Measuring Impact

Today, it'll be my second week exclusively thrifting my clothing. The first week went great on paper but was a tinsy bit of a mess in execution ( I am so sorry, Noah.)

My good friend Korrina drove Noah and me down to the Goodwill bins in SODO. It was an impromptu trip so we didn't have any gloves (which I highly recommend bringing), but we figured it wouldn't matter that much. When we arrived Noah (who's never thrifted or to my knowledge purchased anything from a thrift store.) trepidatiously inched along with Korrina and I and almost squealed when a couple pigeons flew down from the ceiling (its a huge, open warehouse). We walked through the warehouse, just skimming through the bins when a lady approached us about her missing phone (as well as her missing child.)  we told her we hadn't seen a phone around and kept it pushin'. Overall I only found two things, because we all were getting a little sussed out by everyone around us. I got a green turtleneck and a huge Monterey Historic Automobile Race crewneck. Both items ran me about $3 which was wonderful to hear.

Above is the Monterey Races crew neck and below is the green turtleneck, I know my lighting is crap and makes it look black, I didn't feel like turning on the main lights.

Afterwards, Korrina dropped Noah and I off in Capitol Hill where we ended up stopping by Cross Roads and Lifelong.  At Cross Roads, I just picked up (another) sweater and at Lifelong I picked up some cute earrings and bobby-pins that I didn't get a picture of.

To the left is the sweater I picked up from Cross Roads and below are the earrings I got from Lifelong. The sweater was $18 after tax and the earrings were $4 each. In total (the whole day) I spent just about $29 on five items. Compared to the way I usually shop, I basically saved ~$90!

Alright, soooo I saved myself some money. Never a bad thing, but is any of this actually fruitful? Does thrifting *actually* reduce my carbon footprint or am I just looking for a reason to spend money on myself?

Well, according to Green Living, by thrifting I'm aiding the preservation of water. Cotton, a fibre commonly used in the production of jeans, shirts, sweaters and other kinds of clothing requires a fair amount of water to produce. In fact, growing one kilogram of cotton requires 5,300 gallons of water (1)! That's enough water to fill a 15' above ground pool (2) for whats equivalent to about 2 pounds of cotton. That's less than the weight of a (healthy) newborn baby.... ridiculous.

This revelation definitely bothered me because you have that whole ad campaign going around about the "~Fabric of our lives~"... and this fabric cost an above ground pool of water to produce(per one kilogram of cotton) when the people in Flint, Michigan have gone without water for four years!

Alright, so quick maths! How much water would it cost to make just one simple tee-shirt?

In one tee shirt, there are 10 ounces of cotton (3), and one ounce= 0.0283 kilograms. From the source above we know that to produce one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of cotton, you need 5,300 gallons of water.

0.283 kilograms= 10 ounces. (multiplied to get the ounces of cotton in a tee-shirt equivalent to kilograms)

If it takes 10 ounces of cotton to make one tee-shirt, then it takes 1,499.9 gallons of water to produce the cotton used to make that tee-shirt.

This means that if everyone in Summit Sierra were to begin thrift shopping, we could save over 599,960 gallons of water per tee-shirt we uniformly purchased! That's like, a lot of water. I'm not amazed by this information, it makes sense, but you've gotta admit, that would be a huge benefit to the planet.

All of this information makes me feel a little more motivated about my choice for this project and even inspires me to keep going after its all over, but there are some minor problems I have with what I've gathered. So to start off, my first source is a blog post from a site titled Green Living, No issue with the naming or anything, but c'mon... This is a site with an agenda. Addressing the blog post aspect though, only a few sources are cited within the actual post and none of them are citations for the numbers I pulled. So really I'm just going off of author credibility here, and the credibility begins and ends with the fact that this dude has written a crap ton of posts about ways to live 'greener'. My second source is honestly just a pdf I found on the internet, no source or author listed. Just seemed straight to the point with gallons of water an what kind of pool they'd fill... Pretty in and out on that one. But my third blog post is kind of tricky. It's from this website called Livestrong (not to be confused with Live Strong). In their 'About' section, they describe themselves as a website that"provides the blueprint to simple healthy living " (https://www.livestrong.com/aboutus/). This is super vague, that's sort of off-putting, but at least the author of the article cites her sources.

Overall, these numbers may be based on shaky references, but that doesn't mean they don't generally have the same effect on my feelings about thrifting. It is a commonly known fact that when you mass produce, you use massive amounts of resources. Whether or whether not the amount of water used to produce cotton specifically measures out to fill an entire 15' round pool doesn't really change my mind about the fact that fast fashion hurts our environment.


References:

(1) http://www.greenandprosperous.com/blog/2017/10/11/how-does-thrift-shopping-help-you-save-the-environment



(2) https://www.orcity.org/sites/default/files/swimming_pool_water_estimator.pdf

<-- Just for reference, this is what a 15' round pool looks like.



(3) https://www.livestrong.com/article/1006170-much-cotton-make-shirt/