A Mountain of Used Clothes Appeared in Chile's Desert. Then It Went Up in Flames

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12 points·thunderbong··7 comments

If nothing else, setting up a facility to incinerate these discarded clothes would have allowed to recover the energy contents of the material. Beside a much cleaner burn - avoiding the disaster of open-air uncontrolled burning.

Afaik the EU recently decided to outlaw dumping clothes this way? Basically: retailers buy inventory, then must sell it or find proper channel to re-purpose. Shipping off to less-developed country by the metric ton not allowed any more (similar to regulations around e-waste). So at least some progress there.

But I wonder if anything will change concerning this desert dump. Say, same area 10y from now. My guess: probably not much change if any. Law enforcement is weak & the dumpers / dealers are many.

I feel like every little thing that I personally do to lower my impact on this planet is outweighed 1000x by things like this.

Personal actions on this sort of issue are meaningless and always have been.

It's like voting. No, my individual vote doesn't matter. But thousands of individuals voting can. Luckily, you are not alone in efforts to help reduce our impact, so it does add up across the population level if people do try to reduce their impact.

At least in the US, voting is also meaningless due to things like the electoral college.

That depends on whether one lives in a politically diverse state.

In other words, if you want your vote to count, you need to live where it counts.

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