On Why You Should Always Get Clothes Used

Excited because I found this sweater in a free box? Like how cool is that? This is a nice freaking sweater for finding in a free box. It's a bad picture but it's super soft and well fitting and it's a nicer color than in the picture

Anyways, I thought I'd talk about how much better it is for everybody to buy (or find) your clothes new.

Whether you're talking about your wallet, the environment, all the people that the product went through to be made, conservation of all the resources in the actual product (I think you get the idea), buying used is pretty much always the better option. Not to mention thrift shopping is just more fun! You feel better ethically about your purchases, and it's more fun to sift through all the weird stuff you find.

And, because I'm a lover of information: statistics.

Decomposing fabric can release methane into the air, and chemicals such as dies or retardants in to the ground.
if all of the textile waste we normally generate in a year didn't end up at the landfill, we would be looking at a savings of $375 million dollars in fees alone!
Cotton growing takes a about a quarter of the pesticides used in the U.s. Pesticides are linked to a lot of different nasty things, including colony collapse disorder, a pandemic in the bee population. In case you didn't know, bees pollinate flowers, and are incredibly crucial to the environment and our food department and entire way of life.
According to the U.S. National Labor Committee, workers, manufacturing YOUR clothes halfway across the world in sweatshops that YOU don't have to loo at, can make as little as 12 to 18 cents an hour.
The 15% of discarded clothing/fabric that is recycled, prevents about 2.5 billion pounds of waste from going directly to the waste stream.
Since clothes from most popular stores are so cheaply made nowadays (forever 21, h&m, such and such), they often end up being unusable by the time they pass through the first user and get to a thrift shop. Only about 1/5th of clothes donations are actually sold. However, they can sell them to textile recycling factories, so don't think that there isn't a use for even your really old clothes!

I must admit, my closet is overflowing with cheap mall clothes. I'm an incredibly hypocritical person. It happens. But I'm really going to try to stop supporting the cheap plastic world of fast fashion and consumerism. Isn't it kind of strange that we have to use effort for inaction? Self control is a hard one me for me. You kind of just have to keep the goal of a happier of world in mind.

Anyways, just remember, everything you do effects nothing else, so try to make your decisions wisely. Living a life with a smaller footprint doesn't have to be boring. You just have to have a little bit of self control and be a bit more creative!

***Buffalo exchange is boss though

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Debra Baker is a runner, an intellectual, a vegan, and a highschooler. She's self concious, not very good at much, and is a bit neurotic, but had some things she wanted to share with the world, and for that, she made this blog.