Point of purchase recycling bins are all the rage right now. Most stores selling mobile phones have bins in which to leave your old device. IKEA has those charming bins for batteries and light bulbs. Basically, retailers are making it easier and easier to recycle their hazardous or reclaimable products. Why not clothing?
I know, that sounds strange. Clothing isn't hazardous waste, right? But if you think in a systemic way, it is. Let's start with cotton. According to the Organic Trade Association (admittedly not the most impartial observer of the ills of conventional farming), cotton "covers 2.5% of the world's cultivated land yet uses 16% of the world's insecticides, more than any other single major crop" (source). That's a pretty chemical intensive crop. And the insecticides used on it aren't exactly pleasant. A t-shirt, then, which takes about a pound of cotton to produce (according to that same OTA page), is busy little thing. The cotton gets grown in one place, sent to be milled elsewhere, cut and sewn in quite possibly a third place and then has a nice little boat trip to get to the country in which they're to be consumed. (Let's forget, for the moment, that about 10,000 containers go overboard every year, their contents floating off into the ocean.) Already, in one little cotton t-shirt, we've got a pile of chemicals, lots of fuel for growth and transportation, water for growth, transportation and processing and a shirt that's probably better travelled than its soon-to-be owner.
That little t-shirt is hazardous enough already. But the next bit of its life cycle is no better. You buy it from a fast fashion clothing store for somewhere between ten and twenty dollars. At that price, it has nearly no value to you. So you wear it a few times, for a couple months. And then it gets a little rip in the arm pit, or you spill something on it, or that shade of blue just plain isn't in style any more. Out it goes in the bin. Or sits in the back of your closet until spring cleaning. Sure, there are second hand clothing stores that want your old shirt, but it's a lot of effort to bundle all your old clothes into a bag and drive them to a collection bin. So you don't.
And this is where point of purchase recycling comes in. In those fast fashion clothing stores, there ought to be some nice big bins. Bins for accepting used clothing. The clothes could go off to any number of places (whether it be a charity clothing store or a rag merchant), it doesn't really matter where. What matters is that they'd got to a second use, instead of to a landfill.
I know, that sounds strange. Clothing isn't hazardous waste, right? But if you think in a systemic way, it is. Let's start with cotton. According to the Organic Trade Association (admittedly not the most impartial observer of the ills of conventional farming), cotton "covers 2.5% of the world's cultivated land yet uses 16% of the world's insecticides, more than any other single major crop" (source). That's a pretty chemical intensive crop. And the insecticides used on it aren't exactly pleasant. A t-shirt, then, which takes about a pound of cotton to produce (according to that same OTA page), is busy little thing. The cotton gets grown in one place, sent to be milled elsewhere, cut and sewn in quite possibly a third place and then has a nice little boat trip to get to the country in which they're to be consumed. (Let's forget, for the moment, that about 10,000 containers go overboard every year, their contents floating off into the ocean.) Already, in one little cotton t-shirt, we've got a pile of chemicals, lots of fuel for growth and transportation, water for growth, transportation and processing and a shirt that's probably better travelled than its soon-to-be owner.
That little t-shirt is hazardous enough already. But the next bit of its life cycle is no better. You buy it from a fast fashion clothing store for somewhere between ten and twenty dollars. At that price, it has nearly no value to you. So you wear it a few times, for a couple months. And then it gets a little rip in the arm pit, or you spill something on it, or that shade of blue just plain isn't in style any more. Out it goes in the bin. Or sits in the back of your closet until spring cleaning. Sure, there are second hand clothing stores that want your old shirt, but it's a lot of effort to bundle all your old clothes into a bag and drive them to a collection bin. So you don't.
And this is where point of purchase recycling comes in. In those fast fashion clothing stores, there ought to be some nice big bins. Bins for accepting used clothing. The clothes could go off to any number of places (whether it be a charity clothing store or a rag merchant), it doesn't really matter where. What matters is that they'd got to a second use, instead of to a landfill.
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