Thrift Week 2022, Day Two: Shop Secondhand

My Ecofrugal Manifesto continues with...

Ecofrugal Principle #2: Shop Secondhand

Like eating plants, this is an obvious ecofrugal two-fer. In fact, it's a three-fer, because each time you buy something secondhand rather than new, you save money, save natural resources and energy that go into making new stuff, and keep waste out of the landfill, all at once. It's a win-win-win.

But exactly how big are these benefits, really? Well, it varies depending on what you're buying and where, but let's see if we can come up with some ballpark figures.

The financial benefit is probably easiest to measure. To get an estimate, let's look at our most recent secondhand shopping excursion, a trip to a Goodwill store in Indianapolis that Brian and I generally make a point of visiting over Christmas. (Side note: if you're planning to visit Goodwill any time soon, do as I did and wear leggings under your trousers. That way you can still try on pants if all the dressing rooms are closed due to COVID.) Here's what we bought:

• One pair of Christopher & Banks blue jeans for $3.50. A similar pair retails for $49.95 new.
• One pair of Cabin Creek cotton pants for $4.49. (Yes, I know these are grandma pants, but they fit, and that's enough of a Christmas miracle for me.) These appear to be no longer available in stores, but a similar-looking pair from Lee costs $44.
• A paperback copy of David Sedaris's Holidays on Ice for $1. Price at Amazon: $11.60.

So, in total, we got $105.55 worth of stuff for $8.98 before tax. That's a savings of over 90 percent. I'm not saying we do this well every time we shop secondhand, but here's another data point: According to the 2020 Consumer Expenditure Survey, the average married couple spends $1,705 per year on "apparel and services." Brian and I together spend an average of $440, or about 26 percent of the average — and shopping secondhand is the main money-saving strategy we use.

As for the ecological benefits, I touched on these a bit when I covered thrift shops in Thrift Week 2016, but here are a few facts I dug up just now:

• Americans sent more than 21 billion pounds of clothes to the landfill in 2015. 
• The fashion industry produces 10 percent of the world's carbon emissions, more than international flights and maritime shipping combined.
  
• It's also the world's second-largest consumer of water and pollutes the ocean with microplastics.

Buying clothes secondhand rather than new doesn't completely wipe out their ecological footprint, since transporting goods to thrift stores produces some emissions. But it shrinks their footprint by a lot, and it reduces the influence of fast fashion with its endless cycles of buy-discard-buy.

And the benefits don't stop with clothing. Brian and I shop secondhand for all kinds of durable goods: books, gifts, furniture. We certainly don't buy everything used; probably not even half of what we buy is secondhand. But we always try to buy secondhand when we can, and that habit has probably saved us thousands of dollars over the years we've been together.

So I'm not urging you to join The Compact and pledge to buy only secondhand goods for an entire year. All I'm recommending is that you make a habit of looking at secondhand sources first when you shop. You may not find what you need, but if you do, it's pretty much guaranteed to be a cheaper and greener choice than buying the same item new.