On April 22, which happens to be Earth Day, the Tufts Eco-Reps will be hosting the second (hopefully annual) clothing swap. You're excited, I know. A chance to get rid of those old clothes taking up drawer space and maybe pick up a few "new" items. But a clothing swap has more value than a fun, free way to spruce up your wardrobe. The benefits fit into two categories: before and after.
In the "before" category, consider that nice shirt you just saw. How much did it cost? Ten dollars? Now stop and consider where that came from and how that price could possibly cover the true costs of production, transportation and retail. First, someone had to grow the cotton. They probably weren't paid fair wages and they probably used a ton of pesticides. If they were in a developing country while using the pesticides, it's likely they weren't wearing any protective gear while doing the spraying. Then someone took that cotton and made it into fabric. Again, if this took place in someplace like India, there's a chance that they were working in extremely unsafe conditions with prolonged exposure to various chemicals like chlorine that are commonly used to bleach, dye and treat fabric. Then the wastewater containing all these chemicals from the fabrics are released directly into the environment.
OK. So the fabric is dyed and treated and the shirt is sewn, perhaps by child laborers. Now it has to get from India to whichever mall you happen to be in. That takes a huge amount of fossil fuel to fly it over to the United States and distribute it by trucks to any of the stores you might happen to shop in.
Great. So you buy the shirt. It looks good on you. But then styles change and you can't really wear that shirt anymore if you want to be fashionable. So you throw it away. This brings us to the "after" portion. Where does that shirt go when you throw it away? There are a few options: One, it goes to a landfill. Two, it goes to an incinerator. Three, it ends up somewhere in the ocean, in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area of floating trash that is currently estimated to be larger than the state of Texas.
For your shirt, let's consider what happens in a landfill, which is where about half of America's trash ends up according to the EPA, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In the best case scenario, in a modern, well-designed, lined landfill, the most that will happen is nothing. The shirt will sit indefinitely, unchanging and taking up space. If it ends up in a landfill of poorer design, it will begin to decompose, perhaps leaking the dyes into the groundwater (joining a liquid called leachate that forms in all landfills from the variety of decomposing matter) and the organic material in the cotton will be transformed into methane by the action of anaerobic bacteria.
Ideally, all our clothes would be made from renewable, sustainably obtained materials and dyes and the workers who made them would be treated fairly and paid well. The clothes we buy would be of higher quality (and yes, probably more expensive) and last longer. When we are done with them, hopefully they would be able to fully decompose and add to the ground any nutrients they took out.
But all that is the ideal. In the short term, we can try to be educated consumers and think about where our clothes and all our other daily products come from. Another crucial step is to extend the life of the products we already have. A clothing swap allows us to do this (for free)! It is a small start on the long road towards sustainability.
So please donate your clothes to the Tufts Free Clothing Swap. There are bins in eight convenient locations: Dewick, Carmichael, the campus center, Lewis, Hodgdon, Miller, Wren and Carpenter House. They will be out until Friday morning. If you can't make it to a bin beforehand, feel free to bring donations by the event on Friday. We are accepting all clean clothes that aren't stained or ripped. We will also accept shoes and accessories. Any leftovers at the end of the day will be donated to charity. Don't forget to come out to pick up something for yourself from the clothing swap and participate in all the other awesome Earth Day events this Friday from noon to 4 p.m.
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Rose Eilenberg is a sophomore majoring in mechanical engineering and environmental studies.
