Week 7: Organization.
I hate clutter. I hate clutter but I like stuff. To make matters worse, I am bad at getting rid of stuff. I also love organizing and you can’t organize if you don’t have stuff.
So just to recap there:
- I hate clutter
- I like stuff
- I am bad at getting rid of stuff
- I like to organize said stuff
Now that that’s out of the way, we can get to the juicy… “stuff”. As you may have guessed, this week I have been tasked with contemplating organization. I find organizing things to be therapeutic. The feeling of completing a task that is not only visually appealing but incredibly useful does wonders for my Virgo brain. I organize my shirts by warmth and then by color, I keep my wool socks and my cotton socks in separate drawers, and I always put my pens back in chromatic order. I even do things with organizational order – I always brush my teeth before washing my face because sometimes you get that toothpaste foam in the corners of your mouth and then you have to wash it off.
So, because organization is a part of my day to day life, reflecting on it overall seemed like too broad a brush to paint this post with. I decided instead to focus on my most recent and largest organizational event: packing.
Even though I don’t go home for a week and a half, I decided on Sunday that the best use of my time would be productive procrastination which led me to pack nearly all of my clothes. I packed three bags – one with winter clothes, one with summer clothes, and one with my dog’s sweater and his bumble bee Halloween costume that I didn’t think he would need while he stays in Nashville with my sister. If you’re wondering, yes I did vomit a bit at the fact that I purchased a Halloween costume for my dog, but he looked very cute in it.
Every time I have packed up all of my belongings to move during college, I have gotten rid of clothes. It’s less of a thing that I want to do and more of a task that I force myself to do so that I don’t end up with six tee yellow shirts, all of which I “need” because they have slight variations in shade and neckline. I always try to donate my clothes to Goodwill, but in writing this post, I realized that I really have no idea what happens to those clothes once I drive away. So, I decided to do a little digging.
Here are some things I found:
- Americans throw 10.5 million tons of clothing into landfills each year
- Only 7% of the population buys second hand clothes
- Only 28% of the population donates used goods
This means that only a quarter of the number of people who donate clothes buy second hand clothing. Additionally, charities like Goodwill and the Salvation Army sell less than 20% of the clothing donated to them. The rest ends up in the hands of for-profit textile recyclers.
So let’s break that down. If we divide our disgraceful waste evenly across US citizens we get roughly 64lbs of clothing waste per person annually. This waste in reality would not be equally divided person to person, but for simplicity’s sake let’s assume it is.
That’s a lot of clothing!
According to The Atlantic, Americans donate 15% of their used clothes. This means that if we distribute the used clothes evenly like we did above, each American gets rid of about 75lbs of used clothes annually and donates only 11.25 of those pounds.
Here are some ways to think about those weights:
So the next time you think about throwing away your old clothes, try giving them away to your friends, recycling or donating them. They might not get bought but it’s better than throwing away more bars of gold.
This is the sixth in a series of posts From Quarantine. Most posts from quarantine are prompted by Aisling Quigley’s Data Storytelling class at Macalester College. This is one of those posts.