Sustainable Shopping

Activism generally bugs the shit out of me: The innate response to anything forced upon you via email chains, street-stalkers and their clipboards, and/or Facebook tends not to be, “Wow! I suddenly care!” My bestie Isabel and I frequently bitch about the above, so when she tackled Sustainability in her latest Huff Po piece – a burdensome ideal that, like activism, riddles me with guilt over my zealous materialism – I was more than a little intrigued. Said intrigue turned to shock when, post-reading, I realized I’d been actively participating in Sustainability for quite some time. For someone who can’t be bothered to unplug her phone charger, that is all kinds of weird.

I’m more than a little apprehensive to associate buying secondhand clothes with words like green, eco-friendly, reduce-reuse-recycle, et. al. The world of the gently-worn obvs involves and embodies these concepts, but that’s not why I shop there. I frequent places like Beacon’s Closet and Buffalo Exchange because the clothes are (a) Almost-New, (b) Brand-tastic, and (c) Cheap. That these stores continually buy my castoffs in exchange for credit so I can, in essence, shop there for FREE is the fiscally fabulous icing on the recession cake.

Yet whenever I browse Old Navy and see those towering piles of unsold clothes, I can’t help but wonder what’s happens to all that material. Then I realize the really icky truth; that most of it goes from overstuffed shelves to overstuffed landfill. And that sucks harder than the fugly clothes themselves.

Shopping at thrift stores – buying and re-using other people’s clothes – embodies the very definition of sustainability; it’s an act “capable of being continued with minimal long-term effect on the environment.” So Sustainable Shopping might just be the best way to combat apparel produced in excess by Old Navy and its ilk. It might not be exactly why I do it, but I’m more than okay with the fact that re-using other people’s clothes could eventually lead to less garbage in this world.

Maybe there’s a little bit of activist in me after all.