How we can help save the earth with re-using clothes!

Reducing transportation pollution

Considering that US-based firms are held to strict environmental and labor standards, it’s no surprise that about 97 percent of all clothes sold in the US are imported from abroad. Until there’s a zero-emissions revolution within the global transportation industry, every piece of new retail clothing will be connected to a long, dirty footprint of oil consumption and air pollution via truck, rail, or cargo ship. Buying thrift instead of retail doesn’t erase that connection—the damage is already done—but it removes you from the supply,demand equation.

Hope on the fashion horizon

Buying secondhand means enjoying fashion without guilt.

As highlighted in The True Cost, there is a growing movement among some top clothing designers—including such notables as Stella McCartney and Ralph Lauren—to reform the fashion into a non-polluting, 100% sustainable industry. But until you can be sure that adorable department store dress has an environmentally innocent history, your best bet for maintaining a high-fashion, low-carbon-footprint lifestyle is patronizing shops like Thrift Trader and other troves of vintage and secondhand treasure.

Bypassing dirty factories

In addition to requiring significant energy and water resources for production, textile manufacturing is a dirty business:

1. Nylon and polyester production creates nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 310 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

2. To make rayon, wood pulp (from clear-cutting forests) is treated with hazardous chemicals like caustic soda and sulfuric acid.

3. Just because cotton comes from plants doesn’t mean it’s all-natural to manufacture. Cotton is the most pesticide-intensive crop in the world.

4. Bleaching, dyeing, and finishing fabrics require harsh chemicals that easily end up in nearby water sources, along with the production-related chemicals

and toxic byproducts listed above.



Buying secondhand means enjoying fashion without guilt.