"more garments than we need or that the Earth can safely hold"

January 5, 2024 6:00 PM

Clothes and fire in the desert. Julia Shipley & Muriel Alarcón investigate a vast dump of used clothes and what it might mean for fast fashion and the circular economy. (also in Spanish)
posted by doctornemo (26 comments total)

“The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”

― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
posted by AlSweigart at 7:44 PM on January 5 [57 favorites]

Whew. Horrible.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 9:08 PM on January 5

While I was home for Christmas I learned that one of the pairs of pants my father was wearing he has had since college. I suppose a benefit of polyester? They are a deep green, so he wears them only a few days a year (mostly holidays). He graduated college in 1967.
posted by meinvt at 9:18 PM on January 5 [4 favorites]

This is part of the problem of cheaply made clothing that isn’t made to last at all. I’ve noticed that certain kinds of clothing stain more easily and tear more easily; meaning that people discard it more quickly. The problem isn’t that people are wearing things fewer times just because they’re disposing of clothing for fun - it’s that clothing becomes ruined after just a few wears sometimes because of the fabric being used for it.
posted by corb at 9:18 PM on January 5 [21 favorites]

The oldest knittied article I have is a wash cloth by my great grandmother. circa 1917.
I had no idea about this. I'd say it's Poetic in a Ammons view but no. Jebus, talk about bootstraps.

my grandmother gave this to me in grade school and asked what stands out and why.
posted by clavdivs at 10:34 PM on January 5 [7 favorites]

I think cheaply made clothing wearing out isn’t the issue more than clothing made cheap means you can make so fucking much of it. And when you’re making so much of it, you make all different kinds and a lot of it is ugly clothing that no one wants to wear, that doesn’t fit anyone, or is cut super weird. Checking out the sale racks and you see the same ugly dress in 4 colors and it’s obvious only a couple of the entire style were bought. Or some weird material/cut that only looks good on one very specific body type. There’s just so much ugly crap.

The article mentions multiple times that the clothes have tags or have never been worn. That’s not people throwing out broken clothes, that’s clothes that didn’t sell in the first place.

I’ve been buying from fast fashion for years, and I rarely have anything fall apart (I machine wash just about everything). I have pieces that I’ve had for 10 or 15 years just fine, maybe replacing a couple buttons here and there (and the shirts with buttons do generally have at least one replacement attached somewhere).
posted by LizBoBiz at 2:33 AM on January 6 [12 favorites]

Meanwhile, I have one pair of trousers more than five years old. One. It's twenty years old. It actually lasted. Wore them a day or more on average across a decade. These were work trousers, kneepad pockets, hammer loops, that kind of thing. Never, never had a pair of jeans or any other item of voting that could hold a candle to that kind of durability, except a few home knit sweaters made with quality yarn (that are mostly too warm for a world with central heating).

This (the article) is a whole different level of fucked up though.
posted by Dysk at 2:41 AM on January 6 [6 favorites]

A most excellent article about a horrible situation. Featuring a wonderfully synchronistic "typo": Graffiti in one of the most dangerous shantytowns in Chile, near Manuela Medina’s home. The word “votar” is likely supposed to be “botar,” which in Spanish means “throw.” But in its current form, it reads, “Do not vote trash. It will be reported.”
posted by chavenet at 3:15 AM on January 6 [7 favorites]

shirts with buttons do generally have at least one replacement attached somewhere

My grandmothers would never get rid of any garment without removing all the buttons and keeping them, so they always had full sets of replacements for almost anything. Buying new buttons was considered an indulgence. Mind you, only a small proportion of the stock ever got used, so the button box, full of different colours and sizes, came to be more in the nature of a dragon’s hoard.
posted by Phanx at 4:51 AM on January 6 [22 favorites]

The problem isn’t that people are wearing things fewer times just because they’re disposing of clothing for fun - it

Not really - they do not last, that's true, but fast fashion from the likes of Shein, Forever 21, etc, absolutely are frequented by people who buy and buy and buy new clothes.
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:08 AM on January 6 [3 favorites]

My grandmothers would never get rid of any garment without removing all the buttons and keeping them, so they always had full sets of replacements for almost anything. Buying new buttons was considered an indulgence. Mind you, only a small proportion of the stock ever got used, so the button box, full of different colours and sizes, came to be more in the nature of a dragon’s hoard.

When I was a kid, playing with my mother's button collection was a favorite thing. Sorting them into different piles, etc. I don't know for sure, but I think she had inherited her mother's button collection, and then it continued to grow. I don't know what eventually happened to it, but I would guess it was given away in a move. Hopefully someone somewhere is enjoying those buttons, either for sewing or to play with as a kid.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:29 AM on January 6 [9 favorites]

My brother inherited my great uncle's wool suits. They look charmingly dated, and they are still in great shape ( watch out for wool moths!). The T- shirts I bought 25 years ago are in better shape than the T-shirts I bought four years ago, despite the extra two decades of use. You can buy durable clothing today. But the extra cost seems vastly out of proportion with the gain in durability. Or you can ignore the sarcasm and smirks, and wear rugged outdooring clothes all the time. Let me check my privilege - oh yes, if you not white and male, substitute 'hostility and invasive scrutiny' for 'sarcasm and smirks'.
posted by SnowRottie at 7:23 AM on January 6 [5 favorites]

When I was a kid, playing with my mother's button collection was a favorite thing.

Same here, but it was my grandma's button collection, and she had a lot of old stock in her basement from the fabric store she used to run. Those were some incredible buttons.
posted by May Kasahara at 7:48 AM on January 6 [5 favorites]

There's a lot of planned obsolescence in clothing now as opposed to 20 years ago, I think. Brand-name everything from jeans to undershirts to socks is thinner, cheaper, lighter than what one used to get.

I feel that it's analogous to food manufacturers/processors giving consumers less in each bag/box (unannounced, of course), but keeping the container and, most importantly, the price the same. I guess it's harder to say, "Hey, I'm getting two fewer ounces of cereal in this box!" than it is to say, "Hey, I'm paying 75 cents more for this cereal!"

So, the prices of clothing remain roughly the same, but jeans, for example, are made in some f'd-up way that doesn't age the way jeans used to, and they don't feel as sturdy or thick as they used to, and they fray and wear out more often.
posted by the sobsister at 9:04 AM on January 6 [5 favorites]

I've noticed that the last couple of pairs of jeans I've bought, even straight from the Levi's store, have been awesome in the fitting room, and have sagged out pretty dramatically shortly after I bought them. My wife hates how CostCo jeans fit on me, but, despite being quite a bit cheaper they didn't do that and I wore 'em 'til they fell apart.

Now I'm wearing them for a bit and eventually deciding that, yeah, it's okay if this pair gets stuff on it in the shop.

And the big problem is that, aside from purchasing in vintage shops, I have no way of determining if the extra money I'm paying is gonna get me longevity, or just branding. See: buying straight from the Levi's store.

I think the big lesson of this article is: Natural fibers, and turn 'em into rags rather than pushing them into the clothes recycling stream.
posted by straw at 9:27 AM on January 6 [7 favorites]

The bigger lesson for me is how this problem gets unsurprisingly pushed to the Global South.
posted by signal at 10:29 AM on January 6 [6 favorites]

Maddening. A very specific example I confess, but when I see in the article ski jackets being mentioned and think of all the rough sleepers and civilians in winter war zones who could use a good warm jacket (along with many other things).

Fuck it - let the icequakes roar their terrible roars as they pull this world apart.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 1:12 PM on January 6 [1 favorite]

We need to redefine what counts as acceptable in office dress. I can and do wear my casual clothes till they are falling apart, but I can't show up to the office every day with a spaghetti sauce stain on my shirt. IMHO we'll be stuck tossing perfectly functional but slightly marred clothing until we make stains and patches and repairs fashionable, like a clothing version of Kintsugi .
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 7:28 PM on January 6 [1 favorite]

The problem isn’t that people are wearing things fewer times just because they’re disposing of clothing for fun

The disposability of the clothing is very much part of the issue. The core concept of fast fashion is that modern manufacturing (and the exploitation it requires) can take something that appeared on a catwalk and put it into stores in a fraction of the time it used to take. The old process of fashion and haute couture slowly radiating out of Paris to the big cities of the world, then gradually spreading out to smaller towns is gone, and we’ve replaced it with things that are absolutely meant to be disposed of once the trend is over.

This leads to a large amount of unsold clothing being dumped like this because it makes sense for the business model, in that if the trend is over, no one is going to buy the clothes. They aren’t only going to take up space on racks, they might make your brand look out of touch. With as low as they’ve pushed costs (to the detriment of just about everyone involved in any of the process), companies can afford to put out a mass of styles, and as long as one becomes a hit, it’ll pay for the rest of the stuff that just gets dumped in some place like the article.

The business model is insane, but it’s found the ultimate industry for it, one that literally feeds on the newest and shiniest, and is always moving on to the next thing. Consumers of these brands (who are concerned first and foremost with wearing the newest thing) are most definitely disposing of these disposable goods the second they are no longer fashionable. That’s the whole point.
posted by Ghidorah at 8:28 PM on January 6 [5 favorites]

Unless they are donated somewhere, clothes that people actually buy and throw away are not mass shipped around the world. Generally, people aren’t going through the trash and picking out the clothes to throw away. And I know people are shit and some do this, but I’m guessing most people will not donate broken clothes.

Ghidorah has it, making way too many clothes in the first place and those not selling (whether because of quality or style or fashion reasons) is causing this kind of massive problem.
posted by LizBoBiz at 2:34 AM on January 7 [1 favorite]

There's actually so much stuff you can buy used online. I bought a nice jacket in 2015 and wore it nearly every day until it was absolutely falling apart by 2022, I wanted a new one but they no longer made that particular jacket anymore. It got us looking at used jackets from that same company, we ended up buying a secondhand replacement for 1/5th the price on Ebay that was almost as good as new. I figure buying stuff used supports the secondary market and encourages more people to post their stuff online rather than throwing them away. We did the same for an Ikea lounge chair for 1/4th the new price, honestly there's no way anyone could ever know if it was new or used.
posted by xdvesper at 3:17 AM on January 7 [1 favorite]

I worked in various countries over a period of ten years, and it was interesting to see how different one particular garment (Levi 501s) could be. They were still recognisably Levis, but the differences in weight of cloth and quality of finish were startling. The ones in a fancy department store in Mumbai felt like half the weight of the ones I'd got from OMG in NY, although they weren't that much cheaper.
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 11:07 AM on January 7 [3 favorites]

It's a shame this article focuses on the problems Chile has with dealing with waste dumped from other countries, instead of the countries with so little respect for Chile that they consider it a suitable place to dump their garbage. It's a shame that poor countries have to expend their limited resources to deal with the filth of rich countries.

It's already been pointed out that this glut of new and used clothing exists by design, with the industry pushing more and more to clothes being disposable and something you buy, wear a few times or once, or never, then discard. All to sell more and more shoddily-made garments that get worn a few times at most and then replaced with something new.

Like others, I've noticed the decline in the quality of clothing over decades and, as someone that wears clothing until it's literally threadbare before turning it into rags (I have T-shirts over 20 years old), I find it frustrating that even expensive clothing just doesn't last any more. Until recently, you could distinguish between quality clothing that cost more and cheap crap and make your choice. These days, expensive clothing is no better quality than cheap and jeans are a really good example - something that used to be tough enough to wear daily for years, slowly conforming to your body and taking on a character of their own. Now, even if you buy 'respected' brands like the famous Levi 501 jeans, they are the same shitty material and the same shitty construction as cheap brands. They aren't made of denim any more, but some stretchy lookalike that doesn't last and loses its shape after a few washes. That's just one example but my experience is that the same applies to all clothing.

Why is this so? Who let manufacturers get away with this? Well, we did, of course. In the same way that we let every single manufacturer of every category of product get away with selling us cheap shit that doesn't last. Because we let ourselves become obsessed with the idea that new is better and we have to have the new even if it's not better, just because it's new and shiny. Collectively, we decided we would rather have a wardrobe full of cheap, Ill-fitting clothes we throw away once they've been worn a few times than a wardrobe full of well-constructed clothes that fit perfectly and have been amassed over years to suit our own style. To start with, we justified this by pointing out how much cheaper the new clothes were and how we couldn't afford to buy high-quality clothing. But look what's happened now - ALL the clothing is poorly-made disposable crap, only some of it has famous labels so we're willing to pour more money down the drain to possess them.

The stupidity of humans is the problem here, obviously,
posted by dg at 5:19 PM on January 7 [1 favorite]

Like most environmental and social justice issues, this is not a problem that can be solved by private actions like buying things second-hand, etc., which have little impact besides making people feel good and virtuous about themselves.
It's a structural and political issue. It needs structural and political solutions.
posted by signal at 6:06 PM on January 7 [4 favorites]

IMHO we'll be stuck tossing perfectly functional but slightly marred clothing until we make stains and patches and repairs fashionable, like a clothing version of Kintsugi .

But the problem is that the fabric is so shitty you can't even repair it.

I have a merino wool shirt; I've been able to darn it when it got holes with merino wool. It's actually pretty good; I'm a decent darner.

I have a number of dresses; a number of them are made, as said above, out of some shitty stretchy fabric that can't be mended, that frays rapidly when cut, and that falls apart even when simply sewn together. In some cases you can ruin it just by sewing a button on. You can't even use it for quilting much less a patch.

And this also causes problems with sizing. So for example: clothing used to have extra fabric so you could size it up when you gained a little weight or kids gained a few inches or you gave it to someone else. Sure, okay, it doesn't have that, but the fabric means that even if you size *down* half the time you can't actually sew it appropriately to your body. I lost a few sizes and had to donate a lot of my clothing rather than tailor it - and I know how to tailor simple clothing down - just because a lot of it was made with fabric that wouldn't take it.
posted by corb at 4:46 PM on January 8 [1 favorite]

I just want to say, as someone who thrifted in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, the quality of clothes being thrifted today is radically different. And that's because the closets being cleaned out today mostly hold clothes made in the last 35 years.

I still have coats, sweaters, and dresses I bought back then that were 20-30 years old when I bought them that are still 100% fine to wear. Some I've fixed broken seams on, others, I've replaced buttons. One dress needed a new zipper, so I took it to a professional tailor and had it shortened as well. It still looks great! And the fact is, if you can find a relatively unworn 1940s or 1950s pea coat, it will last maybe 100 years in a climate-controlled environment.

That just isn't true anymore. Buy a pair of jeans made in the early to mid 20th century, and the denim is SO much thicker. The seams are always reinforced. You really had to break in jeans back in the day, they were thick and stiff and unforgiving. In fact, denim archivists recently come across a pair from the 1870s that are still borderline wearable today. That's 145 years old!

What's more, the clothes my grandmother hand-sewed during the 1960s and 1970s are still perfectly wearable today. I think one big thing is that more and more clothes made AFTER the 1970s were made with petroleum-based fabrics, like polyester, nylon, spandex and acrylic blends.

Some of those fabrics are desirable because they dry quick, repel water and generally stretch more than organic fibers. But some also shed microplastics with every wash, too.

Those shiny thin fabrics you can't re-sew or alter without them fraying all to hell? They're all made with coal and petroleum byproducts.
posted by Unicorn on the cob at 7:19 AM on January 10 [3 favorites]