Sustainability threatened as thrifting prices rise in Copenhagen

Sustainable fashion has peaked in the last few years, along with the focus on consumers' climate responsibility. Secondhand clothing stores, also known as “thrift shops”, are all over Copenhagen, where hip areas such as Nørrebro, are floating with shops that offer trendy and sustainable clothing.

Many of the younger generation indulge in finding the most exotic pieces. Among them, Generation Z is especially represented in washed-out jumpers, fake furs and worn-out jeans. 

Tourists, like 27-year-old Elisha Foxley from England and 34-year-old Angela Luca from Italy, are two of the many thrifters on the main street of Nørrebro.

For Luca, the climate is not the main motivation, but a bonus feature of her greener fashion choices.

“It’s not that I don’t care, but it’s more on the financial side for me,” she says.

The 34-year old almost exclusively buys secondhand. In that way, she can avoid paying full price for an item she couldn't afford for new, while adding unique additions to her wardrobe.  

“It also makes it more fun when you find something good in a vintage shop. It’s too easy to go into Zara and buy something,” explains Foxley, “ it’s boring,” she adds. 

Swayed by fast fashion

However, thrift shops are highly priced in Copenhagen, averaging from 150 to 250 DKK for outworn t-shirts and tops, and reaching up to 800 DKK for a preowned jacket.

“The price is very high,” shares Foxley. 

“The annoying thing about vintage nowadays is that it’s often more expensive than, for example Shein, so it gets rid of that motivation. People who would shop for the prices get swayed to buy fast fashion instead,” she adds. 

For the heightened cost of fast-fashion items in vintage shops, professor Philip Beske-Janssen, an associate professor of sustainable supply chain management at SDU, explains which factors could lead to the spiked prices, customers like Foxley and Luca are experiencing. 

Electricity, rent, and employees’ salaries are part of the production cost for vintage shop owners, which “cost more than Shein needs to pay for their people. In Denmark, it’s just a lot more expensive to run these things,” Janssen says.

The Professor hopes that the market will regulate itself to balance the unreasonable prices of these brands, 

” Vintage clothing shops are a good way of enhancing sustainability and circularity. But it doesn't make them sustainable just because they're being resold a second time.”

The struggles of recycling textiles

The increasing prices may challenge the sustainable progress we have seen, if consumers start leaning to the cheap shopping option delivered from, among others, Chinese fast-fashion websites, with incredibly poor quality clothing.

Textile waste is particularly dire in Europe. According to European Environmental Agency expert on Circular Economy, Sanna Due, the Europeans consume 90 kg of textiles per year - including second-hand shops and flea markets, producing 16 kg of waste yearly.

The University of Roskilde also underlines EU’s high waste, while the average dane consumes 35 percent more textiles than the global average. 

Sanna Due explained in a live podcast on Monday that poor materials from cheap clothing are costly, thus, hard to recycle. This adds another layer on why quality matters in the recycling process.

Among the European waste, “only 15 percent is collected for recycling and only 1 percent goes back to recycling,” the EEA expert states. 

Rebranding sustainable fashion

It is very common to stumble upon ultra-fast fashion brands like H&M, Zara and Shein in thrift shops. Secondhand shops will sometimes remove the cheap tags and rebrand the items as a sustainable choice, while selling the item to a higher price than the original price. 

The two thrifters are worried about the quality of these brands, and ideally prefer to buy fewer but longer-lasting products. 

Tina Donnerberg, Head of Recycling in Red Cross, is also worried about the ultrafast-fashion brand and says, 

“It’s characterized by a lot of seasons every year, with cheap and low-quality clothing.”

Donnerberg explains how the Red Cross has experienced a rise in poor quality items around their charity shops in Copenhagen in general. But the real change is not in their hands, according to the chief:

“Regarding Temu and Shein, and other Chinese brands, I know they are working in the EU to find some guidelines to help avoid it, because it’s not the job of the secondhand shops to sort these brands out - the EU should make sure we only let in the quality in Denmark, which we want,” Donnerberg says.

This story is meant for an audience on the Copenhagen Post. https://cphpost.dk/