re: #367 Killgore Trout

…and that’s the mentality that keeps the sweat shops and prison camps In Asia working overtime. A used bath robe is permanently unsanitary! Into the landfill with it! Buy a sparkly new Chinese made one from an exploitive mega corporation!

There’s actually no real connection between disposability and sustainability. A lot of sustainable things are the most disposable, and a lot of the longest-lasting things are worst for the environment. i actually had to explain this at length to a hippy-dippy coworker who was trying to get us all to use mugs at work, when we used disposable paper cups. She couldn’t real grasp that the energy expenditure from washing the mugs, not to mention the resources in the soap, were significant, nor could she get that the mugs weren’t ‘permanent’, they just lasted longer than the paper cups. This works along the labor side of the issue, too.

So sure, using old clothing until it literally wears out is good, but it’s not at all what drives the consumer economy. It’s really not that we waste shitloads of usable stuff, it’s the conditions that it’s produced under that’s the problem. We could certainly help things out by being less wasteful— including by not washing it in the way you propose, which is really wasteful— but that’s not the important part of the problem, the conditions of production are. There is nothing inherent about ‘people want shiny new stuff’ that leads to ‘prison camp labor’, that only happens in the absence of effective governmental regulations.

Weird how that keeps cropping up, eh?