Most shops are just landfill waiting to happen.

[SummerDaytoNight]

I mean, all are to a point, but I’m talking about the non essential ones.

Our society is engineering its own collapse. We only need food, health, house basics and clothing. And I suppose, technology.

Fast fashion could go. Housing should just be the essentials.

My friend took me into a shop called sostrene grene. It was lovely, but nothing was essential. Most shops are like that.

The horse has bolted, but I wish we could limit the unnecessarily stuff and just have the basics. Im not talking Amish level, but there’s no need for all this waste. It would be so much better if only the essentials were produced.

At the point of production, it’s already basically landfill.

I haven't been to a landfill - I don't think they're open for public visits!

How come the tat sorted and put into stillage? I thought it was just thrown into the ground? Or do they separate out the tat and recycle it in some way?

Gosh, I don't even know if my rubbish is sorted or just plonked into the ground from how they pick it up.

Many charities these days don't want used toys, clothes, and bedding, even if in good condition. They want everything new. That's definitely been a block in getting rid of stuff.

Where we are we have a brilliant table top sale. One is specifically for babies and children stuff and one is for everything else. People pay £15 quid for a table, there's a £1 entry fee. The entry fee goes to the place hosting (a community centre or school). Things are sold at a reasonable price. At the end there is a massive Barnardo's van that takes everything that people don't want to take home as it's not absolute tat. Over the last 10 years they've made something like a hundred thousand pounds for a Barnardo's.

I bought absolutely all of the kids clothes and presents for years from there and bought 100s of books for the school library. Totally brilliant.

The vast majority of plastic and other tat comes from China. I think we need Trump style tariffs on China to ween ourselves off plastic tat on to home produced wooden stuff as was the case pre-plastic.

I'm horrified when I see the aftermath of festivals where tents are abandoned with all the other detritus. Who buys a single use tent? (and they're all made of super duper non-biodegradable fabrics too)

That's wonderful! Sounds like one community has got it right. It should get on social media and inspire other communities to do the same!

Too my mind anyway,I think I saw the most pointless thing yesterday bags of coloured shredded Easter paper.

Perhaps The Multicoloured Swap Shop should make a return but with a larger remit... 😃

Pointless but hopefully biodegradable. We layer shredded paper in our compost bins.

Like most things, it’s all about balance. It’s ridiculously hard to shop completely ethically- not to mention very expensive, especially with food.
Vinted is fun, but there’s a bit of trial and error involved- I suspect some items spend their lives being bought and sold on Vinted.
Some convenient, planet unfriendly items are an absolute godsend - there was a reason plastic got so popular. I remember getting really upset over someone trying to guilt me into using washable nappies (I had mild postnatal depression) and feeling very strongly that I shouldn’t have to have the responsibility of saving the planet at that particular time!
But we can’t carry on as we are, there just isn’t enough planet.

Shopping ethically for food seems expensive because supermarkets keep produce artificially cheap by refusing to pay farmers a fair price for their goods.

I’ve never really bothered apart from Christmas

Pretty much this.

When on maternity leave I remember seeing a bargain hunt type show with a Whitefriars vase being sold for a ridiculous price, which seemed to start a trend, then I saw the same vase as dressing for a television show. I wondered if the trend had been created by an overenthusiastic set designer at the auction. I'm convinced if you watch enough of those shows you'll see the same stuff being sold and resold and eventually as props on TV.😂

This also begs the question of what happens to the stuff people don't buy ....
That probably ends in landfill as well
Because if shops change their displays/stock every few weeks, there's no way everything sells out.

Return to places like Shein go directly to landfill
There was a scandal a few years ago where it was revealed that Burberry were incinerating unsold stock because reducing the price would affect the brand.

It was meant to be a bit of levity...

Any thread like the present one will come down to a bunch of complex moral arguments about balancing the freedom to make one's way in the world with the question of responsibility towards others and future generations. One person's special purchase is another's frivolous waste. One's shoe cupboard (to take one example) can be anywhere from a pair of clogs for life to Imelda Marcos-style excess.

I have no answer to these questions. I just found it slightly amusing that the Shopping panel scrolled by as I was going down the thread, and then a wrap-around ad for holidays popped up. The fact that we're all here in front of this website is essentially because of consumer capitalism, whether we like it or not. 🙏

The most effective way to get to this is via price. But you can see the impact if there’s anything like a price increase on stuff from China or other cheap production places.

Shops are closing at alarming rates in my area and being replaced my B&M, Home Bargains and The Range. These shops are the main culprits of throw away shopping but without them we would have nowhere to shop.

I volunteered in Oxfam a couple of years ago and we got dozens of boxes from Inditex - the company which owns Zara, Pull and Bear, Bershka. Each of the 500 Oxfam shops got boxes so there must have been literally thousands. Probably tens of thousands of boxes. All were PACKED with brand new stock, most of it was internet returns, nothing wrong with it. Just that it wasn't worth their time restocking it. Everything from little £10 t-shirt tops to £150 jackets.

Now it's great that they made a corporate donation to charity of their excess and we sold it on at hugely reduced prices. But that's just one fashion company of hundreds, the amount of waste is just shocking.

Suffocating, yes! I've been trying to think of how to describe how it makes me feel and there you go. We were at a market today, half looking at some prints as we've recently moved and have a blank wall. But all I could think was that one day it'll be something more to dispose of. Which is depressing. But I feel a kind of pressure for our new home to seem "finished". I'm not sure if that's capitalism or some kind of nesting instinct.

Haven’t read all the posts, I’m always struck by how prescient ( I think that’s the right word) the animation film Wall-e from 2008 was .

I've not read the whole thread so apologies if this was already mentioned.

I was listening to the Stompcast podcast last week with Patrick Grant the founder of Community Clothing who are making ethical, quality clothes in the UK. They were discussing the fast fashion culture and it was really interesting, made me think again about buying from the high street. We're basically being totally hoodwinked by brands giving us unachievable desires on the perfect new outfit.
Good job I love buying and reselling on Vinted.

I can still remember the first time I saw plastic Halloween tat, about 15 years ago at a friend's house, and I thought, What the hell? Who needs plastic pumpkins and little plastic glowing skeletons? Not me for sure.

Yep. I walked around a shopping centre recently and all i could think of was just how many of the shops sold things that were exclusively unnecessary. I thought of the sostrene grene shop immediately when i read the thread title. I haven’t been in the shop because it just looks like a more expensive flying tiger type place. There’s one of those usa documentaries regarding this topic that has been added recently. Some of it made me feel ill (eg shipping so much unwanted clothing to some African counties that they dont know what to do with it so it gets washed into the sea…. Yet there are plenty destitute people wearing rags).

That is a really good point.
Much is made of 'preloved' stuff but there's a lot charity shops won't take, hence perfectly good stuff goes to landfill.