If you've ever been to a Kilo sale before, then you'll know that even just buying a couple of Kilos of clothes is enough to land you with those bag imprints all up your arm. But if you knew that the average household in the UK creates around 70kg of textile waste per year, you might think twice about raiding those high street sales. It's a pretty mad statistic – people are dropping garms in the bin as quickly as Nike are dropping new trainer collabs – and it's causing mountain ranges of textile landfill (overall, 350K tons – the same as about 100,000 elephants).

It's not just bad for landfill though, as your boxfresh shoes might also be leaving a colossal carbon footprint. On average, each household’s clothing intake generates the same amount of carbon as driving a car for 6,000 miles, which is about as green as your jet-black jeans. Oh, and it's not doing a heck of a lot of good for water waste either – each household uses the equivalent of 1000 full bathtubs, which unless you are meticulously scrubbed seems bucket loads: literally.

Enough of the bad news, though. The ace news is that you can make a difference and at the same time get unique, timeless, one-off pieces that aren't creating new emissions, just by buying pre-owned. Even just extending the life cycle of clothes for nine months longer would save five billion quid annually, but the beauty of vintage is that you may find pieces from thirty, forty or fifty years ago (or hundreds if you are into medieval chic). There's no reason that most clothes should be binned, and it's way more fun to rummage through the idiosyncratic designs of the past rather than buy generic, churned-out clothes from drab retailers playing tech house (no names).

But, wide-eyed intrepid fashionista, where you can shop for vintage? Well, I mean we obviously have a pretty good answer for you – right here at TVC. Not only do we just sell pre-owned but we are also completely sustainable, baby! Our packaging is now one hundred percent recycled, meaning that everything that the postman drops into your eager mitts – from the shirt to the shipping label – is being used again in a new life. It's literally a win-win-win: better garms, less waste and good eco-friendly points that you can score next time it all goes a bit political at an afters. No garm done!

SOURCE: http://www.wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/VoC%20FINAL%20online%202012%2007%2011.pdf