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.

Sostrene sells a lot of craft material so I’m not sure it applies.

Fast fashion is an absolute disease and really should stop, though. We just don’t need these many clothes and most of them are poor quality as it is.

I completely agree. What's even more frustrating is poor recycling awareness, habits or people just not caring. We live in a flat so have shared waste disposal and the level of cross contamination is shocking. People chuck food waste in with recycling or small electrical items just chucked in the rubbish.

Fast fashion makes big profits.
Big profits give you the power to lobby governments so that laws are made in your favor and you can continue to make big profits by destroying the planet and exploiting the poor.

You'll also avoid the potential for BPA if you use a metal bottle, though opt for stainless steel rather than aluminium.

I think since Covid, I've made a concerted effort not to buy for the sake of buying and am applying that principle across my life.

Sitting in my lounge and looking at the furniture and soft furnishings I can only see a handful of items which we have bought brand new since DH and I moved in together 15 years ago. I like neutral tones, everything blends, and actually the overall look is one of a cosy Nancy Myers aesthetic before that was even a "thing".

I don't want to be surrounded by seasonal throws, mugs and cushions, anything I do buy (and only when I absolutely need to) is bought because it has been considered not to just fulfil a want.

Planetary resources are finite - so I do my bit.

The big question is……how many times can the word tat be used in this thread…..

what did you actually buy.
maybe it will help with the WHY you are buying it?
( and I'm nosy!)

Absolutely nailed it. We have a new ‘The Range’ open, the people shopping there are not shopping at John Lewis, why shouldn’t they be allowed to decorate their homes. I have very ecliptic taste so most items on sale don’t interest me I’d rather go around auction houses or charity shops but that suits me not everyone. Allow other people joy to decorate as they want.

There is a massive human cost to leveraging cheap manufacturing (poor working conditions) too.

Up to 30% of clothing manufactured apparently goes to landfill without being sold. This giant clothing landfill is visible from space, appalling if all true.

vm.tiktok.com/ZNdFRbL5u/

I'm in my early 60's, so grew up in a time when there was much less plastic tat than there is now. We also had far fewer clothes and furnishings were only changed when they wore out. Whilst I do despair at the amount of crap people buy and the fashion for constantly changing colour schemes, I equally appreciate that it all keeps people in jobs (retail and delivery - as most of the manufacturing is not in this country).
I think it applies equally to the food industry. So much choice that we never had when i was young and most of it highly processed and not good for our health. Would people really suffer if ice cream only came in vanilla, strawberry and chocolate as it did when I was a child? I doubt it. In fact there are far too many choices to be made in every aspect of shopping now which only serves to stress people out as far as I can see, before you even get onto the waste of cheap disposable tat and it's packaging.

personally, I care not how much something is or whetehr some would view it as tat or as classy.
I think there is just too much stuff being manufactured full stop.
if you buy christmas cushions for £4.50 each or £45 each they are still unnecessary, using energy, and creating a disposal problem

There's a lot of truth there, but that's not what the thread is about. It's not (to use one of your examples) about one pair of £40 shoes that are less good quality than the expensive pair, but about the person buying 4 pairs of £10 shoes that are even worse quality.

And people buying seasonal cushion covers, plastic ornaments and pet accessories from B&M are not in "survival mode".

I agree.
I do what I can but have a constant battle with DH who whenever he cant find something in 30 seconds will say "I'll just order another one from amazon, it will only be a few quid"....

That fecking Jeff bezos, hoarding all the wealth while the rest of the world drowns in plastic rubbish shipped out in his name 🤬👎🏻

Agree I've noticed there's a lot more Easter tat than there used to be. I hate those plastic eggs that most likely won't be used again and can't be recycled. Hate all the mothers day tat.

Yes, and Autumn decorations too. It's like the retailers have realised we've reached peak Christmas in terms of the annual volume people will buy and so are expanding into other seasons too.

To go further, it's about buying 4 pairs of £10 shoes, of which one pair is worn twice and the others are never worn at all. Then throwing them away because they're cluttering up the wardrobe, and the next season doing it again.

And it's also about the overproduction that keeps this going - as someone else has said, a significant quantity of new clothing is destroyed. There was a story a few years ago about Burberry incinerating leftover stock. This is brand new, unworn, unsold, all perfectly usable, chucked on a bonfire to make room for a new batch of almost identical stuff, a chunk of which is also destined for the bonfire.

I don't think it's more frustrating. A large proportion of what we recycle will end up exported and mismanaged. I'm very much environmentally minded but I don't recycle most plastics because I'd rather they ended up in our landfills than polluting a beach somewhere, poisoning marine life with plastic nanoparticles, or poisoning lungs with toxic fumes.

Anything with batteries shouldn't be put into household waste of course, but electronics recycling is another con. It's another thing that's exported, any valuable parts are stripped and then what's left will be dumped and left to pollute the environment.

What I find hard to get my head around is just how many variations of the same thing there are now. Why are there so many brands of shampoo or makeup for instance, with new companies trying to break into the market constantly? Is it because of the internet? There used to be much less choice which personally I found a lot less stressful.

We could all do more.
My mum is a war baby, and never throws anything away that might one day be useful. I think she probably takes it a bit too far, but she was able to instil in us the practical skills needed to make do and mend. So making clothes, mending broken items, creating our own birthday and Christmas cards, reusing wrapping paper and ribbons, making decorations and clothes for dress-up days.
My DC always saw making their own halloween outfits as a big part of the fun.

I think schools can help children recognise what they can do that will make a difference, and help change attitudes. My own DC, and their friends, who are now adults, have a very different of view of the world compared to what was acceptable when I was young ( eg not using racist or homophobic vocabulary) and I think that is largely down to ongoing, continuous efforts put in by their schools. Most schools now do teach children about environmental issues and hopefully going forwards the younger generations will be much more aware. My DC already don't buy plastic and will always look for other options. (However that hasn't stopped them buying takeaways in plastic containers, that's our next step!)

The single use plastic bag campaign has worked really well, their use has been reduced by over 80%, I believe. We can do more along these lines. Some places are now introducing rewards for returning empty bottles ( as was standard practice 50 years ago): this is something we could easily do nationally.
We are making improvements, we just need to do it more and for everyone to feel they have a stake in the future.

I do sometimes want a bit of new Easter or Christmas decoration and when I do, I hit the charity shops. Last year 10 baubles for £1! Also a beautiful hardly used musical carousel ornament for £4!

WALL-E and the film Idocracy are feeling more prophetic all the time!

Where I live people can't even get their heads around how to use the brown recycling bins, they just shove general waste in them then of course they don't get emptied and sit there out on the pavement forever

Yeah I'm with you on this! No one can be "perfect" and I get wanting an occasional "just because" nick nack if it's a theme you love or whatever. But it really is just everywhere.

We try and do a balance. Furniture lasts ages, we only buy tech when things die a death. We never use shein, temu or Primark - we do shop high street shops, mostly Next and Asda/George. We just try to pick a few we fully know are awful and avoid them.

We have one DS and he's ot Playmobil and Lego from when me and DH were kids that is like new and he loves it. He's also had many a Christmas gift from FB marketplace like paw patrol and happy land stuff, that we in turn sold on later on. But saying that he also got some tat from the works just this afternoon 🤦 But like I say, nobody is perfect, it's more about trying to be more mindful where you can. If everyone did that, I think it would make a big difference.

Part of the problem is how expensive compared to wages the decent stuff is. If you don’t have much money you may have to buy the cheap version of what you need knowing it’ll break and need replacing within a year but you need it now not in six months when you’ve saved up enough for the good quality one. Then the cycle repeats on all the items you need.