
Recycling clothing gathers steam - RickJWagner
https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2019/0613/Why-this-company-wants-your-old-underwear
======
gambiting
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.

~~~
shioyama
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_.

Different industry, but similar story:
[https://discardstudies.com/2019/05/06/adam-minter-how-
things...](https://discardstudies.com/2019/05/06/adam-minter-how-things-flow/)
(covered here on HN recently)

~~~
xattt
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.

~~~
bubblewrap
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.

~~~
oftenwrong
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.

~~~
c22
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.

------
flas9sd
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.

~~~
mises
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.

~~~
cosmodisk
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.

------
hilyen
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.

~~~
jopsen
Does the tailor make a decent wage?

I think just shortening a pair of pants is 30$ minimum.

Things that can't be done in a factory are increasingly expensive, especially
if you don't have underpaid workers.

~~~
jseliger
"Baumol's Cost Disease" is the missing discussion in these conversations
[https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/th...](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/the-
baumol-effect.html)

~~~
carapace
Reminds me of Mark S. Miller's classic:

"A Computer's Perspective on Moore's Law: Humans are getting more expensive at
an exponential rate."

[https://web.archive.org/web/20070203034530/http://www.caplet...](https://web.archive.org/web/20070203034530/http://www.caplet.com:80/adages.html)

------
atupis
I have noticed that t-shirts that are made from recycled cotton are much more
durable and doesn't shrink same way than normal.

------
SomeOldThrow
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.

------
RickJWagner
I'd think the insulation would be heavy. I like the idea of keeping old
clothes out of the landfill, though.

------
GordonS
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.

~~~
peter303
Most of that goes directly to landfill after these places extract 5% x10%
thatcan be profitably resold.

~~~
smileypete
Apparently some (most?) charity shops will accept unwearable clothes for rags,
would be no point if it all went to landfill.

------
hanniabu
I'm surprised they didn't mention the R value of the insulation.

