Resale events like the Boulder County Kids sale do more than save people money. They also help keep items out of landfills, reduce carbon emissions and save a considerable amount of water.
A report on Fashion Industry Waste Statistics from Edge Fashion Intelligence states "second to oil, the clothing and textile industry is the largest polluter in the world."
Gina Burrows, mom of 4-year-old twin girls and sales leader of The Boulder County Kids Sale — run by Boulder County Parents of Twins and More (BCPTM) — estimates the sale has saved 77,399,629 gallons of water.
A single piece of clothing takes 2,700 liters or 713 gallons of water to produce, according to the ecological footprint bible's overview on The Conscious Challenge.
Naomi Curland, board member and chair of the zero-waste committee at Sustainable Resilient Longmont, said, "We can think of water as one component of all the resources that are going into the manufacturing process. That includes the water it takes to grow the cotton and the water used in the fabric manufacturing process.
Water isn’t the only concern for the sales operators. Plastics like those in the toys, bikes and baby items at the sale also are significant contributors to pollution, due to the tie to the fossil fuel industry.
"In theory, people think, 'I want to buy this new for my kid and have it fresh and shiny but kids grow out of things so fast; toys, clothing and shoes. They're growing out of it and phasing through it so quickly, it gets maybe a year at most. Sometimes six months or less before they're tired of it,'" Curland said.
The short life of toys in a single home makes Curland question why new toys are made.
"The idea that we would be producing all these new toys, so many of them being plastic which doesn't have a good end life and it doesn't have a good production life either and is coming out of fossil fuel industries is problematic,” she said. “We're making plastics out of petroleum.”
In an effort to keep toys out of the landfill, the Boulder County Kids sale focuses on repurposing and reselling “so we're not continually making new toys for each generation of kids coming through our world,” Curland said.
Since 2010, the BCPTM sold 479 bikes, 16,588 toys and 189,579 items of clothing. In addition to their efforts to reduce the use of plastics, the consumption of water and their carbon footprint, the organizers hope to make the sale a zero-waste event.
Becky Tyer, who has 5-year-old fraternal twins, is a sales committee member and the treasurer of BCPTM. She contributed to the idea of expanding the repurposing efforts of the sale to make it a zero-waste event. This includes recycling materials used at the sale and items brought in by patrons such as plastic bottles. It also means setting up composting bins for organic materials discarded while individuals shop.
Curland said zero-waste is a goal for Sustainable Resilient Longmont and the greater community. It can be challenging to be truly zero-waste, but the idea is to get as close as possible.
"I think zero-waste is a goal. It's an aim not to be putting anything into the landfill. It becomes waste when we can't reuse it again. So repurposing, or upcycling, is the best thing we can do to be zero-waste. It's good to give products another life before they have to go to the next phase."
Since the Boulder County Kids Sale is a smaller event than some of the other resale events in the area, Burrows said operators can be more conscientious in how they tag items and what they're reusing.
"Because we are a smaller size, we can be more thoughtful about the way that we organize our sale. We use, for example, safety pins instead of the tagging gun, so we don't use that type of plastic, and all of our tags are paper or cardboard so we can recycle them, and we reuse all of the hangers," Burrows said. "We also take more care about items and the things that we sell. We're very specific about the quality of the items that we sell to reuse multiple times. Which I think makes a big difference. Everything has to be working so it really can be reused by another family," she said.
The sale has been online for the last two events but returns in person on September 25, 2021. For more information about the Boulder County Kids Sale and BCPTM, please visit https://bouldertwins.org/boulder_county_kids_sale/.