8/30/2023 0 Comments My time at sandrock clothesCreating clothing, even at an industrial scale, is a labor-intensive process. And in all likelihood, many-if not most-of them will. These services all make a lot of promises about sustainability and minimizing waste, but what they can’t promise is that your old clothes won’t end up in a landfill anyway. Read: Ultra fast-fashion is eating the world The resale economy, too, has boomed, and you can find new buyers for your old clothes on a slew of resale websites and apps, including eBay, Poshmark, Depop, and Facebook Marketplace. Donation boxes, some legitimate and some owned by for-profit companies looking for free inventory to sell in bulk, now abound in cities and many suburbs. In addition to traditional routes such as charitable donations and consignment stores, you can turn over your textiles for recycling, to either a municipal program or a for-profit company, some of which will send you a postage-paid bag to fill at your leisure. As Americans generate an ever-expanding sea of textile waste-most recently estimated at 11.3 million tons in 2018, up from 1.7 million tons in 1960, according to the EPA-we’ve also generated an ever-expanding number of services that promise to get rid of your old clothes without the guilt of buying so much in the first place. Let me tell you the hard part up front: There is simply no easy, universal guidance for the most Earth-friendly or hassle-free or socially good way for you to dispose of your old clothes. Instead, my main problem was more practical: What should I actually do with all this stuff? Much of it was stuff that I was sure I would never wear again, if I had even worn it in the first place-dowdy business-casual ensembles bought for long-ago job interviews, ill-fitting dresses that I forgot to return, ultra-cheap items that obviously wouldn’t survive machine washing but that would cost more to dry-clean than they did to buy. I hadn’t waited nearly a decade to sort through my clothes because I loved them too much to let them go, or because I thought I might actually need almost anything in my closet. Fashion marketing, too, has become more ubiquitous, and ever more algorithmically fine-tuned by industrial-scale data harvesting to poke at the soft spots in your skull.īy the time my own wardrobe reckoning could be delayed no longer, it had been almost eight years since I’d last cleaned out my closet. At the same time, the country’s appetite for new clothing has expanded rapidly over the past two decades, as clothes have become cheaper, more abundant, and easier than ever to buy, largely thanks to the spread of fast fashion and online shopping. Everyone else wanted to get rid of at least a few things, or had done so in the recent past. One 2021 survey found that only 14 percent of respondents were completely satisfied with what was in their closets. Realizing you’ve exceeded the bounds of your closet is a low-grade domestic humiliation that’s become familiar to many Americans. Eventually, though, I did need some things, and I didn’t have anywhere to put them. I didn’t buy anything new unless I absolutely needed it. I left the things I wore most frequently on a bedroom chair instead of wedging them into my closet. I carefully refolded everything in my dresser drawers to max out their capacity. I loaded two or three tank tops or summer dresses onto a single hanger. The occasion was not exactly unforeseen-for at least a year, I had been rearranging the deck chairs on my personal-storage Titanic in an attempt to forestall the inevitable.
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