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.

It isn’t just used clothes in landfill that are the problem though. The production of textiles worldwide is incredibly energy and water-intensive, and often produced in developing nations, where labour costs are low and reliance on fossil fuels is high. Between 100 and 150 litres of water on average are needed to process just 1kg of textiles and 5.5kg of CO2 are produced in the production of just one polyester t-shirt. As global population growth continues to rise, as does the demand for fast fashion, we are producing more textiles than ever before. Even worse, this type of work is often being performed by children, as up to 160 million children globally are engaged in child labour.

If these numbers aren’t looking good to you, this is where Depop may begin to make its case. By purchasing second-hand from online second-hand stores or even just visiting our local charity shop we can reduce our unethical consumption and make a tangible difference. As an online-shopping addict myself, I find it hard to reduce my consumption coldturkey, especially as it is not always convenient for me to spend time meandering through charity shops and markets on the weekends. However, by purchasing online from sellers near me on secure platforms like Depop, I know that I am reducing not only my consumption and the production of new products but also my rights as a consumer are being met. The impact of convenience on the dedication of the consumer to ‘ethical’ consumption cannot be overstated. Even if you aren’t necessarily a fan of pre-loved clothes, the rise of Facebook groups like ‘Buy Nothing O’Connor,’ allows almost anyone with an internet connection to take part in more ethical consumption. On these Facebook pages, residents simply post their unwanted, good quality, items. My fellow O’Connorites and I have found ourselves walking all over, collecting anything from desk chairs to used roller skates to even surplus home-grown zucchinis. Even for selfish reasons, the impact that small changes have on the volume of waste headed to landfill is substantial. Of course, we cannot save the planet overnight. Picking up a bedside table from around the corner instead of new one from Ikea won’t fix the hole in the ozone layer or prevent child labour. That’s obvious. Nevertheless, we cannot allow our culture of consumerism to prevent us from enacting meaningful change.