Down in the dumps

 

Re-using, thrift, second hand, vintage, hand-me-downs - these ideas have been with me for as long as I've been wearing clothes (!). As a child, I wore my brother's hand-me-downs as long as they hadn't been too destroyed from tree climbing and falling off bikes. In my teenage years, I rummaged around at jumble sales and leapt on anything quirky older relatives were chucking out. I still have my mum's early 60s pastel green cat-eye RayBans. Then were the High Street charity shops I frequented in my lunch breaks to while away the time. And working in London, Flip was one of my favourite destinations. 

From the perspective of my desk, a lot of what I read about circularity in the fashion industry sounds positive. This post by Laura Vicaria, a strategy consultant who specialises in circularity (her website is here) is typical. Drawing on reports from McKinsey et al, Laura cites positive-sounding developments. New clothing volumes in Europe are shrinking. In France, Vinted outsells every clothing retailer by volume. 

The post naturally talks about the intention:action gap, which is one of the biggest challenges for anyone who works in sustainability. From my own point of view, I've begun to see this a little differently. 

Desk View and Street View.

As I move away from paid work, I am out and about a lot more. And what I see doesn't always correspond to what I've read sitting at my desk. I'd love to think that people are cutting down on new unnecessary stuff, and are busy selling on Vinted or re-purposing old curtains into jaunty shoulder bags.

But, generally, they are not. I've helped with a couple of apartment clear-outs/moves lately. Good intentions aside, there was simply no time or energy to sort stuff out into what could be resold/repurposed and stick it all on ebay. No time, even to sort out the rubbish properly. Towards the end, it all went into the same black sacks to be dumped, to meet the deadline for the handover.

Whatever people's good intentions in theory/Desk View, Street View doesn't have the luxury of time, energy, unlimited resources. There are deadlines. There are health problems and physical constraints. There are inadequacies in the infrastructure when it comes to getting rid of stuff.

The photo above was taken outside a supermarket in my town. Until recently, clothing and textile containers stood on street corners and carparks, collected by commercial organisations for re-use and recycling. There were even regular collections. But in the last few months these have stopped. The main reason is people misusing the containers to dump rubbish of all sorts. 

The only places to get rid of usable clothing now are the Red Cross (I'm praying people don't start dumping rubbish in those containers) and the local tip, which is only open two days a week.

I'd love to see some clever solutions to the growing problem of Getting Rid of Stuff that come from a Street View perspective. 

But in the meantime, it's all making me rather down in the dumps.