The robots are standard pick and place robots using suction to pick packaged t-shirts and put them in a box. If you were expecting to see a robot picking up a t-shirt, folding it and putting it in a package you will be disappointed.
I like Uniqlo, but one thing that has annoyed me about them is the environmentally unsound practice of packaging each individual item (T-Shirts, etc) in a thick plastic wrapper.
They don’t do this for all their lines, but it would be good if they could abandon such superfluous packaging altogether or at least switch to using sustainable, biodegradable materials.
It's very Japanese. You wouldn't believe the amount of plastic packaging even simple things are treated to in Japan. Box of 24 widgets? Expect each to be individually wrapped, the box to be wrapped, and then a plastic bag.
Oh, make no mistake, Japan’s plastic recycling is just like the rest of the world: it was dumped in poorer Asian countries. Most cities burn it now. PET plastic is allegedly recycled, but that’s just a small portion of all plastic.
If my understanding is correct, Japanese put lot of emphasis on segregating garbage. So if most plastic is separately collected, who is buying it and for what? Why not simply burn it?
Many parts of the world get humid, yet don’t need to obsessively wrap everything in plastic. Especially when you have modern infrastructure like refrigerated shipping, air conditioning, etc.
It’s not as bad as Japan, but when it comes to produce in supermarkets, the UK shares this “wrap everything in plastic” mentality.
Indeed they don't. Most of their items are directly available as-is on shelves, and you just get one big plastic bag at the cashier to bring them back home.
I agree with you. I don't like unnecessary packaging. However, I am pretty sure the environmental impact of a plastic bag properly recycled or even incinerated is small compared to all the impacts of the individual item. I am thinking of things like the greenhouse gas emission of cotton crop. Maybe someone with a background in LCA knows the details [1].
>I like Uniqlo, but one thing that has annoyed me about them is the environmentally unsound practice of packaging each individual item (T-Shirts, etc) in a thick plastic wrapper.
The environmental costs of production, transporation, storage, promotion, and display of each of their t-shirts would dwarf 1000 times the environmental cost of the plastic wrapper. So much so that removing it would be a moot point -- like optimising a function that the code spends 0.01% of its time in. Removing it would be just the environment theater / token gesture companies love.
What's worse, the "fast fashion", "consume clothing/throw it away/don't hand it down/don't keep it longer" mentality necessary for Uniqlo and others to show growth year after year has even worse impact on the environment.
From the article, I got impression that they are way better than most fast fashion brands and provide great value for reasonable price. If you can afford, on some principles there are better options.
Better than the worst (fast fashion is truly terrible) is not a very high bar.
And true, there are worst clothing companies than Uniqlo.
Although, from the uniqlo website, I can find "Our commitment to making great clothing begins with sourcing ethically produced materials, minimizing environmental impacts, putting workers first, and developing new materials and technologies with better futures in mind."
Sadly, I don't think any of it is true.
I don't have anything against Uniqlo though. They make affordable basics (and some nice collab releases). It is just shameful that it has high environmental and human costs.
> If you can afford, on some principles there are better options.
Absolutely, whether you are after quality, ethical sourcing, treating your worker correctly or even style, there are some awesome alternative. Unfortunately, you have to be able to afford it.
Not all environmental costs are in energy used and CO2 produced though. Microplastics are spreading all over the planet and we don’t know what the long term effects on biological processes will be. Maybe the bag is harmless but maybe its not.
I am not aware of any solid info on the short term affects either but even without that we could justify action to reduce it based on the precautionary principal.
Primary contrasts with secondary; the former is emitted directly as microplastics, the latter become microplastics by degradation of larger pieces. According to that report, "in some countries benefitting from advanced waste treatment facilities, primary microplastics releases even outweigh that of secondary microplastics." p. 5.
All of which is to say, if that plastic bag is properly disposed of (and perhaps even if not), the primary concern might be to avoid synthetic fabrics. That's increasingly difficult considering that so many brands are replacing all-cotton fabrics with blends.
I wonder how microplastic emissions are measured. Probably just some random sampling and estimation, but it would be interesting to know how they account for things like irregular pollution patterns (think about that huge garbage pile in the Pacific). I’m sure they can get pretty sophisticated with their methods... even accounting for things like tidal patterns.
Watch the True Cost, a documentary on clothing, and you might not like Uniqlo any more. It's available free here: http://thoughtmaybe.com/the-true-cost.
Is it possible to recycle fabric? I know this is worse than just not buying clothes all the time, but I wonder if there is better things that you can do than just throwing away garments that aren't fashionable anymore.
My favorite winter aviator-style hat was knitted from scraps of old silk saris. I got it at "Ten Thousand Villages", as I recall. Also some beautiful twine.
well, these robots will be operating in highly competitive markets offering 2-3 day shipping so Bangladeshi packers will not be in those labor markets.
With raising minimal wage in the US. We are likely looking at $10/hr in various markets. These robots run 24/7 so that is 1024365 = $87k saved per year. Even with depreciation counted in, it sounds pretty economical to me.
I guess I misunderstoof the GP then - which is why I asked why it was relevant (and got downvoted for it...).
I'm aware of the terrible things happening in Xinjiang, but now I realise the implication is (I think) that Uyghurs are being forced to produce things.
Xinjiang or not it's China and most of the world are doing business with them today. Not that I'm happy with it but blacklisting products from China is not feasible today.
PSA: I would pay upwards of $5000 for a robot that can reliably fold and put away laundry. I mean in a real bedroom, not some contrived setting, and real clothes that are not pre-sorted.
I have kids, folding laundry is at least an active 15 minutes every day. I'd pay way more than 5000 to get that time back. If you skip a day it piles up, and soon you have hours worth of folding waiting for you.
I don't know where you live, but in New York City there are several services that come pick up your laundry and drop it off when it's done. No matter how you slice it, it's probably a lot less than $5k per year.
> No matter how you slice it, it's probably a lot less than $5k per year.
Now remember that the offer starting this thread was to pay a flat $5k to own a machine. Even with running costs and repairs, that's less than a tenth of $5k per year.
Given the parent's comment, we have no idea if the kids are old enough to fold clothes, or have the physical ability, or anything else. To say nothing of the effort and time it can take to corral kids into doing chores.
Giving obvious advice is both patronising and almost always unhelpful.
If they are too young to do it themselves, then I'm not sure if they would care if there is a wrinkle in their slacks.
And, I've seen parents do all sorts of time-suck things that would be actually teaching kids self sufficiency, but instead the parents are losing their own time and handicapping their children. E.g. a friends mom in high school would still clean her room, and now - no surprise, 15 years later she lives in a pig sty except for the few times a mom visits her apartment and gives it a deep clean. Maybe some patronizing advice like "make your kid clean their own room" would have helped.
The downvotes you're getting are pretty telling of the american tendency to infantalise their children.
Kids from 5 onwards are perfectly capable of doing various chores around the house and until recently in history, it was expected of kids to start contributing to household work as soon as they're old enough to.
But after the post-war age of abundance, americans are like oh no our bubby 10 year old can't handle washing the dishes and folding their own clothes.
> The downvotes you're getting are pretty telling of the american tendency to infantalise their children.
No, they're not. They're telling of the fact that people fundamentally trust that others are doing the best they can in the situation they find themselves in, and have probably considered the obvious alternatives.
GP's not getting downvoted because people don't think children should do chores (that's not a particularly common opinion, unless you're looking to bash Americans), but because it's a callous and self-important opinion that their friend's mother had never considered getting her kids to do chores, and that a reminder from a busybody would have solved the issue.
Yikes. My kids' clothes get chucked into boxes and that takes enough time as it is. I can't imagine a situation where I'd fold them. Wedding clothes, maybe. It's not as if I'd ever iron their clothes.
The industrial laundry industry is almost there on this. Here's Chicago Dryer's line.[1] They can take a huge clump of compressed sheets from a dryer and separate them out singly on a conveyor. But humans still grab them by an edge and start them into a slot for the ironing, folding and stacking process.
I believe it's just a signup-wall, not a pay-wall, so it's quite possible all the upvoters have an account, but I'd still prefer that the link was to something that didn't have any kind of wall.
I found their new cashier system even more impressive. The cashier literally has to put everything on top of this plate and everything gets scanned at once. I hear the Uniqlo in Japan has this self checkout system that has this plus automatic bagging.
Decathlon[0] also has a similar self checkout system where you basically dump all the items in a box with scanning built in and everything gets scanned immediately. Very efficient.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] threadhttps://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/12/24/uniqlo-heads-tow...
They don't show what I assume is the more challenging part, which is to actually fold a t-shirt.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=11&v=h1_aZhmL5vw...
I use hangers for most of my SO's clothes, because women's clothing is just to inconsistent to be handled otherwise.
They don’t do this for all their lines, but it would be good if they could abandon such superfluous packaging altogether or at least switch to using sustainable, biodegradable materials.
I got a recipe book with a Japanese toaster, in addition to like 9 other pieces of paper or cardstock, in addition to the regulatory pamphlet.
I think most places in Japan have pretty extreme recycling policies. I wonder what came first, the excess of trash or the ability to deal with it?
I had no idea Japan had high humidity until today. Thanks!
It’s not as bad as Japan, but when it comes to produce in supermarkets, the UK shares this “wrap everything in plastic” mentality.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_assessment
The environmental costs of production, transporation, storage, promotion, and display of each of their t-shirts would dwarf 1000 times the environmental cost of the plastic wrapper. So much so that removing it would be a moot point -- like optimising a function that the code spends 0.01% of its time in. Removing it would be just the environment theater / token gesture companies love.
What's worse, the "fast fashion", "consume clothing/throw it away/don't hand it down/don't keep it longer" mentality necessary for Uniqlo and others to show growth year after year has even worse impact on the environment.
The majority of their products are unbranded essentials with far greater durability and build quality than your typical “fast fashion” retailers.
https://goodonyou.eco/how-ethical-is-uniqlo/
And true, there are worst clothing companies than Uniqlo.
Although, from the uniqlo website, I can find "Our commitment to making great clothing begins with sourcing ethically produced materials, minimizing environmental impacts, putting workers first, and developing new materials and technologies with better futures in mind."
Sadly, I don't think any of it is true.
I don't have anything against Uniqlo though. They make affordable basics (and some nice collab releases). It is just shameful that it has high environmental and human costs.
> If you can afford, on some principles there are better options.
Absolutely, whether you are after quality, ethical sourcing, treating your worker correctly or even style, there are some awesome alternative. Unfortunately, you have to be able to afford it.
It's not exactly fast-fashion, but not the opposite of it.
When the short-term effects are bad, is it really necessary to wait to figure out the long-term effects?
Primary contrasts with secondary; the former is emitted directly as microplastics, the latter become microplastics by degradation of larger pieces. According to that report, "in some countries benefitting from advanced waste treatment facilities, primary microplastics releases even outweigh that of secondary microplastics." p. 5.
All of which is to say, if that plastic bag is properly disposed of (and perhaps even if not), the primary concern might be to avoid synthetic fabrics. That's increasingly difficult considering that so many brands are replacing all-cotton fabrics with blends.
Microplastics are not just in the ocean, this is in London air.
plastic wrapped t-shirts is literally the least environmentally damaging thing about their business.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rag-and-bone_man
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_paper
Recycled wool is also common.
I hope they would do better, but I am not surprised that they don't even try to reduce single use plastic usage such as this.
With raising minimal wage in the US. We are likely looking at $10/hr in various markets. These robots run 24/7 so that is 1024365 = $87k saved per year. Even with depreciation counted in, it sounds pretty economical to me.
I think it’s important to keep in mind where products come from, especially if the source is from modern day, holocaust-esque, concentration camps.
I'm aware of the terrible things happening in Xinjiang, but now I realise the implication is (I think) that Uyghurs are being forced to produce things.
I don’t like the existence of that kind of wealth while people are dying from lack of insulin.
Now remember that the offer starting this thread was to pay a flat $5k to own a machine. Even with running costs and repairs, that's less than a tenth of $5k per year.
Giving obvious advice is both patronising and almost always unhelpful.
And, I've seen parents do all sorts of time-suck things that would be actually teaching kids self sufficiency, but instead the parents are losing their own time and handicapping their children. E.g. a friends mom in high school would still clean her room, and now - no surprise, 15 years later she lives in a pig sty except for the few times a mom visits her apartment and gives it a deep clean. Maybe some patronizing advice like "make your kid clean their own room" would have helped.
Kids from 5 onwards are perfectly capable of doing various chores around the house and until recently in history, it was expected of kids to start contributing to household work as soon as they're old enough to.
But after the post-war age of abundance, americans are like oh no our bubby 10 year old can't handle washing the dishes and folding their own clothes.
No, they're not. They're telling of the fact that people fundamentally trust that others are doing the best they can in the situation they find themselves in, and have probably considered the obvious alternatives.
GP's not getting downvoted because people don't think children should do chores (that's not a particularly common opinion, unless you're looking to bash Americans), but because it's a callous and self-important opinion that their friend's mother had never considered getting her kids to do chores, and that a reminder from a busybody would have solved the issue.
People don't think twice about buying new cars for much more, so why hesitate when there are clear benefits?
Seriously though. Laundry folding is the last of the endlessly tedious household chores to not fall to automation.
When I was living in France, I had a house cleaner coming every other week.
(IIRC half of what you pay your house cleaner can be deduced from your taxes, making this service relatively cheap)
Their first task was always to iron my shirts ... a chore I was very happy to do not have to do anymore.
I don't mind at all washing them myself but ironing feels like it takes way too much time.
One last step to automate...
[1] https://www.chidry.com/products/cascade-automatic-linen-sepa...
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/27/uniqlo-founder-yanai-resigns...
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decathlon_Group