Textile Recycling advocacy

First, recycle your textiles! Don’t put them in the trash. Clean them and put them in a clothing and etc. donation bin, either at your municipal collection facility or wherever your donation bins are found. They will sort them, for sure in the United States, and probably relatively quickly all over the EU. They recently mandated recycling textiles.

Second, lots of people don’t know this, which is unfortunate. Find your textile recycling, and if you need help with that, feel free to ask in the comments and I will do what I can to identify an appropriate option near you.

There is a lot of rhetoric around “fast fashion”. I don’t want to dive too deeply into it, but I do want to point to this:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230227-how-to-recycle-your-clothes

“ Each year, more than 100 billion items of clothing are produced globally, according to some estimates, with 65% of these ending up in landfill within 12 months. ”

The links do not lead to a useful source on second claim, and the first claim is not technically true, in an important way that helps explain the second claim.

https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/how-many-clothes-produced

This has better sourcing and a lot more humility. We don’t really know how much clothing is produced annually. Also, a very large fraction “up to 40%” of clothing produced and offered for sale is never actually sold, according to that Vogue piece. That could actually be most if not all of the 65% in a landfill within 12 month.

I entertained the idea that small children and the rapidity with which they go through clothing being an explanation for the rest of the 65%, but ultimately concluded that there was something else going on. People latch onto another number — the (92?) millions of tons of textiles that go to landfills every year, convert it to garments and arrive at 60 billion, and I think that’s how we got the 65% in the landfill. But who knows! I’d love to see a source on any of this.

Obviously, if you have ever used a bath towel, kitchen towel, slept on a sheet, under a blanket or comforter or snuggled with a stuffie on a couch possibly with a throw blanket and a small pillow, you know perfectly well that there are plenty of textiles out there that are not garments. Don’t put those in the trash either! They, too, can be recycled as textiles.

But yeah, a lot of irresponsible, unsourced doom-y statistics out there. Like worrying about microplastics coming off your polyester clothing when you walk around or wash it, it misses the point entirely. Primary microplastics from those sources are miniscule compared to secondary microplastics from larger items that are landing in our oceans and rivers. And miniscule compared to tire dust, honestly.

Should you do clothing swaps and shop at thrifts? Sure, why not. I don’t really care, but if you need assistance in figuring out where to recycle textiles, ask for help, here or in your own community, so you know where to put textiles when you are done with them.

Real ID and name changes

A really long time ago, Real ID as a law was passed, with enforcement due to start as the perpetrating administration wound up. This is entirely on brand for how American politics work. A big chunk of the perpetrating party was wildly anti-guvment identification, so it was much easier for that party to pass the law and then dump enforcement onto the other party. No one wanted to really enforce it, until this month. And now, we’re finally doing it.

Even longer ago, in 1991, I got married for the first time (big mistake). Marriage certificates in Washington State at the time (and, I believe, at the time of writing this) did not show the legal name after marriage. But you could take that marriage certificate to the DMV and other places and use it as the basis for changing your name at work and on bank accounts and so forth. I did. But I did not bother to notify Social Security. Wow, were they mad. They mailed me all kinds of stuff. I eventually got around to doing that a year or two later, and shortly after that I got divorced. I very promptly notified social security of that name change. I then made absolutely certain I kept a file of that whole sequence and vowed never to change my name again (I haven’t). I got a passport. I got enhanced wtfery. All the things. When I dragged my sister and her family on a Disney cruise, I worked with B. to get my sister through the passport application process, which was similarly complex because she got married, and then divorced (but did not get rid of her married name).

So now there are all these people in news articles, on FB, on reddit talking about how they can’t get Real ID because they are women who got married and their paperwork isn’t good enough to prove the name change. I’m scratching my head, because a lot of this stuff talks about marriages license. No one wants that. We want a certified marriage certificate. But some people say they are being rejected because the documents on offer do not prove a name change at marriage.

And now I’m trying to figure that out. In many stories, the person has a birth certificate, a marriage certificate, and literally no state issued photo id, and often no social security card. I am not counting any situation where there is a spelling (sometimes the hyphen) difference between the social security card and the other documents. If you are living your life with a social security card with a spelling difference from your other identity documents, you have a much higher risk tolerance than I do.

Now I’m wondering about how these people got through the I-9 process. Hmmmm.

ETA:

I’m back! I think you could get through with a social security card and a voter registration card, and in Massachusetts if you register on the paper form you can get a voter’s registration card on the basis of your social.

My sympathy for people who refuse to maintain any of the ordinary forms of identity verification is limited. It’s there. It’s just not very enthusiastically there.