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I should be walking around in flip flops and shorts, not my fleece jacket. But it’s cloudy, damp and about 55 degrees this Memorial Day – the heralded official start to summer. It’s OK… the heat will come. I stayed mostly indoors and took the opportunity to put away some winter clothes. In the process, I created the seasonal bag of no longer loved clothes for the thrift shop. There is a church near me that takes anything – including household items. They are packed to the gills and it’s sort of a fun place to explore if you have the time and patience. I have gotten books and frames there. And I once bought a ‘burner’ sweatshirt. It was for a 5K race in NYC and I was going to be standing around in the cold for several hours before the race even began. A burner sweatshirt is one you peel off and throw to the side right before the race begins. Obviously, it’s not your favorite. In my case, having nothing I wanted to part with, I got a $3 sweatshirt from the thrift shop. Because so many racers do this, they have people who come around collecting the discarded layers for donation to homeless shelters and thrift shops. Basically, I just ‘rent’ the sweatshirt from thrift and it goes on to have another life.
Growing up in a thrifty family, hand-me-downs were a fact of life. Being the only girl, at least I didn’t have the awful teenage shame of wearing something already in the family. No, my hand-me-downs came from girl cousins in a distant town – and they were actually sort of fun. I got used to trying things that didn’t necessarily appeal to me at first, but worked out OK. To me, it was new clothes. My youth was not scarred by hand-me-downs but some people get deeply affected by it. To me, it’s just sensible and contributes to a sustainable world.
I went to a craft show in VT and there was a crafter who bought old sweaters at thrift shops, washed them in hot water so they tightened up and shrank, and then sewed them into ‘monsters’ and animals for young kids. Today many people also convert old sweaters into mittens by lining them with fleece. And I’ve got a pile of old jeans in a closet waiting to become a quilt in their next life.
A circular economy is the alternative to a traditional linear economy (make, use, dispose) in which we keep resources in use for as long as possible, extracting the maximum value from them while in use, and then finding something new to do with them at the end of each life. This explains my Dad’s extensive collection of ‘stuff’.
Growing up in a thrifty family, hand-me-downs were a fact of life. Being the only girl, at least I didn’t have the awful teenage shame of wearing something already in the family. No, my hand-me-downs came from girl cousins in a distant town – and they were actually sort of fun. I got used to trying things that didn’t necessarily appeal to me at first, but worked out OK. To me, it was new clothes. My youth was not scarred by hand-me-downs but some people get deeply affected by it. To me, it’s just sensible and contributes to a sustainable world.
I went to a craft show in VT and there was a crafter who bought old sweaters at thrift shops, washed them in hot water so they tightened up and shrank, and then sewed them into ‘monsters’ and animals for young kids. Today many people also convert old sweaters into mittens by lining them with fleece. And I’ve got a pile of old jeans in a closet waiting to become a quilt in their next life.
A circular economy is the alternative to a traditional linear economy (make, use, dispose) in which we keep resources in use for as long as possible, extracting the maximum value from them while in use, and then finding something new to do with them at the end of each life. This explains my Dad’s extensive collection of ‘stuff’.