Why buying used clothing isn't enough to achieve "sustainability" in the fashion system

Understanding "sustainable fashion" not as individualistic pursuits but as a collective goal

Photo from Rewind Nature on National Geographic

We've all been told at some point to buy used clothing as one of the best ways to support eco-fashion. And don't get me wrong—it's great to do so.

But is it the most effective thing we can do to support a circular and sustainable fashion industry?

If you've been dialed into the conversation around plastic pollution, you may have heard of this commonly shared analogy:

If you have a sink overflowing with water with the faucet still on, would you first reach for a mop to clean up the overflow or would you turn off the tap?

In the plastic pollution discussion, ocean conservationists use this analogy to illustrate the importance of prioritizing our efforts on addressing the source of plastic pollution, with a more preventive approach, rather than on ocean cleanups after-the-fact. After all, so long as we've got people, companies, and waste facilities irresponsibly dumping trash into our waterways in large volumes, ocean cleanups would never be able to solve plastic pollution.

I think the same thing can be said for the fashion industry.

So long as fast fashion brands keep churning out mass quantities of clothes not designed with circularity (soil-to-soil or mechanical) in mind, made possible using exploited labor and cheapened resources, buying used clothing cannot address the wastefulness and social injustice of the fashion system itself.

This doesn't mean that buying used clothing can't help to chip away at the consumer spending currently upholding the fast fashion industry. But we need to recognize the scale of overconsumption and pace of “waste” creation we're up against.

According to The True Cost, “The world now consumes about 80 billion new pieces of clothing every year. This is 400% more than the amount we consumed just two decades ago.” In addition, “disposable clothes stay in a woman's closet for an average of just five weeks before being thrown out.”

By definition, “used” clothing is any that's been worn at least once, right? Or actually, I take that back. In secondhand shops, it's not uncommon to find pre-owned clothing for sale that still have their original tags on. Sometimes, “used” fashion items for sale may have been gifted to the seller but never even worn.

So the reality is that our current rapid pace of mass production, consumption, and disposal of new clothes inevitably means the amount of clothing considered “used” has also skyrocketed—making it impossible for “buying used clothing” to suffice in addressing the total volume of waste continually churned out by this consumerist system.

Then, there are all of the layers of social injustice embedded in the topic of wastefulness.

“No one wants a factory, a landfill, or a diesel bus garage for a neighbor. But corporate decision-makers, regulatory agencies, and local planning and zoning boards had learned that it was easier to site such facilities in low-income African-American or Latino communities than in primarily white, middle-to-upper-income communities. Poor communities and communities of color usually lacked connections to decision-makers on zoning boards or city councils that could protect their interests.” –R. Skelton and V. Miller.

Textile waste issues are inherently matters of environmental injustice, because only a small percentage of discarded clothes actually get reused, recycled, or up-cycled (even if “donated”); most others end up in landfills, typically located near lower-income and communities of color, or they get bailed up en masse to be shipped off to “developing” countries such as in sub-Saharan Africa.

“Once fragile economies were open to imports — like cheap second-hand clothes — there was a wholesale collapse of vast swathes of local industry. Cheaper imported goods flooded African markets, and workers in clothing factories lost their jobs.” –Andrew Brooks.

Without slowing down the rate of mass production at the source, without ending, point-blank, the exploitative practices in the industry at the source, and without working to create circular systems that design and treat all “waste” as resources, we cannot address the unsustainability of the current fashion system.

(I'll talk about circular fashion systems more in a future post.)

What all of this means is that we need to go beyond seeing “sustainable fashion” as individualistic pursuits to seeing it as a collective goal—for which systemic, structural, and political changes are necessary.

So if we truly want to maximize our positive impact, let's keep making conscious choices and opting for used over new whenever we can. But let's not stop there.

I believe we'll be able to reach our collective goal much faster if we focused on mobilizing to 1) transform the industry's current linear, globalized system, which enables “waste” creation, into circular, localized textile systems (e.g., through supporting Fibershed and its initiatives), and 2) confront the perpetrators of exploitative mass production to ensure we properly value the labor of every worker and the natural resources used in the creation of every product (e.g., through supporting Remake and Fashion Revolution).

Starting to address these overarching systemic issues is the only way we can slow down the pace of production, consumption, and disposal, and create a regenerative system that contributes positively to our world—rather than simply reduces harm.

xx Kamea