What do mall rats and plastic bags have in common?

Mall rats wear clothes, and new clothes wear plastic bags.

Every piece of clothing you purchase comes individually packaged in plastic. Every. Single. Piece.  You know how when you order something online it arrives individually wrapped in plastic? And maybe you think, well that makes sense, don’t want anything to damage it in transit.   No big deal, right? 

Wrong. Biiiig deal. Because your online purchase is one of millions. It, like every other piece of clothing that is purchased online or in a store, was individually wrapped in plastic.

The challenge is this: during shipping, clothes can get damaged. Moisture can make clothes mildewy when they arrive. Imperfections in the cardboard box can cause delicate knit garments to pull. But as long as the total clothing markets (including both eCommerce and brick and mortar stores) total somewhere in the neighborhood of $160 billion and each of those items is being individually packaged, that’s a lot of extra, unnecessary, and overall bad plastic.

“But plastic bags get recycled!” you claim. “Surely, no company looking to survive a recession would spend all that money on plastic bags only to throw them away!” And you would be right: it is a dumb system.

How do I know this? I spent some time working in a retail store and one of our responsibilities was to unpack clothes from the plastic that they arrived in. That picture up top is one I took after I finished unpacking about 8 boxes of clothes. It’s a plastic bag full of plastic bags. And it doesn’t get recycled.

Plastic packaging exists everywhere. Not just for clothes, but for just about anything you buy. And it doesn’t matter whether you can see the plastic in which it was shipped—chances are, it was still there.

So what is to be done about all this plastic? Changing the ways of a multi-hundred-billion-dollar industry will take some time, but the awareness of hidden plastic in our purchases, apparel and otherwise.  For instance, my day job is at an apparel company called United By Blue where we use rapidly renewing banana fiber paper instead of plastic on each of our shirts (yes, yes, shameless plug, but the bags are really cool).  And the Plastic Disclosure Project is also increasing transparency related to plastic both in retail and other sectors.

As of yet, the only way to avoid buying clothes that were individually packaged in plastic is to a) ask your retailer, b) not go shopping, or c) buy vintage! Some of the best vintage clothes were around before plastic, and precious few are every re-packaged in plastic (based on highly scientific evidence of walking into the backroom of more than one vintage shop).