Tuesday, November 10, 2020

"I'm sorry I am not able to fix it."

From the goat farm in the high desert, Marz reports she found a box of VHS tapes and DVDs dumped in the wilderness. Out there––off the grid, far from a paved road or any city services––there is no way to "throw things away".
Anything dumped will remain till Judgment Day.

Of course that's also true here in the city where I work at a thrift store. There is no "away", there is only "out of sight". Donating things to a thrift store may feel like a solution.
It's not.

I'm sorting toys at the thrift store now, as well as books (it fell to me when the toy volunteer quit). At least half the toys are plastic, and half of them are broken, filthy, unfixable.
What am I supposed to do with a cracked plastic truck that could pinch or slice flesh?
Or a plastic doll with magic marker all over its face?
It all goes in the Dumpster.

Here's the thing:
Once we've bought something, it becomes our responsibility for life. It's like adopting a pet animal. If it––the puppy, the clothing item, that great OXO lemon peeler––doesn't work out for you, you can try to re-home it instead of throwing it out.
But what a pain, right? Who even does that?
Maybe with pets.
I follow a Rescue Dog group, and the time and money (and love) involved in finding new homes is immense. 

Donating stuff to a thrift store is a stop-gap. Unless the donated things are in great shape and otherwise desirable (vintage, in fashion, worth money), they will immediately either be
1. put in the Dumpster, or
2. sold for pennies to be recycled
downstream.

 
It certainly is better to donate ripped clothes such as this ^ coat donated to my workplace, than to throw them out. Thrift stores sell otherwise unsaleable clothes to textile recyclers.
(The note gives me the sense that
the coat's former owner thought someone might repair it--a sweet but naive expectation.)

It's handy if you label textiles you're donating that are too worn for further use. Clothes and other fabrics that come in labeled "for recycling" save the thrift-sorters work. Sorting thrift is dirty, dusty, heavy, and poorly paid work.

Recycling keeps textiles out of landfills for a little while longer... they get shredded for industrial use, mattress stuffing, rags--some even gets rewoven into fabric---among other things.*

But it's not an ultimate solution--it takes more fossil fuels to transport and process textiles, and there are more than are needed or wanted by anyone. And things can only be recycled so many times before they end up in the landfill.

There is no ultimate solution.

If you're not sure you want that new puppy, shirt, kitchen gadget, rubber ducky for its lifetime (which, with plastic, is forever)...

DON'T BUY IT.


________


P.S.  Not buying things won't fix the fact that our economy is based on people making & buying stuff to be thrown away, of course, so that's another thing we can work on re-visioning...

 *Mild (not inflammatory) article about "The Basics of Textile Recycling"