Nearly half (44%) of every T-shirt goes to waste before you even buy it | Hacker News Reader

Nearly half (44%) of every T-shirt goes to waste before you even buy it

norwegianscitechnews.com

About a year ago, I researched the most comfortable T-shirt. There were quite a few people who mentioned this specific brand I’d never heard of so I bought about 10 shirts and was sorely disappointed—-I got had by a smart marketer I think.

But a few other people mentioned the Peruvian Pima cotton shirts that are sometimes available at Costco. Generally they show up once per year, in February.

So when they finally showed up, I bought 11. I didn’t realize, until I had these shirts, that I’d never really owned comfortable T-shirts. I’ve worn these every day since I bought them and cannot recommend them enough.

Friends don’t let friends wear crappy cotton.

Now I'm not sure if I should believe you or if you're a smart marketer yourself.

Plus, why in the world would you blindly buy ten T-Shirts you don't know twice?

i think they would probably shill for something more achievable than a shirt you can sometimes get once a year at costco, haha

Ha! You can check my comment history, my Costco T-shirt love is genuine. :)

The second time, I was in the store and could tell these were legitimately great.

In the near future our AI assistants will talk with each other and check if the source can be trusted or not

In the near future our AI assistants will try to scam each other.

What I have a struggle with: Choice. Buy a plain well-fitting/nice-material shirt, or buy a tent/schmedium that will pill, but has something cool printed on it.

Or you could find a local tailor to adjust any shirt to be well-fitting on you.

That's a good idea. I think in this case, the poor fit also correlates with poor material, which is beyond their capability.

It's my opinion that t-shirts with something printed on the front have never been and will never be cool, so I don't struggle with this choice at all

Next Level Apparel and Target's Goodfellow ones are pretty good, and average ~$10/article. A TON of fashion advice forums and subreddits swear by them as a perfect middle-ground between cost and function.

Do you think a 5* rating on Amazon mean the product is good?

It’s good for the given price point. You can a six pack of Amazon basic for a low price. They are good. For sleeping.

Post-industrial recycling tends to be much more efficient than post-consumer recyling since the inputs tend to be much more uniform. Wasted fiber costs manufacturers a lot of money -- more efficient operation will go straight to their bottom line.

In other words, this is a case where governments should focus on research, not regulation. Manufacturers may not have the money to do the research themselves, but are highly incentivized to incorporate the improvements if somebody else figures it out for them.

Right, privatize the profits, socialize the costs. The fast fashion industry makes billions in profit every year, what do you mean exactly by "Manufacturers may not have the money to do the research"?

Most companies in the fast fashion industry aren't manufacturers, they use contract manufacturers.

And if they did figure it out, they'd keep it secret as a competitive advantage.

This is what government is for. Tax everybody to provide benefits to everybody. This is infrastructure spending, just like roads.

> This is what government is for. Tax everybody to provide benefits to everybody. This is infrastructure spending, just like roads.

This is not roads, this is waste management. I pay proportional to the amount of waste my household produces to have it disposed correctly, the more waste I produce, the more I pay. That is what government is for, steering behavior through taxation, instead of letting the most morally depraved enrich themselves on the rest of society.

This isn't roads, it's something much more valuable, it's public domain research.

A road can only be used by a small number of people, public domain research can be used an infinite number of times, benefiting all.

Letting a single manufacturer get a patent on the process would be harmful.

> Manufacturers may not have the money to do the research themselves, but are highly incentivized to incorporate the improvements if somebody else figures it out for them.

Which incentive is this exactly then if the cost is bore by society? "Polluter pays" creates both that exact incentive and the required funds for public research.

"Manufacturer" is typically a mom & pop owned facility in Pakistan.

"mom & pop owned facility" is a very charitable term for the kind of sweatshops western countries love to hide their modern variant of slave labor in.

As a home sewist, I'm surprised to hear the 44% figure on an industrial scale. If I made one T-shirt at home, it might result in up to 50% offcuts? With all sleeves cut out of one bolt in alternating warp direction (~tessellated) and all rectangularish body pieces cut from another and ribbons of binding from another, I wouldn't expect to see more than 10-20% offcuts. And then home home sewists often shred the offcuts and use them to stuff other projects, which should be easier to do and funnel to the right place. I didn't try very hard to access the original paper but count me a bit skeptical and confused.

The article says that 44% loss is in pre-production, specifically the manufacturing of the yarn. Long before the textile is woven, let alone cut.

I'k not sure about the textile industry, but I visited a sugar factory a long time ago.

They separate the fiber in the sugar cane and a part is used to make paper and another part is burned to make heat and electricity to power the factory. They don't just dump the leftovers. I expect a similar redirection of the leftovers in the textile industry.

Manufacturers are already highly incentivized to reduce material waste. It’s their profit margin! Unless of course it’s so cheap and abundant it doesn’t matter.

And the article didn’t identify an externality concern either.

I visited the local waste processing plant to learn about the basics in general and have some insights on what could I do for better recycling.

Clothing is the worst offender here. Impossible to recycle. The quality would not be good enough and the price is too high. It is a huge waste of resources.

Upcycling (e.g. repurposing) works with some materials, though, however, with very low efficiency.

Europe is moving towards reducing fast fashion therefore. This is a good thing in general, but I don't see this change in the US / Asia. And very slowly also in Europe.

no, it doesn't, article doesn't provide any proof for such claim other than that old T-Shirts are not recycled, that's like saying 70% of every car goes into waste before you even buy it just because new car doesn't use recycled resources from old cars

"“We took a closer look at what happens to the fibres in a cotton T-shirt over the course of two consecutive life cycles. We combined a material flow model with a life cycle assessment,” said Ahmed."

very confusing article, practically whole article talks about using recycled old garments/T-shirts and not about scraps during T-shirt production

That's not what the article, or the paper backing it claims.

The paper (https://circulareconomyjournal.org/ojs/JoCE/article/view/250) is about quantifying the environmental impact of material losses that happen in a typical scenario, including a single full recycle (as opposed to reuse).

The paper relies heavily on another paper (https://circulareconomyjournal.org/ojs/JoCE/article/view/250) for estimates of upstream material losses. That paper attempted to quantify production stage losses from raw fiber, into fabric, and then into apparel by surveying factories in Bangladesh for their mass input/outputs for different production stages.

I would be interested to know how much of that is scrap from cutting out patterns. That should be very easy to recycle, I'd think.

Wait until they hear how much source code is thrown away to make software! I guess that's a bit ephemeral, but still probably similar in a lot of industries.

Clothes are weird shaped, weaves are rectilinear, it's a pretty tricky problem to solve. Unless someone manages to invent a non-rectilinear robot loom or something?

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