Why I don't buy everything used

After receiving a Washington Post subscription as a birthday present last January, I also signed up for the paper's Climate Coach column. In it, columnist Michael J. Coren offers climate-focused consumers advice on everything from green funerals to bidets. His most recent column is about an interesting challenge he undertook: "For one month, I set out to buy everything used and online."

Now, I'm already a big believer in shopping secondhand when possible. But trying to buy absolutely everything this way seems like an awfully high bar. As I read the article, I mentally went through the list of items we'd bought recently trying to figure out whether buying them secondhand would even have been feasible. What about the water supply lines we had to replace in our bathroom sink? What about the new lids I bought for our Pyrex food storage containers? Are there really people online selling these things used? And even if there are, would ordering from them necessarily have been greener?

To answer this question properly, I pulled out out my spending list for the past month and identified all the non-consumable items we'd bought. This proved to be a surprisingly short list, as the bulk of our spending goes toward consumables (such as food and medicine), services, and donations. For each item, I noted where I'd bought it and what I paid. Then I did a little digging to figure out whether it would have been possible to buy it used from an online retailer instead and, if so, what it would have cost. Here's the list:

• A secondhand copy of Moll Flanders, bought for $1 at the Princeton Library bookstore. There are, naturally, loads of places to buy secondhand books online; a quick search online turned up multiple copies starting at $1, the same price I paid for it in the store. But that doesn't include shipping, which would add another $4 minimum. And besides adding to the price, shipping it to New Jersey from an out-of-state seller would have added to its carbon footprint. The copy at the library store cost one-fifth as much, supported a good cause, and required no transportation at all, since I was in Princeton already. Buying it online would clearly have been worse in every way.
• A game that I bought directly from its creator, who had a booth at the town street fair, for $26.75. Since this game is brand new, there are no secondhand copies available online or anywhere else.
• A new pair of shoes from Skechers. These sell for $75 normally, but I got them on sale for $54 including shipping. A quick search of "Used Items" on Google Shopping turned up no secondhand pairs of this exact shoe. I found one pair in a similar style on eBay for $34.37 with shipping, but with my weird feet, similar isn't good enough. If I can't try them on in a store, I need the next best thing: free shipping and free returns so I can send them back if they don't fit. So while it's theoretically possible I could have bought a serviceable pair of used shoes online for less than I actually spent, it's equally likely that I'd have paid $16 in shipping costs and still been shoeless.
• Lids for our Pyrex containers. The containers themselves are great, plastic-free and very durable, but the plastic lids they come with wear out over time and need to be replaced. I bought seven new ones directly from the manufacturer: one for our 2.5-quart mixing bowl, three plastic ones for our 2-cup storage containers, two for our 1-cup containers, and one glass-and silicone lid in the 2-cup size. (This was more expensive than the equivalent plastic lids, but I'm hoping it will hold up better. If it does, we'll gradually replace all our lids with this type.) They cost me a total of $37.31, including shipping. To my surprise, a "Used Items" search on Google revealed that there were, in fact, sellers online offering these secondhand. However, no single seller had all the sizes I needed. To buy all of them, I'd have had to make two separate orders: $13.74 (including shipping from Michigan) for the 2.5-quart lid and $17.99 (including shipping from Arizona) for an open-box assortment including the 1- and 2-cup lids. That would have cost $31.73 total, less than I actually paid—but it wouldn't have included the glass lid, and it would have included lids in several other sizes that we didn't need.
• A long-sought-after replacement for my beloved Maggie Bag tote, which was stolen five years ago. I'd tried several different replacements for it before finally settling on a similar bag from Harvey's,  but I was never quite as happy with it. It was a little smaller, so I had trouble cramming all my everyday carry items into it, and I kept losing my pen because the purse didn't have a pocket for it. From time to time I'd search eBay and Poshmark to see if they had another tote like my old one, but I never found one until this week. This bag isn't quite identical; it's black instead of grey and large instead of medium. But after my years of fruitless searching, I was happy to snatch it up for $83.14. Although the purse was technically "new with tags," I think it counts as a secondhand purchase since it came from a reseller. So this is one item I did buy used and online, exactly as the Climate Coach suggests.
• A pair of plumbing supply lines from Lowe's for $14.88. (When we replaced our sink last month, we reused the old lines, but one of them started leaking not long after, and Brian decided to replace them both just to be safe.) Once again, I was surprised to see that you actually can buy these secondhand, or at least "open box." So, in theory, I could have ordered two lines from an eBay seller for $17.14, including shipping. But aside from the higher price, doing this would have meant letting the plumbing continue to leak for another 4 to 11 days while waiting for the new lines to be delivered from California. And what if, when they arrived, we found they didn't fit (as we did with the first pair we purchased from Lowe's)? Between the ongoing water leak, the cross-country shipping, and the risk of having to send them back, I can't believe that buying these online would have been a greener choice than running out to the store for a new pair.
• Lastly, from HomeDepot.com, a new spigot for our rain barrel for $21.53. We tried to pick this up in the store at the same time we bought the plumbing supply lines, but we couldn't find the right part. This item seems like it should have been reasonable to buy from a reseller since we had to order it online anyway. But when I did a search just now, I couldn't find anyone selling it secondhand. I found one listing on eBay for an open-box item, but it wasn't the same one we bought, and it's not clear it would have fit our rain barrel. So, apparently, buying this used wouldn't have worked either.

Of all the new items we bought in May, there's only one (the Pyrex lids) that it might have made sense to buy used and online. However, it's not clear this would actually have been a greener choice. In the first place, the "used" lids weren't a secondhand item that we'd have rescued from the landfill, only an open-box item selling at a discount. Ordering secondhand would also have required two shipments instead of one. We'd have ended up with several lids we didn't need, which we would then have had to Freecycle or throw away. And finally, we wouldn't have been able to buy the more durable glass-and-silicone lid, which could potentially eliminate the need to keep buying new plastic lids in future. Add up all those costs, and I'm inclined to think that buying new from the manufacturer was still the right move.

None of this means that the online secondhand marketplaces are useless. Without Poshmark and ThredUP, I wouldn't have my new, roomier purse or the wool cardigan I wear all winter long. The one thing I appreciated most about this column was that it introduced me to several new online marketplaces, such as Mercari and Goodwill Finds, expanding my options for secondhand shopping. Better still, it tipped me off to the existence of the "Used Items" button in Google Shopping, which makes it easy to search secondhand listings from many sellers at once.

But useful as these online markets are, I don't think they should be the automatic first choice for all my shopping. As my list shows, even when it's possible to find things used, it doesn't always make sense to buy them online. In my experience, this is particularly true for clothing. When I shop at a store, most of the clothes I try on don't fit and end up back on the racks. If I did all my shopping online, I'd most likely have to return most of the garments I bought, paying for shipping both ways—assuming returns were allowed at all. I can't see how shipping all those packages back and forth could possibly be better for the environment than driving to a thrift shop, trying on a bunch of garments, and buying only the ones that fit. (In fact, I currently have a credit at ThredUP that's been languishing in my account for over a year because I hesitate to spend it on something that probably won't fit. The site has measurements for some garments, but they aren't always accurate, which is how I ended up with the credit in the first place.)

Indeed, despite the bold headline "Why you should buy everything used," Coren admits that he came to much the same conclusion himself. He noted that with online resellers, "Quality varied. My preferred styles weren’t always available. Returns and shipping weren’t as seamless as Amazon. For low-cost items, it was sometimes cheaper to buy new than pay to ship even discounted used items." And there was one item—a replacement for a torn wet-suit glove—that he hadn't been able to find at all. 

Still, Coren found that for many categories, buying used was the right choice. In the wake of this experiment, his shopping habits have shifted: "Instead of buying new as the default, I’m searching first for used. If I do buy new, I often buy a higher-quality item since I know I’ll either keep it for as long as possible or sell it when I’m done." 

All of this is perfectly logical. In fact, it's exactly what I'd already been doing before reading his column. And that's why this piece, despite its intriguing title, didn't prove to be a game-changer for me. It was an interesting read, and it gave me some useful info about new places to look for secondhand goods. But it didn't convince me that I should be buying everything from online resellers. Instead, it reinforced my view that my current shopping habits—try shopping secondhand first, and go for higher quality if you have to buy new—are about as ecofrugal as you can get.