While the concept of secondhand clothes has been around for ages, it’s taken on a new life with Ebay, Etsy, and other online retailers. According to the latest research carried out by Thredup and Global Data, purchasing secondhand clothes is expected to double in the next 10 years and is on track to make up one-third of our closets by 2033. Shop your local thrift shop and you support a local business as well as recycle.
Online consignment shop thredUP has upcycled 65 million items in the past five years. When you’re cleaning out your closet, you can order a Clean Out kit from threadUP and send your items for resale or donation.
Renting is the new recycling
Remember back in high school and college when you would share your clothes with friends and roommates? You were on to something! Sharing clothes is a great way to expand your wardrobe without increasing your closet size. Rent the Runway is the world’s largest shared closet with thousands of options. It’s perfect for wedding season so you can wear something new to each event without buying multiple dresses. They’ve even expanded into designer handbags, sunglasses, and other accessories. Every time you rent, you’re saving all the water, electricity, and emissions used to manufacture a new piece of clothing.
“The so-called ‘Netflix for clothing’ model clearly cuts down on waste—instead of 20 women buying identical dresses, they can all share one.” – Mother Jones
As Rent the Runway says, “Own your favorites, rent the rest.”
Replace fast fashion with secondhand
Fast fashion is our least sustainable model. Fast fashion is a contemporary term used by fashion retailers to express that designs move from catwalk quickly to capture current fashion trends. It’s easy to say no to cheap clothes.
According to the Fair Fashion Center in New York City, one in six people on the planet works in the global fashion supply chain, and three in every four garment workers are women. And only two percent earn a fair, liveable wage. Two percent.
Take care of your wardrobe
In order for things to last longer, we need to take better care of our garments and lose the disposable wardrobe mentality. Read your garment labels and treat your clothing with respect. Regular trips to the dry cleaner will help keep things looking nice but also help them last longer.
Taking men’s shirts to be laundered saves water since your dry cleaner will run full loads of shirts versus you washing a few shirts in a less efficient home washing machine. They can also replace buttons that have broken and make small repairs.
I hope this gives you some ideas to choose differently when adding to your wardrobe and carbon footprint. Did you learn some new ways to reduce your carbon footprint with a circular economy mentality? Sustainable fashion choices can make a big difference if we all start making small changes every day.
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