1 week Ago By Stef Muller Pallarès
As warmer weather settles in, people are ditching their jumpers and fluffy socks for a spring clean, but with that comes an annual influx of textile waste to secondhand shops. While cleaning out your wardrobe or donating to secondhand shops isn’t inherently bad, our habits formed by the broader culture of how we care for our clothes can be extremely wasteful and harmful to the environment. So, before you pile last season’s things into a box and drive down to the nearest secondhand shop, here are a few things to consider.
As a country, we throw away 180,000 tonnes of clothing and textile waste. Recent studies find that many people will dispose of clothes within a year, usually after no more than 10 wears. With cheap, seasonal trends being advertised at every corner and online video, we are enticed to constantly look for new options even if we don’t need them.
This is where the problem arises, over-consumption and waste. On average, we buy 53 new items of clothing a year, four times as much as in the year 2000. With all the new coming in, the old has to go and usually, it goes to secondhand shops.
Just because clothes arrive at secondhand shops, they don’t necessarily go to new homes. In 2018, Red Cross reported spending $50,000 on disposal costs, Auckland City Mission spends about $20,000 annually and Hospice spends almost $100,000 annually with five tonnes being dumped a day minimum, with illegal dumping and unsellable items as the bulk of the problem. So, what can we do differently? Sometimes minor issues like a rip, stain or hem coming apart can tempt us to put things in the ‘too hard’ basket.
Finding a local mender (or bribing a friend with sewing skills) or attending a local repair cafe is a great place to start. Hibiscus Coast Zero Waste hosts repair cafes in Ōrewa each month – you can find out more on their website or social media. There is a movement for visible mending where people stitch designs around repairs, not to hide that they have been mended but to give that mending its own beauty.
Make sure items are washed, mended and in good condition before donating them. It is also important to ask what the store is taking, most have signs out to let us know. Otherwise, donated items that they don’t have room for might as well all go straight into the bin.
A great idea is to get all your good friends together first and letting them go through any donation boxes or organise a clothes swap. . Another growing option is renting clothing for those ‘one-off’ moments.
Ball gowns and wedding dresses are a great example of this. Renting is cheaper than buying and the garments get many wears instead of sitting in the back of a wardrobe. So I invite you to fall in love with what you have again or give it a new life this spring.
.
