Your ultimate guide to the magic of sparkles and how to shine eco-friendly

Our wardrobes have been expanding and yet we only wear 20% of the items we have. The rest 80% are on a clear path to landfills.

Once old clothing gets to landfills and decomposes, it produces a greenhouse gas called methane which is five times more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Sounds pretty bad, doesn’t it?

How do we start tackling this problem on an individual level? The first step is awareness, and the second step is your closet clean-up. As you purge your closet and old fashion habits, pay attention to the clothing you no longer want to wear. It’s probably in the Donate pile, waiting for the final verdict.

The Donate pile might be the largest among your castaway clothing. New York and New Jersey Goodwill stores alone collect 85.7 million pounds of clothes every year. Unfortunately, according to Smart, an association of used clothing collectors, only 20-25% of this clothing is sold through thrift stores. Why? Charity stores have huge problems with receiving items that are destroyed, solid, and unusable. The remaining 80% of the received donations go on a journey to local landfills and third world countries like Pakistan, Ghana, and Malaysia.

This question popped up in the mind of a talented filmmaker Andrew Morgan, and a great documentary was born in 2015, titled True Cost. As the creators describe it – “True Cost is a groundbreaking documentary film that pulls back the curtain on the untold story and asks us to consider, who really pays the price for our clothing?”.
We don’t want to give away spoilers. Please take some time to watch it, and it will change your life as a fashion consumer. The great news is that True Cost is available on Amazon Prime, and you can also watch short interviews with people who were interviewed for the film on www.truecostmovie.com. But we do want to explain the most important issues raised in the movie, because Sparkpick owes its existence to True Cost, and makes its mission to help solve them.