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ARTWORK: Beth O’Sullivan
how depop will save the world ALEX BEKIER Op-shopping, like almost everything these days, has been undergoing gentrification in recent years. This trend sees teenagers enter charity shops en masse to purchase t-shirts designed for children of about eight years old… only for them to be resold online for double the price underneath the description “Y2K crop baby tee.” This may seem ridiculous to some, like just another of the teenage internet trends often written off as ‘not worth reporting on.’ However, for ecologists and economists alike, it could be the light at the end of the tunnel. As our landfills overflow with fast fashion and barely used goods, reports from Australia’s Assistant Minister for Waste Reduction and Environmental Management, Trevor Evans, illuminate how pressing the issue really is. According to a joint media release from February last year, “Australians discard close to 800,000 tonnes of clothing and textiles per year, a rate of 10 – 15 tonnes every ten minutes.” Our onus to redesign our economy and rethink our approach to consumption increases each day. For our own survival, a linear economy in which companies are incentivised to increase sales, with little regard for the whole life of the product is no longer an option. We simply cannot afford to continue at the rate at which we deplete our planet’s natural resources. However, is simply purchasing used goods the silver bullet we think it is? Creators on TikTok have been quick to scrutinise the moral shortcomings of selling clothes and other charity shop novelties at an inflated price. These creators claim that this kind of consumerism reduces the amount
of fashionable and good quality clothing available for low-income consumers. Many of these same creators are sponsored by, or affiliated with slow fashion brands like DL1961, and stand to receive substantial financial gain from producing content with these kinds of messages. Contrastingly, the data collected by Lifeline in 2019 estimated that “half its stores across Australia had to stop accepting donations due to storage restrictions.” Given the sheer abundance of clothing sent to charity stores, it seems very dubious that by simply reselling second-hand clothes at a profit, low-income people would be deprived of adequate clothing. All this additional, perfectly good clothing added to landfill has a myriad of environmental concerns. Primarily, the sheer mass of discarded clothing alone prevents oxygen and bacteria important for decomposition from entering the environment and adequately breaking down all this rubbish. Not only does it mean that additional rubbish degrades at a much slower rate, leaving it around for generations to come, but also this anaerobic process of decomposition produces greenhouse gases. As we all know, greenhouse gases play the starring role in global warming, as they trap heat in our atmosphere.
