Buy Used

Buying new durable goods has a lower environmental impact than buying disposable goods, but it is possible to take this type of thinking even further. Buying used durable goods, instead of new, saves a perfectly decent product that one person no longer needs from actually becoming garbage. It also prevents the need to make a new one. The good news is that used objects are typically durable; if they weren’t, they wouldn’t have lasted long enough to show up on the secondhand market.

Buying used is important because it avoids the need to manufacture a new object, making the environmental benefits of buying used immense compared with any other form of purchasing. You may find the secondhand market—garage sales, antique dealers, thrift stores, and websites like eBay and Craigslist—to have many of the durable goods you might otherwise purchase new. The volume of used stuff out there is amazingly large—partly because we seem so wired to prefer new products—and there is a direct economic benefit to the consumer because goods on the secondhand market tend to cost less than they would new. So maybe the next time you want to buy a lamp, instead of buying a new, durable lamp, you could find that same amazing lamp on the secondhand market and cut having to produce a new lamp out of the picture.

Because the concept of buying durable goes hand in hand with the concept of buying used, it can be applied only to non-consumables (you can’t, and wouldn’t want to, buy a used pizza). When you buy clothing, consider going to a vintage clothing store instead of a department store or designer. Fashion cycles anyway, so wouldn’t it be more authentic to wear something actually from the 1960s or 1970s instead of something made today to mimic the style of a bygone era? When you buy furniture, why buy new stuff with paint-on scratches when you can get an antique with real ones that has already proven itself to last for decades?

It is right around this level of change—when new objects are not created—that our economy may start to suffer by current measurements of economic health. Even though the vintage shop or online retailer will be making money, manufacturers no longer will because no new product is made.

The final step in this progression from hyperconsumption to sustainable consumption is to reconsider the act of purchasing altogether.