Shopping for Green Clothing, Yearning for Vintage Clothes
Nov
13
One way to reduce the number of new clothes you cause to be manufactured is to buy clothes from the past. Lots of good-quality clothes in market stalls and second-hand, vintage, and charity shops fit the bill for something different. The retailers are trying to get in on the act by producing designs that look like they’re old but they’re not likely to be made from the greenest of materials so the older versions are better from an environmental point of view.
The great thing about becoming a vintage clothes convert is that it fits quite nicely within the three Rs model of reducing, reusing, and recycling. Even though many vintage clothes are made from unsustainable materials, at least keeping these clothes in the supply and demand loop reduces the demand for manufacturers to supply a new stock of unsustainable clothes — and keeps that groovy 1970s polyester shirt out of the landfill a while longer.
Raid your older relatives’ wardrobes. There may be all sorts of gems there that no longer fit their owners but that you can remodel or alter to fit you.
As with any fashion, what vintage clothes are in demand changes with the seasons and the other designs around on the high street. Most shoppers like to mix and match their vintage buys with current fashion items.
Good clothes bought today will last long enough to be the vintage buys of the future. If you buy fewer, better-quality items instead of many cheaper items you’ll be helping to reduce the amount of clothing produced in the long run.
A quick search of the Internet shows you that there is a growing number of vintage clothes retailers on the Net. The only trouble is working out which ones are selling authentic used clothes and which ones are selling clothes made to look like vintage clothes.
Try charity shops and markets, and online auction sites. Enter ‘vintage fashion‘ on a search engine and you’ll find dozens of shops — some of which may be in your area.
When you go looking for vintage clothes take along any you’d like to get rid of. You may be able to sell them to the same shop you buy from or arrange a trade-in.
Disposing of Clothing
Most clothes no longer in fashion end up in the household waste and go from there to landfill sites. Despite the proliferation of charity shops, only around a fifth of old clothes are donated to charity — either directly to the shops or through one of the increasing numbers of clothes banks springing up alongside glass and paper recycling facilities. Many items that go to clothes banks are bought by private companies that give the designated charity a donation and sell the clothes on to developing countries.
You may feel pleased that clothes you’ve finished with get a second life in another country where people can’t afford to follow fashion, but often these clothes are unsuitable for the climate or culture of the country they end up in. Plus, by sending these cast-offs abroad the textile industries of those countries can be seriously undercut and destroyed — forcing local manufacturers to close down.
In the meantime, the clothes that don’t get to other countries or recycled through charity shops are degrading in landfill sites. Some — like tights and other items made with high proportions of nylon — can take hundreds of years to break down and disappear, and toxic chemicals that were used in the production can leach out into the soil and nearby water sources. The UK is also running out of space for landfill.
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