When I used to take my items into a consignment shop my thoughts centered on one thing: payment. I never considered the benefits of recycling clothing aside from my own personal gain.
This is a picture of a long-time consignor, Pat, at our Lambertville, NJ location!
After watching “The True Cost” documentary I realized that each consignment is much more important than simply making some extra money. I encourage everyone to watch the documentary, but if time constraints you, I will share what I discovered….
Up until 1960s, United States garment workers produced clothing for the country, beginning as an art form done by hand, later to be aided by machines. Today, however, we only make 3% in the US, and outsource the rest to third world countries. The economies in these places are below sufficient, leading to low wages (like in Bangladesh were the average garment worker makes $2 an hour) and products made at very low costs.
With the constant demand for clothing made quickly and cheaply, known as "fast fashion," these countries are an easy target for companies like H&M or Forever 21. Sadly, due to such poor economic factors, the owners of the garment factories often cut corners. Usually this means that proper safety and health regulations are ignored and in 2013, an 8 story building collapsed in Dhaka, the largest city in Bangladesh, killing more than 1,000 garment workers. Unfortunately for the workers that survive such horrors, they have no choice but to continue working in these conditions in order to survive.
This high demand for “fast fashion”-- from consumers that constantly feel the need to buy to corporations filling that need with cheap, disposable items-- leads to piles and piles of unwanted clothing. As a population, we no longer buy twice a year for seasonal change-- but almost every week.
Due to this tremendous overload, landfills are becoming filled with disposed, unwanted clothing. Today the average American throws out 82 pounds of textile waste a year, adding to up to 11 million pounds of textile waist just in the US alone. Most of the material is non biodegradable, sitting in landfills for 200 years or more while releasing harmful gasses into the atmosphere.
In addition, only 10% of clothes we get rid of by donating end up in local thrift stores or consignment shops, and the rest gets dumped into developing countries like Haiti. This sounds like a nice thing, but now Haiti is so saturated with donated clothing, that it is harming their local garment industry. For example Haiti used to have a significant workforce producing a variety of clothing for their population but due to the increase in donations, those left in the clothing industry only make plain t-shirts.
If everyone were to consign/ purchase used clothing, the demand for “fast fashion” that supports such harmful worker treatment would diminish. Additionally you would be saving the planet by not adding to another landfill statistic or saturate a market to the point of driving people out of work. Consigning is not only about adding more money to your pocket, but about changing environmental and social injustices affecting the world.