We have been told, in a scientific paper no less, that there is a “loss of $0.70 for every piece of apparel” exported.
However, this is not true, not in the slightest -- so don't go around believing it is.
What is actually being measured is that 70 cents worth of materials (yarn, cloth, etc) more is bought to produce each piece of apparel than actually ends up in each garment.
There are some parts of any bolt of cloth which simply are off-cuts, not every inch of a skein or hank of yarn ends up making it into that final product.
If we value those wastes at the original purchase price then we can indeed reach that 70 cents a garment number. That number even has a use for us, as it tells us how much less we could spend if only we could have 100% efficiency in the manufacturing process.
But it is not a loss, not at all.
We could get all serious and start right at the beginning with the laws of thermodynamics. There are losses in any process and the universe doesn't allow us to do differently. There are no 100% efficient processes, and never will be, and so the theoretical number is nice to know but not wholly useful.
We could be industry specific and talk to a fabric cutter and point out that however they design their cuts there will always be some off-cuts which just don't make it into a garment.
They will look at us as if we are their idiot nephew, of course.
For much of the effort and a great deal of the skill in being a cutter is in minimizing the losses in off-cuts from any bolt of cloth to make any particular design.
Where this becomes more serious is that we can say that there are these costs, 70 cents per garment. This is the material we buy that doesn't get used in the garments.
But not only is this not the same as a loss, it's also not true that people aren't trying to do something about this.
For the wider point of this paper is that if only we had a circular economy then we wouldn't have these costs or losses -- and that just isn't true.
For what does happen to these bits and pieces? They get sold on for whatever they can be sold on for. The paper talks about markets for scrap cloth around and near the factories. Well, those are exactly that circular economy, aren't they?
Here is something that can be used again -- so it is being used again. A century back such rags would go into paper making. Today, well, whatever. Polishing cloths? Feed for a furnace? But whatever value there is, people are collecting it. Because, as the paper itself says, there are markets in these materials already.
There's been a similar mistake made with food waste numbers in Britain. There's a whole bureaucracy dedicated to reducing that amount. That bureaucracy has come up with numbers for the waste they're trying to prevent, but it was only after several years of shouting (from people like me) that they admitted they were including tea bags, egg shells, and potato peelings in their definitions of waste.
More modern such statistics now differentiate between edible food waste and inedible. The inedible parts not being waste of course, not food waste anyway.
The error in this textiles paper is subtly different, but still of a similar kind. The assumption is that if only everyone did things better than this 70 cents waste per garment could be avoided.
Except everyone is already doing as well as they can. Cloth buyers do not go and waste cloth for the fun of it, after all. They have just paid for it and they use it as efficiently as they can. The same is true of any other input -- labour, energy, machinery, yarn, dyes, leather, whatever.
Further, when things cannot be directly used they are then passed along to those who might make use of them in other ways. The 70 cents is a cost of making the garments, yes, but it is not in fact a loss.
And what value there is in those wastes is already realized because we have already got a circular economy.
After all, we do not see piles of thousands of tons of waste cloth outside those garment factories, do we? Someone is carting it all away and doing something with it.
Think of it this way -- one estimation in the paper is that there's $100 million in value in these wastes. So, let us conduct a thought experiment.
Can you see $100 million being left on the street in Bangladesh and then just sitting there? No, me neither.
So, it is either not worth $100 million or someone is indeed taking it away and doing something with it.
Tim Worstall is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London