When it costs more to be sustainable, how can we make it accessible to everyone?

I’ve always been thrifty; I love a bargain, love a charity shop. My mum has this thing she does that I’ve (annoyingly and without meaning to) started doing: you pick up a garment, say “oh this looks nice!”, take a look at the pricetag, and if it’s too much, you say “for [insert price here], it better be!” and put it back.

Breaking this habit is hard; recognizing the value in spending a little more on a garment that will actually last is a difficult thing to do. But it’s damn near impossible when you don’t have any money.

When I first landed in London in my early 20s, I was living off of savings. It took me 3 months to find a job in my industry, after doing three unpaid internships back-to-back (another privilege: I’d saved up for the better part of a year prior to leaving by living with my parents; I know that’s a benefit that not everyone has). When I landed a job at a startup, I told myself I was going to make it work—even as I realized that my paycheque fell well, well below the London Living Wage.

Out of savings and low on money, I spent the better part of my first three years in London dipping in and out of credit card debt. I bought my clothes at places I could afford; the ASOS sale rack, Primark, and charity shops. Even as I read about Primark’s abuse of women in sweatshops, I still shopped there (although I did feel worse about it).

When I moved out of my uncle’s apartment (another privilege—having someone in London willing to house me for three months on an air mattress in the living room), I did it by tube, taking the two suitcases I owned back and forth from the north side of the Northern Line all the way to Tooting, in the South. I couldn’t afford a moving van, so I took 4 round-trip journeys over a weekend, before realizing I didn’t have any bedding.

So with £40 that my uncle had given me, I stopped in Primark and got a bed set, duvet, and pillows. They were a bit scratchy, but I wasn’t buying them for quality; I was buying them because they were accessible. Their low price, open hours (this was 5pm on a Sunday) and location near my house weren’t just convenient for me; they were paramount to making sure I got what I needed to sleep that night. The same way that if the subway had been closed that day—and parts of it were; I’m remembering a rail replacement bus I left my suitcase on—I would have had to find another way, or move another day.

The difference between these two examples though, is that in one case, the workaround is something I’d consider a net positive, and the other, a negative. The problem of not being able to get from location A to B is solved by government-issued programs like the Underground and TFL. The problem of people not being able to afford clothes is “solved” by companies cutting costs in other places, like fast fashion brands like Shein and Temu finding loopholes in legal systems, in order to force labour.

This all happened at a time where I was in a different place in my life. I now enjoy a different set of circumstances; I have a much better-paying job, having been in my industry for 10+ years. I have a flat where I share expenses with my partner; food is cheaper when you’re splitting the food, rent, and bills. I’ve been able to build up my savings back from when I was going into debt each month.

All this is massively weight-lifting, mentally; when you’re not thinking about a lack of money all the time, you have more space to think clearly about it. You get to think about where you want your savings to go—because you actually have money saved now. When I first moved to London, I didn’t know how long it would be until I could save again.

I don’t think “Past Charlotte” was unconcerned about sustainability, climate change, or the environment. I just think that it wasn’t—it couldn’t have been—top-of-mind for her. Thinking about sustainability couldn’t have been one of her key concerns; not above food or rent.

I remember at one point in my life, reading this Terry Pratchett quote from Discworld, and it infuriated me:

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of okay for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

“But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”

I remember that quote knocked me down, because yeah—of course I wanted to invest in high-quality pieces. I didn’t want clothes that were going to wear out easily, leading me to an endless cycle of consumerism of buy>wear>ruin>throw out. But I didn’t have the money to buy decent things—which was probably leading me to over-consumption.

When I think about what can be done about this—how do we make sustainable fashion accessible to everyone, not just the “fifty dollar boot” crowd—I often come up blank. Of course, systemic issues need to be addressed: fair wages for garment workers, harsher punishments and boycotts for fast-fashion brands who force labour, and incentives for companies to adopt sustainable practices. But if I’m being honest, I don’t hold a lot of faith in insitutions; I see far too many exposures of greenwashing campaigns that putting more pressure on corporations to do the right thing feels pretty useless.

So, what can we as conumers do to fix this? The common advice for shopping sustainably seems to fall down here. Some advice, such as buying local, or investing in high-quality basic pieces that you then can dress up or down with accessories, presumes customers have money to do such things. If the advice is to upcycle or mend things, that assumes that people have quality pieces to start with. The most laughable for me was renting clothes: you want me to pay for the privilege of wearing something for a few weeks? And I don’t even get to keep it?

Buying second-hand is a favourite of mine for accessible quality, but you can’t rely on it indefinitely; you’re at the mercy of whatever people choose to donate. Even if you find charity shops in posher areas, there’s no guaruntee of finding things you like (or even in your size—as a size 14/16, I can tell you I’ve never found anything I liked in Chelsea bigger than a size 12). Depop and Vinted have worked much better for me in that regard, and I wish that online retailers had been more common 10 years ago.

Something that didn’t result in a ton of quality pieces during this time, but was certainly cheaper, was that my roomies and I would sometimes go through each others “donations” to charity before they left the house, kind of like an informal “swap” party. It wasn’t always helpful, as we weren’t all the same size, but it meant sometimes getting a piece or two for free. And there would be days where I’d get out my sewing machine, and if the girls needed repairs on items they loved—small tears, hemmed jeans, missing buttons—I’d see what I could do. (When you have no money, you learn how to be creative pretty fast!)

I hate the fact that as consumers, sometimes those of us without ample spending money are left out of the push for sustainability. And I know that, in a cost of living crisis, this is probably the last thing that people want to talk about (because who wants to feel bad about the purchases we’re making, the way I did at Primark?). But I think that, with sustainability in mind, we should be ensuring that affordability is part of the equation. Sustainability won’t work as a movement unless everyone’s included; it shouldn’t be a privilege to be able to consider sustainable practices when shopping. I’m looking forward to a future where sustainability isn’t a luxury for the affluent; it’s accessible to all.