“A woman should wear fragrance wherever she expects to be kissed”-Coco Chanel
Laura Reynolds looks at some of the cheapest beauty products available
When you actually start to think about it though, there’s no way that charity shops are anywhere near as bad as you think they are. Have you ever donated clothes to a charity shop? Then you’re not alone in the student population. Most people occasionally admit that they should probably give away that pair of trousers lingering like an awkward third wheel at the back of their wardrobe. Not that you would keep wheels in your wardrobe, but you get what I’m saying. On the other hand, if you do keep a stock of tyres in there, I think now might be the time to tell you that you may have misunderstood the meaning of the words ‘fashion cycle’.
So anyway, it just isn’t true that the only clothes hanging on the racks in your local Oxfam are either relics of the days when people thought that disco shirts and paisley-patterned bell-bottoms would do them favours, or are in such a state of disrepair that you’d be better off wearing a used dishcloth. Yes, you might have given clothes to charity because they had holes in them and the sleeves had gone bobbly, but plenty of clothes are given to charity shops still in perfectly good condition, just because they don’t fit anymore, or because their former owner never really liked them but couldn’t resist a tag that said ‘Now 95% off!’. Not that I’m speaking from experience on that last point. Not at all.
So once you get past the standard prejudices against buying your clothes second-hand, why is it a better idea to do a bit of clothes-recycling than to buy all your clothes brand new?
Because, particularly when trends change so quickly and new lines are coming into production all the time, the amount of waste produced by the clothing and textile industry has been growing year on year. In factories, that means the use of higher volumes of toxic chemicals to dye and print clothes – just two in many stages of clothing production. It also means burning up fossil fuels and using electricity to heat the huge amounts of water used in laundering. And that’s only the beginning.
Once the clothes hit the shops, you’d think all that effort would pay off. You’d think that the 1.15 million tonnes of clothing the UK exports, and the 3.25 million tonnes it imports, would be for a good reason. Well, demand is certainly high enough: the world’s consumers spent about $1 trillion – the sort of number that sounds like a made up figure, but isn’t – on clothes in 2000. But supply and demand – contrary to what your Economics lecturer might tell you - isn’t everything. Not when you’re looking at an industry where many people will buy a lot more than they actually need. A recent Cambridge study estimates that, having bought all those new pairs of jeans we just had to have, we send an average of 35kg of clothing per person to landfill sites every year. The average UK consumer spends £780 on clothes in a year – and seven eighths of what we buy eventually ends up in the bin.
So, about that one eighth that does make its way to charity shops, then. First of all, the figure could be a lot larger, if everyone took everything that could feasibly be worn again to their local charity shop, instead of just throwing it out. In York, you’ve got no excuse not to find one: on Goodramgate alone, I’ve counted nine of them, and I’ve been assured there are more than that. Outside the city centre there are plenty of them around too, so you won’t have to go very far.
With all that choice out there, it’s not entirely outside the realms of possibility that you might actually find something to wear in one of them, too. It won’t do you any harm to go and have a look anyway: if you happen to set foot inside, you’re free to leave without being forced to take that hideous bright pink and orange leather jacket with you. And even if they did force you, it’ll still only set you back about three pounds. And possibly your eyesight and sense of dignity. Oops.
Interesting article. Ideally, along with giving more clothes to charity shops, marginal social costs like pollution should be internalised, thereby making the price of clothes reflect their true cost to society. One way of internalising the pollution externality is to expand trade in carbon emission certificates. We would then end up spending $1 trillion (or more) on less clothes. Throw in a reduction (ideally, an elimination) of protectionist measures by the EU and other industrialised economies against overseas textile industries, and we'll have done even more to make sure the price of clothes reflects their value to society.
Yes, but enforcing a carbon trading market could be problematic. And personally I think the social costs of production should be internalised in some way too. The conditions that some workers in the clothing industry face are pretty dire.
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