Yard Sales for Sustainability

We love yard sales for so many great reasons: they make for great community events, they give us a chance to find unexpected treasures, they’re an easy opportunity for decluttering, they’re great for finding amazing items and great prices…the list goes on! But there’s one more reason to love yard sales that just about everyone can get behind: sustainability.

It’s a topic that swings in and out of popular discourse, but as the effects of climate change become more and more tangible, it’s never a bad time to start thinking about how to make your personal consumption more responsible. One great way to do this? Go to yard sales! Here are a few ways that yard sales are great options for sustainable consumption.

Fast fashion and production

Especially when it comes to clothes, there are a lot of reasons some people prefer to shop at yard sales rather than the mall. For many, it comes down to a preference for vintage styles and throwback looks—we’re certainly a fan of this. For others, however, a big part of it is avoiding the environmental impact of fast fashion.

It’s easy to pick up cheap shirts at the mall for super low prices, and a lot of us do it without giving it a second thought, but as usual, there’s more than meets the eye. For one, these sorts of stores and fashion trends are meant to have you coming back in to buy more regularly. What does it matter that you just bought a bunch of new clothes last season? The trends have changed! Right?

While that might make sense on a fashion level, it puts a lot of strain on the environment. The ridiculous amount of water and microplastics needed to support production and consumption on that level do serious harm to the planet, and those low prices mean that that harm is affecting countries to where the labor is being exported first. How can you avoid feeding into this vicious cycle of overproduction? Go to a yard sale, or buy your clothes second-hand in general! By buying items that have already been produced, you aren’t adding more materials into the environment or exporting more labor for your purchase. Plus, you get to feed that vintage chic directly.

Avoiding landfills

Another danger of fast fashion is that these articles aren’t only meant to be purchased frequently, they’re meant to be discarded frequently as well. More generally with anything you buy, when its time to part ways with the item, often the landfill will be its final destination. Unfortunately, landfills pose significant threats to the environment, and discarding items more frequently only makes it worse.

Don’t get us wrong, sometimes things need to be thrown away. Often, however, we’re throwing away items that are perfectly fine, but that might have been replaced with an upgrade or have simply lost their place in our lives. Instead of throwing these perfectly good items away, however, how about finding them a new home? That’s right, with a yard sale! In fact, whether it’s buying or selling, keeping items in use and circulation longer through yard sales and similar structures helps us push less items into landfills as a community, and also helps us use less resources in production. Once again, yard sales are a win-win situation.

They don’t make ‘em like they used to

There are right times and wrong times to use this phrase, but when it comes to sustainability and yard sales, it definitely fits. A lot of people like vintage items because they prefer the style from a different time, and we can get down with that. Some people, however, like to search for vintage items because they are simply made to last. This isn’t just some nostalgia trip, either. It’s a concept called planned obsolesce, and as companies optimize their profit-making strategies more and more, it’s something that’s put into place across industries more and more as well.

In short, planned obsolesce is the practice of designing products in such a way that you’ll need a replacement soon enough—think of your phone magically becoming unusable every two years or so. The sooner your stuff breaks down, the sooner you’re back in the store to spend more money. Lame, we know, but profitable. As this practice has become more commonplace, it also means that products aren’t as likely to last you as long as they used to. A workaround? Buy old stuff! More specifically, go to yard sales and other used item shops and find what you need, made before things were designed to break. This fits into the other points, meaning that you don’t feed into the chain of overproduction for profit, and you also don’t buy things that are going to go into a landfill in two years.

The truth is that a few thrifted sweaters aren’t going to save the planet, and you aren’t going to single-handedly empty the landfill with your neighborhood sale, but baking practices like these into our basic routines and mindsets can be the first step to leading more sustainable lives and a more sustainable community. So, whether it’s for you or whether it’s for the planet, long live the yard sale!