The Good and the Bad of Recycled Clothing

My "new" used sweater

I have become a fan of doing my clothes shopping at used clothing stores.  This came to me after the umpteenth time of complimenting a friend's outfit and then being told that it was purchased at a consignment shop.  Duh - if all of my friends have been shopping this way for quite a while, why haven't I?  So now I am and what a delight it is!

The above ensemble is today's purchase from the Goodwill Store in Roseville.  I had not shopped at Goodwill in many years on the thought that I should save all of those good prices for people who needed the discounts more than me.  But now that I am concerned about reducing my carbon use, shopping for used clothing seems the way to go - and it's more fun too.  My goodness, the Goodwill Store in Roseville is really nice - well laid out, lots of happy people working there.  They even dust the clothing racks of all things.  The clothes are nice and the price is right.  It was a much calmer shopping experience than at the mall - and the dressing rooms were quite nice as well.

The primary benefit to the world in buying used clothing is it reduces the amount of new clothing that needs to be manufactured and since clothing manufacture and fibre growth have pretty serious environmental impacts (see this article), reducing that impact is a good thing.  Having a market in used clothing also reduces the amount of clothing that is thrown in the landfill.  In 2006, 2.5 billion pounds of clothing was kept from landfills because of used clothing sales.  (See this article.)

We still have a long way to go in that regard. Americans discard about 68 pounds of clothing a year compared to buying 10 pounds of used clothing.  In fact, the rate at which clothing is purchased and discarded in our society is a real problem.  Even if you contribute your used clothing to charity, as I discussed in yesterday's blog post, you may be contributing to international economic woes.  In fact, when I googled "Impact of buying used clothes", I found more articles on the negative impact to African economies caused by the re-marketing of used American clothing than I did articles on the positive impact to the environment.  Here is one of those articles.

So first of all, buy less and when you do buy - buy used.  Here is another plus to that approach.  We did go to the mall today, after our trip to Goodwill.  Gordon was still lacking a bathing suit for that infamous trip to Acapulco we are going to take.  Since I am trying to limit my clothes buying to used clothing, I didn't feel the need to look at clothes racks in the mall at all.  It was a very freeing feeling.