making a zero-waste pouf.
things fall apart, but they don't disappear.
The textile recycling drop-off tent is a block away from the farmer’s market and never not full, but on the particular Sunday that I visited it, the tower of discarded clothing was especially grotesque. A dozen or more bloated plastic trash bags were already stacked when I showed up not all the way changed out of my pajamas around 9 am. I emptied my cloth tote into a propped open bag, shaking out a small collection of free t-shirts and too small leggings and shrunken dress pants, items I’d culled slowly over time and added one by one to a tote hanging from a doorknob in my office.
Later that afternoon I stayed back from a frigid park run to put away laundry and reorganize my kids’ wardrobe after a week away. I righted a slumped stack of small pants and rearranged the shelves to better accommodate the sizes of growing children. I filled a second tote, this time with shorts and t-shirts too small and too soiled for anyone else to wear. I put away sheets and decided to part with pillow cases and a twin sheet gone yellow and threadbare and I added them to the tote, too. I stashed snow pants on a top shelf of a closet and was reminded of a beloved blanket I took out of circulation a year or two ago when I discovered a large threadbare patch in the middle of it, and wasn’t sure how to part with it.
By the time I finished with my new year cleaning ritual, it was after dark and too late to drop any items at the textile recycling tent. Besides, the sheet and pillowcases and that big worn out blanket aren’t things anyone’s supposed to drop off there, anyway. I thought of the tower of bags I’d seen that morning, and wondered how much of the sidewalk it covered by closing time. Those bags were destined to go somewhere, of course—from Brooklyn sidewalks to the shores of Ghana, most likely—where they would become someone else’s problem. Just days earlier, on January 1, a fire had devastated the Kantamanto Market in Accra, Ghana. Kantamanto is the largest secondhand market in the world, receiving and recirculating millions of clothing items from the Global North every week—clothing exactly like what I and my neighbors had jettisoned to the sidewalk with a New-Year-fueled enthusiasm. I couldn’t stomach the bag of extraneous stuff remaining in my apartment and I couldn’t stomach adding it to a fresh sidewalk heap. Things fall apart is the thing, but they don’t disappear.