I can buy clothes online, but it’s hard to know it it will fit. One way is to just buy a bunch of clothes, try it on, and then return what doesn’t fit.
Alternatively I can travel to a store and try on clothes there.
This has me wondering what is actually best for the environment. You would think the shipping would be bad, but the alternetive could be that I drive myself to where the clothes are instead.
Obviously this depends on a lot of factors, but I was wondering if it’s possible to say something generally about how we want people to shop for clothes.
How far do you have to drive and how efficient and polluting is your vehicle would be the main factors.
An online store like Amazon is coming through my neighborhood pretty much daily, so the impact for us it lower. But if you live more rurally the impact of Amazon coming is much higher. Of course if you have to drive 40 minutes just to get to a Walmart, we’re probably back to Amazon might be better. I bring that up specifically as it was true for my In-laws at one point.
The last factor is packaging, overall Amazon in theory is more wasteful in this area.
They do seem to be getting better, using crumpled kraft paper for padding in boxes, and the boxes use less cardboard than before. It may also be better that returns are now handled (in my area at least) at the Whole Foods, so they can be picked up en masse and don’t require additional boxes for return (I don’t know how they were handling it when returns went to the UPS store, so that may be a wash).
Driving around seems very wasteful to me, especially since I don’t know what stores are going to have in stock until I get there. Being a “big” (i.e. fat) person, the stores I could shop at are limited anyway, and many of them don’t have actual outlets near me. Now that I’ve lost some of that weight my options are wider, but I still dislike driving to stores looking for clothes. And brick-and-mortar stores can’t compete with online shopping for variety of sizes and materials; those same stores offer much more themselves in their online stores than they can in person.
That said, I don’t buy clothes at Amazon, the sizes and materials are too unreliable; even some brand name clothes sometimes seem to be actually different from what the stores sell. The last clothes I bought at Amazon were some extra-large socks, which I couldn’t find in person.
I have to try clothes and shoes on so I am someone who needs to drive to a store. The nearest store with reasonable options is about 30 minutes away . I shop there once or twice a year.
I do purchase a few things from Amazon but try to keep the orders larger and less often.
I’ve read that most stores don’t put the returns back out for sale as new, and that often they’re thrown out.
– a brief googling gives the impression that often they’re shipped around to liquidators, who sort them out and ship them on to somebody else for resale, or sometimes do throw them out.
So it’s not just the environmental cost of your shipping them back, but also the cost of them being shipped, possibly multiple times, to liquidators and then on from there; and quite possibly the cost of their being sent to the landfill without anyone ever having used them.
Look for a documentary called Brandy Hellville it describes the way high-cost yet disposable clothing is treated. When it gets shipped in huge bundles to 3rd world countries.
What doesn’t sell for pennies over there is often dumped in the ocean, impacting sea life and washing back up on the coast in giant tangles. Ruining beaches and tourism.
We have to quit being a people who must have these things and willy nilly throwing them out or donating to huge outfits like Goodwill who are responsible for bundling what doesn’t sell in a certain time and shipping it overseas.
Just buying a T-shirt at a B&M or online makes very little difference to the bigger picture. IMO
Most of my life I purchased clothing from yard sales and thrift stores. In the last few years since covid I have resorted to buying a few things once or twice a year at a local department store. I recently had someone give me three brand new summer shirts which I have absorbed into my work/travel wear.
I had to finally break down and buy 2 new pairs of jeans this month. My three pairs of ten year old jeans had been mended to within an inch of their life and were no longer safe for public viewing.
Yeah, that’s what most people assume. But apparently it’s very often not done that way.
I think much of the issue is that when you try things on at a brick and mortar there’s somebody right there who needs to handle every individual item in any case, and can easily rapidly check it for any damage from your trying it on, and, being already in the correct department or close to it, can put it back on the correct hanger or shelf nearly as fast as they could dump it in a reject box. But at Amazon or wherever your returns are at best coming back to the same huge warehouse they started off from, and maybe not even that; and coming back in combination with huge piles of other stuff being returned by lots of other people – who won’t be face to face with any Amazon employee and therefore have a higher percentage of people who will return something dirty or torn. So they’d have to hire a lot of people to inspect every item, pack it properly back in its box including replacing portions of packaging as needed, and then re-sort what needs to go where in the warehouse; and then somebody else needs to get it there.
We’re living in a society in which the cash cost of doing that is very likely more expensive than the cost of dumping it; and apparently that’s true, or many places think it is, even when the possibility of selling some (not all, some will be damaged) of the returned items as new is figured in. The costs of environmental damage in both the creation of the excess and the disposal of it, after all, are “external” and not figured in.
Bear in mind that a lot of customers will complain if what they order arrives even wrinkled from being mis-packed by the person who returned it.
And shipping secondhand clothes or returned clothes to third-world countries sounds like a philanthropic thing to do but what it does is to destroy whatever domestic textile and clothing industry exists in these countries.
The Atlantic had an article saying the same thing a while back. Said logistics works quite well to get good to consumers, but not so well to return them for resale.
I recall reading that if you buy a pair of jeans costing less then (IIRC) $50 or so, you can pretty much assume some child labor, serious pollution, or other wonderful things went into their production. I can only imagine what is involved in getting a $10 dress to an American consumer…
I’d wager that it is the excessive consumption itself that is far more significant than the method of purchase.
I was wondering how Stitch Fix managed it. When I was told that my returns were likely going straight to the landfill, I canceled my subscription.
I’ve also been simplifying and purging my possessions in general. This book was inspiring:
I’m trying to be more conscious of what clothes I buy and where they’re made. So I was interested in the American Apparel line because they supposedly made their clothes in a union shop in Los Angeles but then I visited one of their stores and was disappointed at the quality. Currently I’m wearing t-shirts and sweatshirts from a company called American Giant, which also makes its stuff in the US. I’m going to try to buy higher-quality stuff that’s produced domestically, in the hope that the workers are at least treated better.
That’s true. About a decade ago, the public radio program Planet Money arranged to produce t-shirts, from the farms where the cotton was grown, through the dyeing process and the actual production of the shirts. The idea was to demonstrate the global nature of the process.
Many of these clothes end up improperly disposed of:
The article mentions H&M as stating they have guidelines to ensure fabric waste does not get sent to a landfill, but what happens to those bags of clothes retail stores discard every day? I have not yet heard anything about enormous fines for throwing T-shirts into the trash.
The problem for me is I need to try things on and cannot be bothered with online shopping. If I am paying fifty dollars for a t shirt I need it to fit well. Pants are an absolute horror for me. Very few types of pants ever fit and when I find something that does I buy 2 or 3.
Plus I need way more kinds of clothing than these places offer. Coats, swimming suits, underwear, sweaters, etc.
I wish we still had domestic textile and clothing production in the US like we did when I was a youngster.
Two things,
After 9/11 I went to a fabric store, to buy some curtain material.
They chose to toss 100s of bolts of fabric produced in Islamic/Muslim countries. All of it in a dumpster. They had a choice of about 20 fabrics left to sell.
The tossed bolts were already purchased by the store. So they didn’t help anything by tossing, but just added to the landfills. This a major franchise. If all stores in the company threw away all that fabric… unfathomable.
Next, I purchased a pair of leggings. From a clothing site I was informed that sizes were way off. To order many sizes larger.
So I did. I’m usually a medium for leggings. I definitely need length. So I ordered 2X tall.
I swear to you, they might fit a kid, sz 6x. Not kidding at all. No way I could wear them.
I called to make a return. They credited my card and told me to toss it or donate it. I donated them to my young granddaughter.
It makes me wonder, how can they eat this loss?
I’m sure I’m wasn’t the only person ordering $29 leggings from them.
What, do they cost them like 3¢, that it means so little to them?