Is Your Wardrobe as Green as You Are?

George Carlin famously pointed out that we love hording stuff and buying bigger and bigger houses to put it in. This is only partly true, however. The other half of the story is that when we don't want or can't afford a bigger house, we streamline, throwing a bunch of stuff away to make room for more. Throwing stuff out is thus as much a part of consumerism as buying stuff (see here, for example, or here for a fun cartoon).

The problem with this is that it makes landfills bigger. Throwing things away is not really getting rid of them; it's making someone else deal with them instead. While recycling can be a good way of getting around this problem, the things we think we've "recycled" often end up with a very different fate from what we have in mind, being more or less trashed (see this other cartoon).

So what does all this have to do with the subjects we talk about here? Well, most of us who like clothes -- me, many readers of this blog -- buy a lot of them and we don't always, or even usually, wear out what we buy. Taking them to thrift shops can be good, but if the reason we don't want them is that they are ripped, impossibly stained, or newly out of style, no one else is going to want them either and the only thing we'll have accomplished is having the thrift shop throw them out instead of us. So it doesn't solve the problem.

Perhaps we could come up with a solution, though. My own suggestions toward this are the following:

1. We could keep our buying to a minimum, attempting to wear the clothes we have, and, when buying, buy wisely. This is a tough one. After all, shopping is fun, right? We're being trained to view buying things as a hobby, a social activity, a therapy, and much more, but we can resist this. In pursuing a more environmentally responsible wardrobe, we can seek out garments that are made well and won't fall apart (like most clothes are designed to do). This will probably mean spending a little more money upfront, but I think it's worth it. We could also stay away from clothes that only go with a few others others or are strictly in style and thus likely to be deemed passé by fashion spin doctors in a year or two.

2. We could vastly reduce the amount of clothes we throw away by being more reflective about the issue, beginning by asking why we are discarding a given item in the first place. Is it because it's stained? We could relegate it to work clothes (as I argue here). Is it because it has a rip in it? We could stitch it. (If I can do it, anyone can.) Or, if it's a really hard repair, why not have it tailored, which would also benefit local artisans? Or maybe we're getting rid of the piece because we've been unsuccessful in keeping our eighteen-year-old waistline. In that case, we could think of someone who would love to wear the garment. If no one fits the bill, a couple options remain. If it's a shirt or pair of trousers, we could cut it into rags to shine our shoes, work on our car, or clean our house. This does, of course, amount to throwing the garment away eventually, but it happens a use or two later and, in the latter case, replaces the paper towel waste that would be there anyway. Alternatively, if it's a blazer, tie, or hat, we could take it to a thrift shop.

These are just ideas to get us started. I'm open to others. The main point is simply that when we buy clothes, we should think of them as ours and not be so quick to throw them away, or so quick to buy them in the first place, thinking we can just discard them later. If we're going to be putting these things on our bodies, don't we want them to be so much what we're looking for that they're worth keeping, repairing, using, loving?