I'm conflicted when it comes to purging unwanted items. On one hand, I love the feeling I get when the unloved, unwanted, and unworn items are gone from my closet and my life--the purging "high", as Alasse so accurately names it. I might feel a twinge of guilt over wasting my money, but I can afford my regular purges without any major damage to my way of life.
But I'm starting to realize that my purging euphoria has a much bigger dark side than I'd like to admit. It's easy to forget the top I so blithely toss into the trash is the result of someone else's labour--usually a woman, or child--in a third-world country, often working under appalling conditions. The labels in the rubble of that Bangladesh factory haunt me because those are exactly the kinds of items that I'm inclined to purge without a backward glance. My closet churn feeds the fast, cheap fashion industry.
I've also come to realize most of my "gently used" items do not get recycled within my community or my country. Local thrift stores only put a fraction of what they receive back out on the floor; the vast majority of items get bundled and sold by the pound to jobbers who then re-sell the bundles in other countries--or the bundles just get dumped in the nearest landfill. Indigenous textile manufacturing in many third-world countries is fast disappearing, along with the associated jobs and families who produced the raw materials, because buying cheap bundles of discards and reselling them is easier and more profitable.
So that's why I feel conflicted about closet purges; I love the look of my closet after a good purge, but I can't shake the feeling that I was just acting like a stupid, greedy, and entitled member of a first-world country when I bought all that stuff in the first place...
