Second-Hand Challenge
Here’s a challenge – take one hundred dollars and buy yourself a whole new outfit to wear to an event that celebrates sustainable living.
The challenge was issued by Climate Club Aotearoa, and I was delighted to take them up on it. They’re a relatively new charity which started out as a passion project amongst young friends. Anyone who thinks Gen Z is all about fast fashion and cheap knockoffs isn’t seeing the whole picture because here is a whole cohort of enthusiasts finding daily, practical ways to fight climate change.
I love a hot tip for making a difference. Most of us would like to do good things for the planet, but don’t know where to start. We’ve also been told individual effort is futile – that we can’t compost and recycle our way out of this climate crisis, and only corporates and governments can truly make a difference. Given how slow they are to make meaningful systemic change, we can end up feeling paralysed and overwhelmed.
But Emily Mabin Sutton and her Climate Club team are quick to point out this is not an either/or situation – we can do both. Individuals can have an impact on communities, communities can influence what businesses and governments do, which then loops back to change even more people’s behaviour.
And what better place to start than with the choices we make about what to wear every time we get up in the morning?
The scary statistics are familiar. Around 180,000 tonnes of clothes end up in New Zealand landfills each year and these textiles take decades – even centuries – to break down, releasing greenhouse gases along the way.
On the upside? Reducing that waste can have real impact - just a kilo of clothing, reused instead of dumped, saves 11kgs of CO2. Meaning we can radically reduce our personal carbon footprint just by switching to buying second-hand.
On Climate Club Challenge day, I arrived at the party - held appropriately in one of Auckland’s bigger second-hand emporiums – in $93 worth of favourite recent finds.
There was a metallic green pleated skirt found at an independent recycled clothing boutique in Takapuna - $39. A black satin top by a well-known NZ designer - $4 from an SPCA op-shop. A vintage crystal necklace - $10 at my local Hospice Shop. And for an extra layer, a woolly-but-not-at-all-scratchy jumper from one of those stores where people rent a rack and sell their clothes direct to the buyer - $40.
Which brought me in under the $100 limit nicely. And then, because it was a cold day and a party, I also wore the velvet coat I found that time in a Hamilton recycle boutique and carried the designer handbag I bought for next to nothing on TradeMe.
Also at the party was a stunning woman in a rented evening gown, another in an exquisite outfit featuring shirt, trousers and blazer in tonal shades of blue, and various young women and men looking effortlessly chic in their treasure-hunted finds.
Stories were swapped, outfits admired, videos made and uploaded to Insta, as is the way. I mentioned to someone that I’d been op-shopping since the first op-shop opened in my small town in the 1970s, and there was wonderment at the concept of a world before second-hand stores, just jumble sales and hand-me-downs.
A time before we knew that a new (old) frock might be part of what we do to save the planet.