How You Can Be Sustainable Without Being Trendy
Enter, patchwork and junkyards.
I hate how sustainability looks nowadays. It’s always pretty. Shiny. And new. It’s wrapped up in these packages, with marketing and perfect pictures. It all just feels so… unsustainable.
Hear me out, have you ever tried to buy some of these sustainable products? For instance, in the picture above — I’m going to bet that the total price tag on these products is well over $100. Sure, they may last a long time. And, of course, they are made with 100% organic cotton/bamboo/recycled something or other.
But is it sustainable for most people to spend $100 and not even get groceries? Is that the direction we want for this movement — making it only available to the rich or those who can/want to take out debt to ‘become’ sustainable? All I’m saying is, this is also a picture of a sustainable life:
Patchwork. A bit of this old shirt, a bit of that old rag. Do you see what I’m saying? Can we agree; that chair is rad, right? It’s upcycled or recycled — however you look at it. It likely cost someone more time and creativity than money.
I think we need more pictures that show the patchwork nature that’s true sustainability.
We are going at this thing the wrong way. We’re approaching it from the same mentality that got us into this mess. Sustainability isn’t just a new buzzword or a marketing technique. It’s a way of life: appreciating the planet so much that you don’t want to misuse its resources. It’s a way of using every item in your life as much as possible and then finding another way to use it!
That, in my eyes, is true sustainability. But, what that means is — it’s not going to look as pretty. It’s going to be messy, less than ideal. A little worn or rundown. A little…dare I say, mismatched.
There will be things that don’t seem to go together but, you’ll make them go together. There are going to be things that are sewn together, glued together, duct-taped together. But that means your life will look less like an Instagram photo and more like a patchwork quilt.
Or a junkyard.
Ok, maybe not quite like a junkyard. But your life may start to accumulate items that you want to toss — because they are “unusable” for their original purpose — but that could very well be used as parts to fix something else. Your spaces may not be as neat and tidy because you’ll keep things a little longer than Marie Kondo would recommend.
In other words, a corner of your life may become junkyard-esque. Not because you’re a hoarder. Because you are resourceful.
Welcome to the new (old) wave of sustainable living: junkyards and patchwork quilts.
Low-Cost Sustainability
I am not suggesting that we simply accept a low-cost sustainable way of life.
I am asking that we glorify it.
Why? Because humans have already produced a disgusting amount of stuff.
Why? Because every time we produce new stuff we generally have to use more raw materials which further deplete the planet’s resources.
Why? Because to be sustainable, you have to reduce first, then reuse, and then recycle. If those things all fail, then you buy something new.
Why? Because…. landfills.
Have you ever been to a city dump? Have you seen where your garbage goes?
I have. I sat there and watched truckload after truckload drive in and unload items that likely were rejected from second-hand stores due to scratches, dents, missing parts, holes, etc. — but which most assuredly had potential for a second (and third!) life.
If only there was a place to bring them. Besides the landfill.
A Sustainable Way for All Socioeconomic Communities
We’re setting a precedent in advertising and social media that makes it look like we can lead the same unsustainable, polluting lives we were leading by simply buying sustainable products. And it makes me queasy. It feels ridden with elitism, possibly racism, and seems inaccessible to people in lower-income brackets.
If everyone needs to hop on board the sustainability train — which, make no mistake, we all need to! — we cannot make it uncool or looked down up to patchwork sh*t together.
We should applaud this innovation instead! Let’s recognize and celebrate people for their ingenuity, “Wow, I never knew a wire oven shelf from an old, broken stove could double as a floating wall bookshelf!”
In other words, we need to make junkyards cool again — and accessible to all. Or, at least some version of a junkyard.
Free Rooms Needed
If I could grant one wish in my path to low-cost sustainability, it would be to provide every town or city district with a “free” room (or building, depending on the population).
This is not my idea. I encountered this at a school I attended — students simply called it “the free room.” It was very similar to a thrift or consignment store, except it was true to its name: everything was free.
You dropped off used stuff for free. You picked up used stuff for free.
This means people could drop off things that they normally wouldn’t drop off at a secondhand store. (Hint: most people would refer to this as “junk.”)
There were things like clothes with holes that could be mended and worn by someone with sewing skills. And appliances that one person couldn’t fix, but someone else probably could (or might use for parts). It was a world full of possibilities. You never knew what you’d find.
My Favorite Free Room Item
As you can tell, I frequented the free room. A lot. My favorite item I ever got from this magical room was a dish drying rack drainboard. Now, I know what you’re thinking: a dish drying rack drainboard? How boring is this lady?
I get it but just try to follow my enthusiasm here.
I already possessed the actual dish drying rack, but I was missing the plastic drainboard underneath. Needless to say, it wasn’t optimally functioning. I thought, “Well, I’m pretty strapped for cash plus I don’t want to buy a new set of these two things: I already have one piece of the dishwashing puzzle! I guess I’ll check the free room just in case.”
Lo and behold. I found a lone dish drying drainboard — with no drying rack.
Again, I know you can’t imagine the magic that I felt that day but trust me on this one. It was like a match made in heaven. But not by today’s sustainability standards.
Was the drainboard the same color as my dish rack? Nope, definitely not.
Was it obviously a different make and model? Absolutely.
But was it more sustainable to combine two disparate items to create the household item I needed than it would have been to buy a brand new one? YES!
I saved two pieces of plastic from the landfill that day. TWO! I also saved money. And I eliminated packaging.
But, here’s the downside. My kitchen looked stranger than most peoples’ kitchens. Martha Stewart would have shuddered in horror. And I was never going to achieve Instagram kitchen status with my patchwork dish dryer — I mean, god, just look at how everything perfectly matches.
There is no room for patchworking in a kitchen this pristine. Let’s change that.
After all, what is the cost for this fanciness?
The Better Way to Be Sustainable
In my opinion, there has to be a new wave of low-cost sustainability. And its backbone must not only include but actively celebrate:
- junkyards
- patchworking
- free rooms/freecycle.org
- and good ol’ fashioned ingenuity
It’s not that things can’t be clean and tidy, but we need to stop normalizing pictures of things so perfectly matched, shiny, and new — acting as if that’s the only eco-friendly path. That feels, to me, like the antithesis of sustainability.
Let’s get real. It reeks of privilege and money… and/or debt. There’s something wrong with the sustainability movement if you have to go into debt to live an eco-friendly lifestyle. There must be a better way.
The sooner we celebrate the patchwork quilt approach to sustainability, the sooner we’ll get to the real root of the issue — caretaking for our ego and our image over planetary reverence and functionality of items.
Sorry, I just call it how I see it. And from where I stand, we need to get a handle on this perfect sustainable product culture. We need to make it accessible to everyone. That means we cannot glorify $100 bamboo matching towels as the only path to sustainability, otherwise… we’ll never get out of the climate sinkhole.
Thanks for reading! If you liked this piece, maybe you’ll want to read more about sustainability and my holey pants in this article below:
