It’s all the rage to declutter and minimize your living space all thanks to a charmingly cute Japanese woman named Marie Kondo. She first came out with a book, ‘the life-changing magic of tidying up,’ three years ago and only recently did Netflix release a series on her philosophies and techniques. The series, ‘Tidying Up with Marie Kondo,’ came out on New Years Day, the perfect time of year to make positive changes in life.

You’ve likely seen the series or heard about the phenom through news or social media. No doubt you have friends who have posted on an image of all of their items that they are letting go of bundled up in large, black garbage bags stacked in a big pile preparing to exit your friend’s house and life; or maybe that describes how you just spent your Polar Vortex weekend.

All I know is that there are piles and piles, mountains and mountains of stuff/junk/garbage/waste/clothes being taken somewhere as the realization has just struck that many meaningless things in our living spaces serve little to no purpose. You may have felt a slight anxiety looking around your closets and basements to discover that you yourself, to some degree, have the same problems as the clients on the Netflix show, trust me, we all do. Things acquire and it’s hard to let go.

In fact, most of us have that very same problem of having too much stuff, so much stuff that although an initial hit of happy-feeling oxytocin  is received when initially purchasing said too much stuff, that after some time we forget about it and the individual item gets entirely forgotten about because it is buried in a closet of hundreds of other items.

After piling up your clothes, books, knick-knacks, etc. and holding them close to you and questioning whether they spark joy, Marie Kondo’s signature philosophy, and you find that the majority in fact do not spark joy, then what happens to those poor, unloved things?

In the second episode of the Netflix special the family reported that around 150 garbage bags of stuff left their house – that is a lot of stuff… but where did it go? NPR reported that a lot of that stuff has been going to thrift stores.  That can be good, but thrift stores before the effects of MK were drowning in our used clothes, most of which gets put on clothing racks for sale for a while, weeks or months, and then sometimes gets shipped abroad to developing nations to be sold there, or sometimes is processed into secondary items for sale such as industrial cleaning rags or is shredded up to be used in homes as insulation.

Both of those outcomes can be viewed as positive for the environment, but they are not the only results of people shedding their unwanted junk. According to this article in the Saturday Evening Post, Americans on average throw out 81 lbs. of textile waste (clothes) per year. That’s per person, per year. And that was before the Marie Kondo Effect, imagine the amount of waste being sent to thrift stores and landfill just in January 2019 alone, thre result of those that have taken inspiration from Netflix.

As you prepare to purge your closets and storage spaces, please be aware of where you are taking your items, for they may spend the rest of their days there, and their days are long if they are made of plastic or from plastic. Most clothes are synthetic these days, or at least partially, meaning they have a lifespan of possibly hundreds of years. That goes for your home goods, too.

Follow this site for the next post about how you ended up with such a packed closet in the first place and life changes that you can make so that it doesn’t happen again.