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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
Clothes are a small source of CO2 emissions compared to transportation and electricity.
> Just as the pandemic accelerated global cooperation and change
No, cooperation has gotten worse. Look at how many countries want to repatriate industries so they're not dependent on others.
> Today I do all my shopping considering what it would be like to burn it. Car shopping would be so much fun.
I'll just leave that one there.
> I think the issue is that this is essentially a scheme to cheaply get rid of trash.
Trash isn't that expensive to get rid of, and, at least the US, isn't running short on places to store it. I have no idea why clothes in poor condition are still worth shipping to developing countries unless charities just feel really committed to doing something.
Haha, the trash issue actually did help my consumption. I didn't have much of a choice at the time, so I lived like I was camping and did manage to keep my trash down to almost nothing. I had a laptop, clothes and some gadgets. Many drinks come in bottles which really do get re-used. I can get meat and veggies at the market with no packaging. Certainly, burning trash isn't good for the environment though.
As for cheap trash, I don't do research into that. It's not expensive to get rid of trash, but it must come with significant enough expenses that it can be shipped via container to another country. Though maybe we're not using the correct terms. This article is talking about clothes. The origin countries may have logistical difficulties with certain types of things which would otherwise go into a landfill. Throw one shirt into the landfill? Fine. Bring dump-trucks of clothes? Maybe now we have a problem. Same for E-waste (also an issue here in the form of used computers which are barely usable.) I could see shipping this stuff overseas as taking a major problem off someone's hands. I imagine it's massively expensive to clean up for plants which deal with large volumes of the worst chemicals, but they deal with high enough margins to pay for the clean-up and some things you can't pawn off on someone else without moving industries (exporting waste and pollution creating manufacturing to China.)
ETA: Recyclable materials is another "trash-like" item which gets shipped. I believe China has since blocked this?
>The origin countries may have logistical difficulties with certain types of things which would otherwise go into a landfill. Throw one shirt into the landfill? Fine. Bring dump-trucks of clothes? Maybe now we have a problem. Same for E-waste (also an issue here in the form of used computers which are barely usable.)
I don't think there's anything special about clothes that make them particularly hard to dispose of, unlike e-waste. My municipality has warnings specifically for e-waste, but none for clothing. The non-cynical view of why we ship ewaste and/or clothes to china is that they're valuable on net, even if 80% of it or whatever are thrown away. You see this with e-waste. They're not just imported into the country and then dumped in the nearest river/landfill. They're sent to a recycling center where scavengers pick through them to recover what's left.
What I've anecdotally seem is that it makes these fast fashion "green brands" pop up who claim to plant trees or use "organic" materials instead of common sense reuse, recycle point of view.
If they would sell clothes from recycled fabrics, the quality would probably be very poor. The technology to separate fabrics of mixed content (cotton, synthetics) is not good enough.
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.
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.
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.
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."