Ignoring Conventional Wisdom! Should We Rethink: Donating Used Clothes, Replanting Trees from Wildfire, Drinking Water? Which Idea Needs to be Rethought First?

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Consider: only between 10 and 30 percent of second-hand donations to charity shops are actually resold in store. The rest disappears into a machine you don’t see: a vast sorting apparatus in which donated goods are graded and then resold on to commercial partners, often for export to the Global South. The problem is that, with the onslaught of fast fashion, these donations are too often now another means of trash disposal—and the system can’t cope. Consider: around 62 million tons of clothing is manufactured worldwide every year, amounting to somewhere between 80 and 150 billion garments to clothe 8 billion people. We rarely see the networks of people involved in processing, reselling, and eventually reusing the things we donate—vast networks that encircle the globe like a ball of yarn, conveying our unwanted things to people in places like Afghanistan or Togo or Bangladesh. Like anything we put in the bin, they are sent “away.” In this case not thrown, but given." This paragraph comes from GQ. The article is titled: "What Really Happens to the Clothes You Donate." The author is: Oliver Franklin-Wallis. You can read the full article here: https://www.gq.com/story/oliver-franklin-wallis-wasteland-excerpt#:~:text=Consider%3A%20only%20between%2010%20and,export%20to%20the%20Global%20South. Zac and Don discuss conventional thinking and wonder which generally accepted idea should be ignored. In addition to ignoring the conventional thinking of donating used clothes, they also wonder if we should not replant trees that have been burned in forest fire, and if we are already drinking too much water. You can read the replanting trees and drink water articles here: Replanting Trees https://www.sfchronicle.com/california-wildfires/article/sequoias-national-park-18261745.php Drinking Water https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/08/drinking-water-hydration-amount-importance/674926/