I saw a video claiming that clothes in America are only worn six times, in average. That horrified me
I wouldn’t be surprised if a large percentage of clothes bought in rich countries are worn once or never.
But I say that as someone who gets told by his wife that he needs to throw clothes that fall apart away, so it’s just a guess ;)
As an example, say 8 out of 10 people have 7 sets of clothes, one for each day of the week, and use the same sets for a whole year. The remaining 2 out of 10 use a new set of clothes every day, so they go through 365 sets of clothes in a year. That comes to clothes being used an average of 4.64 times:
$ python -c 'print(
# average used times in a year
(
(
8 # people
* 7 # sets of clothes
* (365 / 7) # used times in a year
) + (
2 # people
* 365 # sets of clothes
* 1 # used times in a year
)
) / (
8 # people
* 7 # sets of clothes
+
2 # people
* 365 # sets of clothes
)
)'
4.643765903307888Anyway, it's just an example to show how that number can be easily influenced by a small minority. The real numbers are going to be different.
On the other end, I’m also surprised by the “one-year” thing: most of my clothes are more than five-year-old and they are fine. For underwear and t-shirts, I typically wear them once a week.
Because these are the minority of clothes despite being used by the majority of people in the example I gave, changing the timeframe doesn't really change the average. Changing the example to use a 5 year timeframe, for instance, only changes the average to 4.92.
> not 20% of the population
Right, and it also ought to be less than 80% that buys clothes no more often than once per year or per 5 years. Both extremes are exaggerated to not have to insert more tiers than needed into the example.
Enough. Nobody actually wants these. It's direct to landfill for 99% of the things you're giving away.
I start saying no, not that it impacts items already ordered. Figure if they start ending up with thousands of t-shirts after an event they'll stop ordering them.