Transcriber: Eli Rigamonti-Janssen Reviewer: Taher Koja
My dad wears the same five shirts
and four pants every single day
for his birthday, every year we get him
two or three new shirts, and he rotates
the colors throughout the week. His closet is pretty minimalist.
Mine, on the other hand, is what you could call maximalist.
Or at least it was about a year ago.
It was March of 2020, and I was moving out of my college dorm.
My roommate and I were carrying hard loads of my clothes to the car,
which was already packed to the ceiling full of notebooks and furniture.
And when we got to the car, my dad and his usual blue shirt and jeans.
He looked at me and said, ‘Man, you’ve got a lot of clothes.’
But he didn't know I had four more mounds of clothes back upstairs,
and these were just the clothes I chose to bring to college with me.
I’d even left some back home. And I barely wore any of them.
It was in this moment playing textures of my clothes to fit them in the car,
that I knew this was an area of my life that I wanted to make a change in.
Harvesting this many clothes
isn’t sustainable for my wallet or the planet.
That's what I challenged myself to.
Over the course of a year,
re-evaluate how I think about clothes and build a sustainable wardrobe
for myself.
My goal was to shop only second hand clothes for an entire year.
See if I can improve this one aspect of my life.
Maybe explore my personal style and save some money along the way.
So the first thing I did when I got home
was head to the thrift store.
I got a bunch of cute summer tank tops and skirts,
and I was so excited to add them to my new sustainable wardrobe.
Shall-be second hand is literally recycling clothes,
it’s giving old clothes a new life that otherwise would fall to the landfill.
In fact, if everyone in the US bought just one item used instead of new,
it would save 449 million pounds of waste.
That’s the same as saving 18,700 garbage trucks
full of textile waste.
After a few months of searching, though,
I ran into a problem that you may have faced before.
I ran out of hangers. And not only did I run out of hangers,
but I realized that of all the clothes I thrifted over the past few months,
I had only worn two items more than a few times.
That’s when I started to realize that just because I thrifted it,
it doesn't make it more sustainable.
Yes, I was giving the old clothes a second life.
But what happens to those clothes after a month of wearing them
and getting tired of them?
Around 87 percent of textiles in the U.S. are thrown away.
So, you know, if I thrifted it, if I only wore it once or twice,
it’s still going to waste eventually over-consuming at a thrift store
is still over consuming. I needed to learn
how to thrift mindfully, not just buy something,
because it’s $2. So I set some rules for myself.
One: do I know the care instructions, do I know how to take care of this?
Does it use cold water does it need dry cleaning?
Two: do I feel comfortable in this? Do I feel confident?
Is this something I would be excited to wear often?
And three, how many times will I wear this will I wear it at least 30 times?
And do I already have clothes in my closet that I can style with this.
These simple guidelines really helps me thrift more mindfully.
I didn’t stop buying thrifted clothes,
but I slowly didn't feel the need to do it as often.
So after a little crazy thrifting,
I decided to take a step back and do an audit of my closet.
I wanted to understand how many clothes I had and how I could re-wear
the same outfits for multiple occasions.
Now, this would mean I would have to become an expert outfit repeater.
Now one in two shoppers say they don’t want to be seen
in the same outfit twice. But I also couldn’t help but think
of how many permutations of outfits
I already had right there in my closet.
If I had five pairs of pants, six shirts, three pairs of shoes and two jackets,
that's one hundred and eighty different outfits.
And I knew that most of the time I wore the same things over and over
and over again. What if I could find ways to style
what I already had in different ways?
I had so many clothes in my closet that I rarely wore just because
I didn't know how to sell them.
So I took a quick Pinterest search
and followed a couple of secondhand fashion bloggers,
to learn how easy it was to wear what I had and make multiple outfits
with the same clothes. These are my favorite pants,
and through some trial and error,
I learned how to style them at least four different ways!
And I can replace a shirt with a sweater in the winter,
and I could put a sweater on top of the dress to make it look like a skirt.
I could easily wear all the clothes I had in my closet
and all that took was a closer look at my wardrobe.
So as I sat there looking at my closet,
I realized that my wardrobe was becoming more
and more sustainable every day just by focusing on areas of my life
that I could change within my needs.
I probably will not ever have a perfectly sustainable or second hand wardrobe,
and I’ve been doing this shopping secondhand for an entire year.
Isn't it better, though, for many of us to make small changes than just
a few of us to do it perfectly?
Let's say we get one percent of the entire U.S. population to have
a completely second-hand wardrobe,
say 20 second hand pieces that would save 89 million pounds of waste.
But that’s just one fifth of the amount of waste saved if we got
everyone in the US buying just one item used instead of new.
If you can have a perfectly sustainable or secondhand wardrobe, that's great,
but the bottom line is you don't have to reach perfection in order to make
a meaningful impact. So I continued shopping second hand and reflecting
on that consumer habits. In fact, when I moved to Seattle,
not only did I buy secondhand clothes,
but we also furnished almost our entire apartment in secondhand furniture.
We got plates and dishes, a kitchen table a teapot, our favorite chair.
I knew though that I could do more than shop second hand.
What if I do this for other aspects of my life?
But there are so many areas of my life that I could focus on next
from my water usage, my energy consumption to my disposable packaging waste.
I was pretty overwhelmed and I didn’t know where I,
as an individual could make the biggest impact.
So just as I did an audit of my closet
I wanted to understand how much trash I was producing and how
I could organize my waste in a way that would help me identify
my next area of focus. Now my trash had a combination of leftover Thai food,
veggie scraps, disposable packaging from granola bars and snacks,
and a paper coffee cup. So based on my findings,
I decided the next area I would focus on would be my food waste.
Now, if you were to do a trash audit, it might be different for you.
But it's all about starting somewhere and starting small.
So for me, it was food waste and using the same mindset as I did
when building a sustainable wardrobe,
I realized that I probably could have avoided a lot of my food waste
if I had done two familiar things: using what I have and shopping mindfully.
So first, I focus on using what I had or eating what I had.
When food gets thrown away in the landfill, it doesn’t reach down.
It actually gets trapped between other types of trash.
And then it’s nothing which is a greenhouse gas.
And when I found this out, that food doesn’t actually break down in
the landfill like I thought, I was shocked.
I knew for me to avoid my personal food waste
I would need to stay organized and make sure I’m eating all of the food
that I buy at the grocery store.
So I kept my pantry cabinets tidy using thrifted baskets and bins,
and I put food that was about to grow old in the front of the fridge
to signal to eat it first.
These were two small steps that I worked on over time.
I was still producing some food waste,
but I was slowly and imperfectly learning along the way.
So next I focused on a second step: shopping mindfully,
specifically at the grocery store.
And I wanted to think about more than just food waste,
but the sustainability picture around my food in general.
So using the same rule of thumb to be mindful about when I was lying,
I started paying attention to the brands I was purchasing
and the packaging the food came in. I kept an eye out for big corporations,
which are businesses that meet high ethical and sustainable standards.
I shopped at our local bookstore,
getting my own book goods in my own recycle containers.
I got fruits and veggies, loose, without the plastic produce bag,
and I brought my own reusable bags to the grocery store.
Before I knew it I was living sustainably by focusing on areas of my life that
I could change within my means by using what I had, and shopping mindfully.
I had become an environmentalist,
an imperfect environmentalist taking small, gradual steps over time
to eventually make a big impact.
Now, for me, this meant focusing on my wardrobe first
and then thinking about my food and my food waste.
For you, it might be something else.
Maybe it's taking more public transportation or using reusable bags
and reusable water bottles.
Or it’s pushing for ethical treatment of garment workers or shopping recourse,
or even contacting your local representatives
and demanding climate change legislation.
Maybe it’s wearing the same five shirts every day like my dad.
I never really considered myself to be sustainable,
and I always thought that living sustainably would be this massive
lifestyle change, and be expensive,
I’d have to replace everything I had and change everything about the way I live.
But you don’t have to be a perfect vegan or go 100 percent zero waste
or have a completely sustainable wardrobe.
If you think you can't be vegan because you love bacon for breakfast,
that’s OK. Eat bacon, and eat less meat during other meals.
It’s your waste throughout your lifestyle.
Just do what you can and make small changes that are within your means.
And if you still buy clothes new,
just ask yourself if you’d wear it at least 30 times.
It's about making small, gradual changes using what we found in shopping mindfully
because all of us being imperfect environmentalists is better
than just a few of us doing it perfectly. Thank you.