might mean not buying at all in the first place or to buy within a community if it is available and especially with textiles, not from remote open markets - you don't know which levers are in place for a business to make its profits, which costs are dissipated to everybody but the profiteer. Policies and programmes help. But don't fool yourself to be relieved of your consumers responsibility by recycling. Somebody else will shoulder the external costs.
Recently a local social organisation offered numbers for textile donations: women make up 80% of their donations, 10 tons per week, men are mostly recipients. Less than 10% are reused or resold, the rest might become insulation. They lamented: we get too much. Access to cheap textiles is easy.
I'm not sure what you mean here with not buying. Do you mean not replacing clothes seasonally based on what's "en vogue"? If so, that may be why women make up most of the donations: they do tend to use clothes for a much shorter time.
I still remember being shocked when I spoke to a young lady who told me she wore a dress two times at most. I've never been much of an environmentalist, but I guess I can feel good about keeping clothes for years and not changing them with styles.
I used to dress relatively well.Lots of good quality clothes. Then I put on lots of weight and was like " fuck it,I look like shit anyway", so started buying the cheap stuff. A pair of jeans-£6, t-shirts-£3, etc.The only exception is footwear- I don't buy cheap shoes,as they are crap. £6 jeans last only a couple of months before they become unwearable,as the material is usually subpar. So I kept buying them every 2 month or so. However recently I stopped buying this cheap crap,and usually buy clothes that are high quality and they do last. That's how I'd describe less consumption.
This is cool. The title had me thinking about just repairing old clothing. It generally takes $4-6 at a tailor to fix a pair of pants, etc. I've gotten years more out of my jeans just doing that.
Fixing a ripped pair of pants? Probably, I’ve watched my mother in law fix a pair of pants on her sewing machine in a couple of minutes. Let’s say it takes 5 minutes of fully loaded labor time and de minimus materials, that’s $60/hour, which isn’t terrible, especially since repair is likely to be an on demand thing that supplements more profitable lines like alterations.
If home economics classes in school hadn't been gutted a generation ago, this could be much more viable. It's becoming hard to find anybody that can so much as sew on a button. Much less operate an electric sewing machine.
It's one of those things that is really not hard, you just have to have some exposure to it.
I learned sewing in school, but I never developed the skill for anything more than the most basic alterations. Most of the tailors in my area are older people, and they seem to be from the "Eastern Bloc" or China. I would imagine they grew up using sewing as a practical, day-to-day skill, or profession, and not merely as a hobby or odd-skill-I-learned-in-school.
Recycle is the THIRD of the three Rs for a reason. Fast fashion is incredibly heavy in CO2 output, so recycling won't do much at all to hamper this UNLESS people shift their purchasing away from heavy consumption. The recycling process very likely has significant CO2 impact itself, so here’s hoping it’s at least heavily reduced from using raw materials.
That said, I’m very excited about this, and SF offers recycling that’s very convenient. Much better than goodwill/thrift IMHO for more than lightly worn clothing—fast fashion doesn’t make good second hand clothing as it’s typically cheaply made and falls apart rapidly.
Here in the UK, donating old/unwanted clothes to charity has been a thing for a long time, at least a decade.
Many supermarkets accept various kinds of recycling, and many have a large box for clothing, which goes to places like the Salvation Army. TBH, I've no idea what they do with it though.
There are also door-to-door collections, where a bag is put through your door, for collection a couple of days later - of course, anyone can do this, and there have been cases in the past of unscrupulous people claiming proceeds will go to charity, but instead pocketing all the money.
Donating used clothing and other things to Goodwill, Salvation Army, etc. has been a thing for many decades in the US. These days you also see a fair number of collection bins in parking lots for either clothing/shoes or books/videos. I don't know how much of what's donated just gets thrown out though; I suspect a fair bit.
