Are We Too Dependent on Secondhand Items?|Chanvo Hung

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Hi, this is just another boring article about environmental issues, but something we can’t simply ignore. If you’re still reading this, consider yourself a considerate citizen. I’m pretty sure in your lifetime you have own few or lots of different secondhand items that are imported from Southeast Asia, US, UK or Germany or the Netherlands. Say, your favorite shirts or jeans, socks or bags, etc. were bought from thrift shops. You must have been really happy you got them at a cheap price and somehow felt special that people around you won’t own the same item as you do. How fortunate are we to have secondhand shops in our place!

Well, it’s the truth, secondhand items have literally made our life much easier: we saved a lot of money, find good pieces, unique items, and when lucky, we got designer garments in good condition, have access to vintage clothing and fashionable items, etc. all in a throwaway price. We decorate our rooms with curtains, bed sheets, pillow covers, carpets, and even blankets bought from secondhand shops. Besides, for many, secondhand business has been a source of income. 

People say we should give new life to our old clothes and items by giving out to charity or upcycle them, or recycle them. The items we got from thrift shops are all actually used and unwanted products donated by the richer and developed nations. And by buying and re-using them for our own purposes we are giving these products a new life. And also, in that process, in one way, we saved an incalculable amount of unwanted clothing from getting dumped and forming unwanted landfills. 

If you’re wondering where I’m going with this, well here is my point. On the surface, the recycling of used clothes, often charitably donated, means old garments didn't go to waste, and the new owners get a good bargain. It seems like a "win-win" situation that couldn't be more ethically sound. But on closer inspection, the reselling of clothes is more complex than one might possibly think. When secondhand items can save us from lots of expenditures, and while we are doing such great charity work by giving new life to the products, how can this secondhand culture probably affect our environment? Right? 

Here are a few points that I would like to bring to attention:

1. What happened to all the rejected and unsold secondhand pieces?
You must be familiar with the huge amount of rejected items when shopping in thrift shops. I was curious, so I asked around a few thrift shop keepers in Manipur. This is what I got - they either donate to orphanages, or give it to village farmers, or return them to the dealers, or just throw/ burn them away. In this case how much can village poor farmers or labourers take? 

How much can orphanage consume from what was given? I’m pretty sure most unsold garments are burned or simply thrown as they often are the ones that come in big sizes, or are worn out and not fit to be used for any purposes. How many items from the unsold items are recycled or up-cycled? How much of the items are returned back to the dealers? Or should I ask how much of the unsold items go to the waste and got burned? I’ve noticed that some orphanage home doesn’t have the space to store all the amount of leftover donations they received. So, they burned most of them.

2. Aren’t we encouraging fast fashion?

Fast fashion? What does that even mean? Fast fashion clothing collections are based on the most recent fashion trends presented at fashion shows every season of the year. Emphasis is on optimizing certain aspects of the supply chain for these trends to be designed and manufactured quickly and inexpensively to allow the mainstream consumer to buy current clothing styles at a lower price. How is this even related to my topic? Well, it is very related. We are directly or indirectly encouraging donors to buy more than what they need. 

For instance, the majority of donations come from the US. Also, the US offers the largest consumer market in the world, and its household spending is the highest in the world, accounting for nearly a third global household consumption. The U.S. consumes 30 percent of the world's resources despite making up only 5 percent of the world's population. It also produces 30 percent of the world's waste. In only a year, Americans throw away around 6,330,000 tons of clothing and footwear, and tons of other waste. Unfortunately, 80 percent of all products that are produced in the United States are used only once and then discarded. 

Here's something you probably didn't know about your favorite T-shirt. Did you know, to grow enough cotton for just one T-Shirt, it requires 2,700 litres of water. This amount of water is enough for one person to drink for the whole 900 days. What? Shocked? Well, that’s not only it - there are a whole lot of processes and procedures in making a single T-Shirt. I like to leave the rest of the T-Shirt making process to your imagination. Now that you know it, shall we still encourage or be a part of fast fashion culture? Isn’t it time we seriously consider what kind of customer are we?

3. Blurred Culture
Like I mentioned earlier, with the arrival of secondhand items in our town and city we got access to designer’s wears, vintage dresses, western clothing and many more. When I go home, I see mostly Westerners like and Koreans like. Where are our colorful and beautiful traditional dresses? We hardly see people wearing them now. Future generations might never know how beautiful our traditional attires are if our choice is driven continuously only by the cost-effectiveness of secondhand clothing. Every year, I can see an increasing amount of secondhand shops in my hometown Manipur. And this scares me.

4. No market opportunity for local talents - fashion designers, textile designers, shoe designers, pattern masters, etc.
In the name of cost-saving we buy whatever is cheaper, but at the price of wasting our local talents. People from Northeast India region are exceptionally talented in the field of fashion and craft. Many fashion designers emerged from our region and they are usually well respected for their craft. But many of these talents prefer to base in a metropolitan city because there can hardly find any market opportunities in their own home state. 

I’ve met some designers who are compelled to change their profession into something else (non-fashion) just because they wanted/ had to stay in their hometown. Why? In business, if there are no customers, how can one run such a dead-end business. Right? How do we open an opportunity for our talented sisters and brothers in our own hometown? Don’t you think we should depend more on local talents and local products?

5. Undermined Local textile.

Our land is blessed with fertile soil. We can harvest. We are creative people, we know the art of weaving, knitting, crocheting and more. Textiles are formed by weaving, knitting, crocheting, felting, or braiding. Textiles are made from many materials, with four main sources: animal (wool, silk), plant (jute, flax, cotton), mineral (asbestos, glass fibre), and synthetic (nylon, polyester, acrylic).

We have all the natural resources needed to make textiles. 

We can even use bamboo and flax fibers for clothing. We have a good amount of straw and bamboo to make marketable baskets and hats. With a blend of cotton and other materials, we can also use pineapple fibre for clothing. These are some of the materials that are easily available in our local places. If we don’t give our local talents to explore and market opportunities, aren’t we undermining our local textile industry? Now we have few designers from Northeast who uses only local textiles, and they are making a name in the fashion industry. Many of these designers still find practically impossible to settle and base in their own hometown, because there is hardly any market for them. It’s sad!

6. Becoming a wasteland? 

With environmental issues becoming more prominent and fashion pollution being one of the major concerns, the industry people learned how to be environmentally friendly. And in this regard, second-hand/pre-owned stores have become very fashionable and respectable in Europe, the US, but, in states like Nagaland and Manipur, it is a different story. Why? 

As the Christmas season approaches, millions of Westerners flock to charity shops to donate their used clothes. Then these items are compressed into bales to be resold. Then the better graded used clothing is exported to Central American countries (no wonder why it considered respectable and fashionable there) and the lower graded clothing is shipped to Africa and Asia. It means, most of the so-called “rejected/ unwanted” pieces were shipped to a country like India and states like Manipur and Nagaland. I am not ignoring the fact that we got good quality goods from these secondhand items and that it is economically friendly. 

But I’m also stating that we shouldn’t forget about the items that didn’t get sold. Isn’t our land becoming their wasteland in this case? In the name of charity and sustainability aren’t they committing huge mistakes by buying more than they need? Aren’t we allowing them to dump their unwanted items in our land? We might not see the drastic environmental changes now but I’m afraid, we will someday if the ongoing secondhand trends continue.

With this brief discussion, I wanted to bring into consideration the flourishing secondhand culture in our land. When we are so focused on the benefits we received from Secondhand business that we are consciously or unconsciously ignoring the demerits of this very own occasion. 

Let’s enjoy secondhand culture, but, also at the same time, let’s be a responsible customer.  What shall we do about it then? I’m sure some of you have a better solution. Here are a few solutions I have in mind. Depend less on the outside source and encourage our local products, upcycle old items. Some cafes in Ukhrul upcycled old bottles and old tyre and used them for furniture and light lamps. We are creative people; we can make a whole lot of ideas to upcycle our old clothes, gives new life to old items. Give our old items for recycling. Also, why not we buy less, and cherish what we have? Become a minimalist. That’s in trend! Cherish what we have. That way, we will save money and it’s more sustainable. At the same time, we won’t become a victim of Fast Fashion.

In the end, I would like to admit, I totally messed up with my writings here. I’m an aspiring fashion designer and by no means a good writer. All in all, the bottom line and the thing, the only thing, that, I want to say is, what are we becoming as we embrace this secondhand culture? We have such rich customs and traditions that we are proud of. We claimed to be proud of our traditional values even when it comes to fashion. But our dependency on secondhand culture serious question this very claim we made.
Our land is literally a dumping place for their used items and it’s blurring our culture. And here we are, so proudly embracing these dumped materials like our new skin at the cost of discarding our own traditional values and thinking very less about how our actions contribute to environmental pollution. We should be aware and be careful – we just cannot ever let these dumped clothes become our image!

Chanvo Hung can be reached at chanvophyh@gmail.com. The article first appeared in NagaDao (2019), an annual publication of the Naga Students' Union, Delhi (NSUD). 

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