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It’s not waste, you idiot

Charity shops are being flooded with poor-quality clothes that they have to turn away, because of fast fashion, the head of the environment select committee has said.

Mary Creagh, Labour MP and chair of the Environmental Audit Committee said the fashion industry is failing to cut waste, leading to tons of clothes clogging up landfills.

She explained: “the whole industry is based on us buying more than we need, and not valuing an item of clothing when it comes to the end of its life.”

Things that people desire are not waste. It’s their utility that matters, not what you think they should value.

65 thoughts on “It’s not waste, you idiot”

  1. Clothes clogging up landfill? A cotton shirt will decompose in a couple of years. Wool about 12 months. Polyester takes longer so maybe when the tip is done and nature has taken is course and you’re left with that, dig it up and burn it. Or, just leave it there. There’s plenty of crap land in this country.

  2. Mary Creagh calls for a return to the’50’s, wearing hand-me-downs, shopping in jumble sales. Not sure that’ll work. So-called ‘classic’ clothing items that span and stand the test of time are beyond the purse of the majority.

  3. I always assumed that these charities kept what they could sell and sent for textile recycling the rest. Why would it go to landfill?

  4. Carol Kane, joint CEO of Boohoo, was asked by the committee how the company could sell dresses for as little as £5 when the minimum wage was £7.83.

    Is the committee made up of certifiable morons?

    Next question: how does Tesco sell a Snickers for 60p when the minimum wage is £7.83?

  5. If this is true, then why do I get 2 or 3 plastic bags from various charities shoved through my door every week begging for unused/unwanted clothes?

  6. “not valuing an item of clothing when it comes to the end of its life.”

    Err, if it’s come to the end of it’s life…

    And EOL is not quite the same thing as poor quality. There might be a point in there somewhere, but it’s not being made.

    But I suppose that Mary Creagh is the dozy bint who asked the £3 dress vs. £7:80 minimum wage question that Sky had on a loop yesterday afternoon, so I feel confident that she hasn’t got a scooby anyway.

  7. This is getting crazy. Someone was on TV yesterday demanding the media be prohibited from giving anyone that had an opinion (on climate change) that was contrary to the ‘settled science’ should not be given airtime as it introduced doubt into the public mind. Give people like Creagh an inch and, never mind rationing, they will take us back to the middle ages.

  8. Is the committee made up of certifiable morons?

    That or liars. Two obvious thoughts which didn’t occur to them:

    1. They can make many such clothes in one hour
    2. The clothes are made somewhere else

    Having seen the quality of recent MPs I am moving away from the cynical liar theory and towards the belief that these people really are this stupid.

    Anyway, marvel at a political class so disconnected from reality that they demand more expensive clothes and food for the general population.

  9. Bernie G – was that the bird who almost started blubbing ‘cos to show how she cared sooooo very very much?

  10. “The MP said that the rise of fast fashion, where t-shirts are sold for just £2 and dresses for £5, means clothes are worn once then thrown away, where they end up in landfill.”

    Another Labour MP who hates the fact that more products are now cheap enough for poor people to afford. She’s basically advocating making clothes more expensive so people can’t afford to throw them away when they like, and have to sit at home and darn them when they get torn or a button comes off. Another Stone Age MP.

    “Mrs Creagh asked Primark how they can justify selling T-Shirts for as low as £2.”

    Yes, a Labour MP really asked that question. She really asked how can a company can justify selling clothes for a LOW price. The modern Labour party is basically now the old Conservative party.

    “They are turning it away as they can’t sell it so fabric either goes to Europe or the developing world.”

    Hang on, you just said they go to landfill. Now you’re saying they get used in other countries. Isn’t that a good thing? Aren’t we always told that charity for overseas countries is a wonderful thing?

    Apparently not, because: “It’s disrupting markets in other countries.”

    Suddenly you’re concerned with markets rather than charity. Better cancel the overseas aid budget then.

  11. I thought that according to the remainers (Mary Creagh being one, despite 2/3rds of her constituency voting leave) we were all going to starve, disease would stalk the land, they’d be no clean drinking water and we would be reduced to foraging in the fields for the odd turnip, so worrying about clothes waste seems minor. Perhaps we will be reduced to picking apart cotton t shirts to make the modern equivalent of oakum. Or perhaps she’s just an authoritarian ignorant bitch.

  12. The Left need to invent problems as they have so many ideologically pure solutions all ready and waiting in a cupboard.

  13. A local charity sought old clothing for the poor deprived Muslim children and adults who, although on benefits, can’t afford to clothe themselves. Of course, I helped and donated, but wonder what they made of my “I heart Tel Aviv” t-shirts.

  14. Of course, she’d prefer us to wear fetching government issue blue overalls. Oh, wait, they’re probably what Theresa has in mind for us. Best make them pink, it would please so many factions…

  15. Sweatshop jobs making cheap clothes in the third world have done more for the people there than the efforts of Oxfam, Save the Children, fill in your own virtue signalling charidee, combined. I guess that’s what really pisses her off.

  16. So basically she wants to deny poor people clothes here and jobs in Bangla Desh as well as completing the destruction of the High Street, and those dumb bastards give her airtime, unopposed.

  17. Hector D- v.N. That committee question was facepalm stuff for me too initially but thinking about it probably an attempt at giving the CEO Kane the chance to hang herself. Wisely she played a straight bat- even before Gerald Ratner offered concrete proof- people knew that it was a bad idea to insult your customers.

  18. “I always assumed that these charities kept what they could sell and sent for textile recycling the rest”

    A local independent charity I support is happy to take any clothes or textiles. Things they can’t sell go to the “Rag Man” and what he pays them covers the shop rent.

  19. I can translate Creagh:

    “Capitalism is wasteful. We won’t have this problem [sic] anymore when government owns the means of production.”

  20. Hah! It gets better, (and slightly more on-topic WRT to Creagh’s motives/idiocy);

    “We are calling for 2040 as the time that would be most in line with safer scenarios to keep temperatures under 1.5C,” said Wendel Trio from Climate Action Network Europe.

    “Going to net-zero by 2050 as the Commission proposes might need a lot of reliance on carbon removal techniques, there are lots of proposals but it is not clear that it can actually happen.”

    So, Wendel, the actual date being 2040, 2050, or 3457, is utterly irrelevant then?

  21. Ten years ago the EU said they would ban non electric cars by 2060.

    It’s the idea that they think they are still going to be around in 30 or 40 years that gets me.

  22. Ducky – Climate change: EU aims to be ‘climate neutral’ by 2050

    Needs fixing:

    EU aims to permanently impoverish your children and grandchildren by 2050

    Rope, tree, Eurocrat.

  23. “I’m a tad unclear about how burying trees underground is going to help.”
    It stops the decay products (Methane and CO2 for instance) escaping into the atmosphere, and may well cause the wood to decay into carbon (i.e. coal) instead. Then in a couple of million years the ratmen or cockroach people can come along, dig it up, and burn it.

  24. Is the committee made up of certifiable morons?

    Next time you hear a Remainer say that decisions should be left to elected representatives, remind them of this clown. And all the others. These are your ‘betters’ who will solve all the problems.

  25. I suppose that if you are running a charity shop then a high price for new clothes would increase sales and profits.

  26. It’s all starting to get quite interesting isn’t it. On the one side we see all the rhetoric being ramped up by the climate nutters and the political elites who will not have to suffer the consequences of their own actions. On the other side we’re beginning to see resistance by their populations to the measures being implemented, the most notable example being the “Gilets Jaune” in France. And this is just the start as the measures needed to achieve this lunacy will only become more extreme. This call to make clothes expensive is just a part of that continuum.

    We’ve also seen this week that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen. It must be dawning on even the thickest of the European political elites that the rest of the World either doesn’t buy into the nonsense, wants to improve the living standards of their populations, or is simply getting on the bandwagon to milk the West for money.

    Also the insularity of the Europeans is truly staggering. We’ll all be driving electric cars by 2050. Really? Who’s this all, there are going to be something like 3 billion Africans born this century, will there be an electric grid in place for them all to drive electric. I doubt it, ICE cars and motorbikes will probably still be how the vast majority of the World gets around.

    So the good news as I see it is that we’re going to find out if this theory really is true because the World in general isn’t going to reduce their emissions. Look for rapid ad hoc rewriting of theories and timescales. Or if it is conceded the whole thing is a load of old baloney then the political elites will throw the scientists under the bus, claiming they were only acting on what they were told.

  27. Dennis the Peasant
    ”Bwahahahahahahaha…“

    We’ll add a few bwa haas when Maxine heads up that Congressional finance committee.

  28. ‘… leading to tons of clothes clogging up landfills.’

    Those landfills were previously ‘clogged up’ with tons of something else, maybe stone, maybe clay, maybe coal. Why is ‘clogging’ them up with clothes (or plastic) a problem?

    Landfills not ‘clogged up’ are called holes. Why should we be saving holes?

    The trouble with these clowns is they are just stupid, too stupid to get productive work, and there is no cure for stupid.

    And we have a political class of fools who take notice of them.

    They whole lot should be sent to clog up landfills, instead of clogging up our lives.

  29. We’ll add a few bwa haas when Maxine heads up that Congressional finance committee.

    Bwahahahaha… You run with that, Laughing Boy.

    Like Maxine Waters could possibly do anything close to the lasting damage to the USA that Theresa May has already done to Britain.

  30. Yes stuff the charity shops cannot take themselves or no room for will be passed on to their rag man. Who passes it on to places that sort and categorise it then sell it by the kilo elsewhere in the UK or overseas.

    Often good quality stuff. The low quality stuff that cannot be sold is rags – useful to other businesses.

  31. She explained: “the whole industry is based on us buying more than we need, and not valuing an item of clothing when it comes to the end of its life.”

    So the problem with consumption is production. Or is it the other way around?

    It sounds like Ms. Creagh has spent too much time in Richard Murphy’s classroom there at Whassamadda U.

  32. I assume the stuffed into landfill is only an issue because of EU regulations relating to landfill.
    Since I took up running again a few years ago I have a draw full of t-shirts that are part of the race package for many events, I keep the better ones and just pass the others onto the local charity shop, I assume she would consider this terrible and stop the t-shirts being part of the event

  33. Bloke in North Dorset

    There’s an industry in Africa based around buying, distributing, tailoring and selling clothes sent from western charity shops. This article looks at the US end of it, but something similar happens here:

    Jeff Steinberg had a maroon and white lacrosse jersey that he wore for years. It said “Denver Lacrosse” on the front and had his number, 5, on the back.

    Then, one day, he cleaned out his closet and took the shirt to a Goodwill store in Miami. He figured that was the end of it. But some months after that, Steinberg found himself in Sierra Leone for work. He was walking down the street, and he saw a guy selling ice cream and cold drinks, wearing a Denver Lacrosse jersey.

    “I thought, ‘Wow, this is pretty crazy,’ ” Steinberg says. Then he looked at the back of the shirt — and saw the number 5. His number. Steinberg tried to talk to the guy about the shirt, but he didn’t speak much English and they couldn’t really communicate.

    “I spent a lot of time thinking about that over the following days,” Steinberg says. “It was just beyond me how it could have gotten there.”

    It turns out the epic voyage of Steinberg’s jersey — from a used clothes bin in the U.S. to sub-Saharan Africa — is actually really common. Lots of U.S. shirts (including, it seems safe to say, lots of Planet Money T-shirts) will eventually make the trip.

    There are some concerns that this trade is suppressing the creation of T-Shirt manufacturing economy in Africa as this is seen as a first step up the manufacturing value chain.

    Of course as everyone on here knows those T Shirts and dresses are made by people who appreciate the work and in many cases are wealth by local standards, but the left refuse to engage on the issue. I posted this before but the Planet Money T-Shirt project is a brilliant bit of journalism and should be compulsory listening for all MPs and lefties. The podcast is better than the videos.

  34. We’ll all be driving electric cars by 2050. Really?

    No, because the roads will be shanty towns inhabited by the 50m Africans who will have turned up.

  35. @bloke in north Dorset
    I read somewhere that they do the same thing with sports championships where for say the Super Bowl the NFL will have Team Super Bowl winner caps that the winning team is given at the end of the game, of course they have to order for both teams as they don’t know the result in advance so the losing team items are donated to a charity to distribute in 3rd world

  36. Heard this on news earlier.

    Envoronmental Audit Comitee = Virtue signalling green loons wanting industrial revolution abolished and 90% in poverty.

    MPs moaning we buy more new clthes than any other EU country – so what?

    MPs moaning a T-shirt costing only £2 is too cheap – you what? we should be celebrating that low price.

    imo Asos, BooHoo, Primark etc should have refused to attend, or done an Arron Banks and walked out.

    Low prices have sod all to do with Stalinesque MPs

  37. “Team Super Bowl winner caps that the winning team is given at the end of the game, of course they have to order for both teams as they don’t know the result in advance”

    Think not?

  38. “the whole industry is based on us buying more than we need, and not valuing an item of clothing when it comes to the end of its life.”

    Should you bury or cremate?’ The end’ is not the end? What does ‘valuing’ mean?

    Creagh thinks you should be issued uniforms. To be worn be worn til death. The socialist world will be so much simpler. And not a t-shirt will be wasted.

    I dare say this is not even a third world problem.

  39. She explained: “the whole industry is based on us buying more than we need, and not valuing an item of clothing when it comes to the end of its life.”

    Yet another politician who thinks it is her business to know what we ‘need’. Why are these people nearly all women?

  40. Landfills not ‘clogged up’ are called holes. Why should we be saving holes?

    How else will we know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall?

  41. @Rob, November 28, 2018 at 11:41 pm

    As each day passes my belief that giving women a vote and right to be elected was wrong.

    Abbot, Bradley, Creagh, Greening, Harman, May, Morgan, Rudd, Soubray, Wollaston… all Harpie Totalitarians

    Seems women Want to be ordered and controlled, but insist everyone is – equality

    My problem is: no Margaret Thatcher if so.

    But, then I look at May & Merkel and ..Beeeeppp Maybot reboot. No – more trouble than their worth.

  42. ‘Fast fashion: ‘How do you justify selling a £2 T-shirt?’

    Sounds like there should be a new article category:
    Questions that can be answered: “Fuck off, I don’t have to justify myself to you”.

  43. @Rob, perhaps we need a peek inside her wardrobe to see how many blouses and skirts she has than she no longer “needs”.

    Being married to a woman and having a daughter, I do know that for them buying clothes is usually out of compulsion rather than necessity.

  44. I just did a Google image search for Mary Creagh. In almost every picture she is wearing different clothes.

    What’s more, if I search on different years, she seems to wear different clothes to the other years.

  45. @pcar I don’t recall where I saw it but I do remember someone saying if you put a woman in chains she will just paint them gold and try to enslave every other woman so she can feel superior

  46. @ Bnic
    These things go through fashions – I used to have enough coffee mugs from races “to last me a lifetime” – except one son is “dyspraxic” (genetically programmed to be clumsy) so none are left by now, and I used to have lots of race T-shirts but they are all (except for a couple of the ones that didn’t fit) worn out by now. Keep running for 30+ years and you’ll use up your T-shirts.
    No, she wouldn’t *just* stop T-shirts being part of the event – she’d stop the event

  47. John77. I’ve always regarded gratuitous exercise as not only hazardous for the participant but even more so for the onlooker. There is always the chance it could become compulsory.
    So, in this case, the woman may well have my support.

  48. Men are genetically better at running, throwing and killing things. Hunter gatherers. Women have a keener sense of smell and colour to ensure safe food and are more nurturing. Men find it easy to form loose associations to get things done (hunting party or work) while women are more protective and jealous and operate in small covens (to protect children). For most women at work, the worst person to work for is another woman. The home environment is naturally Marxist – from each according to their ability (Mum and Dad) to each according to their need (the children). Outside of the home, things are perhaps socialist – I give back more to my local community than others because I can – or beyond an immediate community they are capitalist, the return I get from my efforts reflects the amount of effort I put in. Even small scale communes fail for this reason and most advocates of socialism are either female or beta males looking for state coercion to give them enhanced status in excess of the value they actually add. The inherent female role is about distribution while the male’s is about putting food on the table by producing things of value to others. The problem in so much of politics these days is that the females bring only a sense of distribution and no sense of creating wealth in the first place.

  49. “I just did a Google image search for Mary Creagh. In almost every picture she is wearing different clothes.”

    Too bad she doesn’t have some fitted. Off-the-rack doesn’t suit her.

  50. “We’ll all be driving electric cars by 2050.”

    Not me, James. I plan to be completely, totally, unrecoverably . . . dead.

    Hmmm . . . perhaps a golf cart in Heaven?

    Or a Nissan LEAF in Hades?

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