It’s Aliiiive! My Passion Project to Make Secondhand Shopping Faster & Easier

It’s been a minute! I’ve been up to a few different things since my last update about the beauty that is the Canadian recycling system:

  1. Going full-time with my sustainable events business
  2. Planning my wedding, then re-planning it because pandemic (2 weeks to the big day!)
  3. Launching the project this post is about!

I’ve written extensively before about my love of secondhand shopping, my ethical motivation for shopping secondhand, and how I think the world would be a better place if the people who had useful stuff and the people who want that stuff had a better way to get connected.

I’ve had an idea in my head for a few years about a way to make secondhand shopping easier, but I only worked on it intermittently and didn’t know how to bring it into reality. Enter my amazing fiance, Mark, a coding wizard with mad technical skillz, and together we brought my dream into reality earlier this year.

So I unveil to you (drumroll please)…

Hand holding iPhone showing homepage of Secondarie website that reads "The easiest way to find secondhand goods online" above a box containing search filters.

Secondarie, the easiest way to find secondhand goods online.

What is Secondarie?

Secondarie is a search tool that makes online secondhand shopping faster and easier by searching multiple marketplaces at once and showing you all the results in one easy-to-use interface.⁠

One of the major challenges of online secondhand shopping is having to go to multiple websites or apps and constantly repeat your search in order to find the right item. It’s tedious and time-consuming, creating a significant barrier for those who may want to shop secondhand but can’t spend hours searching for the thing they need.

For secondhand to be a practical first choice, we knew it had to get easier and less time-consuming for each of us to find the specific items we need.⁠ That’s what we aim to do with Secondarie. Our goal is to make choosing “secondhand first” just as easy as shopping at a big box store or ordering from a mega-warehouse.⁠

Secondarie also makes it easier to reach a larger audience when selling secondhand items online. Instead of having to cross-post to multiple marketplaces, you can simply post your item to one of the platforms that Secondarie pulls from, and it will be visible to everyone who searches on Secondarie.

Secondarie currently compiles results from:

  • Craigslist
  • eBay
  • Poshmark
  • Goodwill Auctions
  • Bonanza
  • ThredUP

And we’re adding more sources all the time.

We’d love to get feedback from secondhand aficionados. Check out Secondarie here and let us know what you think! And for the latest updates on new features and search tips, follow Secondarie on Instagram or Facebook.

It’s Clothing Swap Time Again!

Are you depressed by winter doldrums? Is your life an endless and unvarying gray cloud? Do you find yourself wearing a burlap sack every day because you just can’t muster the energy to care?

Screenshot of registration websiteFret not, my pretties! It’s clothing swap time again! And we’re very optimistic, so we’re calling it SpringSwap18. Suck it, winter.

Join us at New Day Craft on Wednesday, Feb. 28 from 6–8pm for a jubilant evening of apparel, accessories, cider, friendship and more. Due to our cozy space, there are only 30 spots available, so sign up now!

See the deets and register >>

How to Start Spending Ethically

Woman holding three shopping bags over her shoulder

Recently a friend reached out to me about her goal for 2018. She wants to focus on making her spending more ethical, and she asked if there were any tips I could provide.

My friend is already an incredibly thoughtful and globally-conscious person, so I didn’t need to start at the very beginning. (“You may not have realized that the products you buy are manufactured by people, and they’re made out of natural resources provided by our planet…”) I remembered a post I wrote a few years ago called The Beginner’s Guide to Ethical Shopping, which focuses on how to evaluate the ethical qualities of a specific brand. While that information is still helpful, I realized I hadn’t written a holistic post about how to change one’s shopping routine overall.

After thinking about what practical tips I could give my friend, here are the steps I came up with for how to start spending ethically:

1. Buy less

The best way to reduce the environmental impact of your shopping habits is simply to buy less. This graphic created by my friend Elizabeth at The Note Passer was incredibly helpful to me when I began my ethical lifestyle journey:

Flow chart: Do I really need it? Does it need to be new? Can I buy it ethically?

This graphic is from 2013, so some of the secondhand companies listed are out of date, but the thought process remains the same.

The most important purchases to curtail are those of brand new items. New items have the highest environmental impact because they use new natural resources and require energy to be produced and distributed. Products made with recycled materials have a lower impact, but recycling still requires a great amount of energy and often some new resources to be combined with recycled material.

I was never a big shopper even before I began focusing on ethical consumption, but I found that as I’ve focused on cutting down on new purchases over the years, my purchases of even secondhand items have gone down as well. I’ve gotten much more into the habit of asking myself if I truly need to own something, or if I can borrow it or make do without.

This adaptation of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs into the Buyerarchy of Needs, designed by Sarah Lazarovic, has also been a helpful guide for me:

Pyramid from bottom to top: Use what you have, borrow, swap, thrift, make, buy

Now, you may have rightly realized that in the short-term, the strategy of buying less may not provide direct economic benefits to people employed by manufacturing. However, the culture of rampant consumption leads to long-term effects I consider far more harmful and significant, effects which require a significant economic pivot in order to be resolved.

Constantly growing consumption leads to pressures for factories, and therefore workers, to produce more products faster and cheaper, leading to lower wages and more stressful and dangerous working conditions. Unbridled production also leads to environmental degradation, often in locations with minimal environmental regulations. (Rivers running red and purple with dye in India come to mind.) This kind of poorly regulated manufacturing can lead to unhealthy or unpleasant living conditions. So rather than providing direct economic benefits, the idea of buying less is about creating a cultural and economic shift that realizes both human capacity and natural resources have limits, and that a system based on endless expansion is not sustainable.

2. Prioritize your values

If you want to shop more ethically, chances are you already have one or more issues in mind that are motivating you to make a change. Whether it’s a desire to alleviate poverty, support women, reduce your carbon footprint, prevent deforestation, or any other motivating factor, when it comes to creating a practical shopping strategy, it helps to prioritize your values from most to least important to you. Having an idea of what’s most important to you will help you make decisions when choosing from products with varying ethical/sustainable claims.

After prioritizing your values, determine what characteristic of a product goes along with that value. In other words, what “counts” to you as meeting that value? This will help you understand which product labels, certifications, ingredients, etc. correlate with your values. Here’s an example using some my values:

  • Workers treated ethically – label from Fair Trade USA, Fairtrade, or Fair Trade Federation; or a thorough and transparent statement from the company about their practices
  • Organic/chemical-free – label from an official organic certifying body such as the USDA or Oregon Tilth; or for local small producers, assertion from the producers that their products are chemical-free
  • Palm-oil free – ingredients list does not include any of the palm oil root words that I know about

You might need to create a couple of different rankings based on different broad product categories. For example, for clothing, accessories and other non-consumable goods, my priorities generally go in this order:

  1. Secondhand
  2. Fair trade/workers treated ethically
  3. Zero waste/minimal packaging/no plastic microfibers
  4. Recycled materials
  5. Organic materials
  6. Local

However, for food, my priority list looks more like this:

  1. Fair trade/workers treated ethically
  2. Organic/chemical-free
  3. Palm-oil free
  4. Zero waste/minimal packaging
  5. Local

Sometimes these values will shift around depending on the circumstances. You might find a product that meets every value except your #1 value, or you’ll find yourself comparing a product that meets two of your values with another that meets three totally different values. It’s easy to fall into analysis paralysis in situations like this, especially when you factor in other characteristics of a product like price, style, and quality. To help with this, you may want to include price in your value rankings as well. Which values are you willing to pay more to get, and which are just nice-to-haves if they fall within your budget?

Despite the occasional fluctuations, being clear on your values and how to tell if a product meets those values are important steps to shopping more ethically.

3. Change your routine

Now that you know what types of products you’re looking for, you need to figure out where to get them. The hardest part of changing your shopping habits is changing your routine. If you’re a “get everything at Target” person, it will take some adjustment if you need to go to different stores to find the values-based products you want. However, I’ve found that now that I’m in a new routine, shopping by my values comes naturally, pretty much automatically. It doesn’t occur to me to shop in the mainstream, conventional way, because I’ve created a routine that’s both convenient and personally fulfilling to me.

Start by getting into a routine for the products you buy most often, which for me is food. With how I shop now, I’ve found that I shop at more stores for food than I did before, but fewer stores for everything else.

I’ve gotten familiar enough with the stores in my area to know that for organic, zero-waste peanut butter, I need to go to Fresh Thyme. I get organic bulk foods at the Good Earth, Fresh Thyme or Earth Fare, and I get organic packaged goods at Kroger (their Simple Truth store brand has a lot of organic bargains). I get chemical-free, zero-waste produce at the farmers’ market, Kroger or Fresh Thyme.

For personal care items, I start at the Good Earth, but I also get some items on Etsy because they have a bigger selection of palm-oil free products. Kroger is my stop for inexpensive recycled toilet paper.

For non-consumable goods, my first stop is always Goodwill, then usually Amanda’s Exchange consignment store, or sometimes Craigslist or Facebook. If I need to get gifts, my first stop is fair trade store Global Gifts, then other locally-owned boutiques and gift shops.

4. Cut yourself some slack

Just because you’ve decided to change your shopping habits, that doesn’t mean you’ll suddenly have enough time in the day to perfectly follow your new system for every purchase from day one. I’d say it took me about five years to really develop a comprehensive ethical shopping routine, and it’s still growing and changing. I started in college with the items I bought most often and that had high levels of worker mistreatment: clothes, shoes, chocolate. Once I moved into an apartment, I started being more conscious about other food items. As my interest in sustainability grew, I started favoring used items and products with less packaging. And just within the last year, I’ve started avoiding palm oil and plastic microfibers.

There will always be some aspect of a product that’s unethical on someone’s standards (unless you live on a self-sufficient permaculture farm and weave fabric out of your own hair). That doesn’t negate the positive effects of the values-based choices you make. Buying less is pretty much always a win. But when you do need to buy something, getting a product that causes less harm in a certain area than the standard option does seems like a no-brainer to me.

If you’re an old pro, what other tips do you have for someone getting into an ethical shopping routine? Post them in the comments!

Save the Date for Our Next Swap!

It’s that time again! Our next style swap has been officially set for Wednesday, August 23, at New Day Craft Cider & Mead.

SummerSwap17 promo image

If you’re on the fence about whether a clothing swap is your scene, check out Bethany’s previous post about why swaps are basically the best thing ever. Then head over to the registration page to sign up!

See you at SummerSwap17!

Tips for Buying a Used Lawn Mower

Remember when I used to write about cute things like shoes and dresses and DIY projects? Now that I’m a fancy grown-up homeowner, my life revolves around glamorous subjects like ant control and backed-up drains. More than anything this summer, my life has revolved around learning how to maintain a lawn.

One of the things I really liked about my house when I was thinking about buying it was that both the front and back yards are very small. I’m deeply relieved that I went for a house with a small yard, because even the postage stamp-sized patches of grass I do have take more attention than I anticipated. (Did you know that in the spring, grass grows fast? This was news to me.)

Small front yard with two trees

My li’l front yard

Small back yard with large tree

My li’l back yard

From the start I wanted to choose an eco-friendly lawn mower, but I wasn’t sure exactly what kind I should get. I researched powerless reel mowers, which would be the ideal green option, but I read several reviews saying they tend to get stuck on sticks, and my trees drop a copious amount of twigs. I also read that they don’t work well if the grass gets too long, and I think we all know how frequently I was prepared to mow. (Not often.) I would definitely be interested in trying a reel mower at some point, but it seemed intimidating to try as a total lawn newbie.

I decided to pursue an electric solution instead. For me there were both practical and sustainable benefits to an electric mower over a gas mower: I didn’t want to have to keep gasoline on hand to power it, I didn’t want to smell like gas every time I mowed, and I didn’t want the mower to be noisy and produce air pollution. I’m also a member of the green power option with my local utility, so even though Indiana’s electricity is produced by polluting coal-fired power plants (boo), the electricity I use is matched by renewable energy certificates (RECs), which help offset conventional electricity generation by supporting wind farms. And of course I wanted to get a used mower if at all possible, to extend the life of still-useful equipment and eliminate the environmental impact of manufacturing a new one.

For the first couple of months of spring, I actually cut my grass with a hand-held electric trimmer (much to the chagrin of my neighbors). At first I was experimenting to see if my yard was small enough to even need a mower at all. While the trimmer solution technically worked, it did take about twice as long as mowing does, and the trimmer makes a loud, shrill drone that I didn’t think was fair to subject the neighborhood to for an hour every week. I decided it wasn’t a viable long-term solution and that my little lawn did in fact call for a real mower.

Mower #1: Lawn Hog = Fail Whale

My first lawn mower purchase was a fail but a valuable learning experience. I had noticed an electric lawn mower for sale at the pawn shop where I get most of my music equipment, and having always had good luck with pawn shop purchases in the past, I decided to give the mower a try. It was a corded electric Black & Decker Lawn Hog. I quickly turned it on next to the store to make sure it worked. Nothing seemed remiss, so I bought it (and thankfully the $2 warranty) and took it home.

I got about a third of the way through mowing my back yard when the mower suddenly stopped cutting—it continued to spin but was no longer cutting the grass. After some disassembling and Googling, I discovered that the fan blades were all broken off, the blade wasn’t securely fastened, a couple of key components were fused together, and the motor itself was completely unattached from the body except for a few thin wires. I learned a lot about small motors that day, and I also learned that there’s more to vetting a lawn mower than just making sure it turns on.

Mower #2: Crushing It with Craigslist

I kept up the search for a few more weeks with no luck. But over Memorial Day weekend I checked Craigslist again and lo and behold, the perfect mower was for sale! It was a cordless Neuton brand electric mower being sold by a local couple. The price was right ($55!) and the sellers turned out to be incredibly gracious and helpful. The mower itself is a dream—no cord, easy to push, quiet enough to talk over, and it can do both the front and back yards on a single charge. I actually enjoy cutting the grass now, because it’s just like taking a series of very short walks in my yard on a nice day.

Full image of Neuton electric lawn mower

Say hello to my little friend Neuton.

Close-up of Neuton electric lawn mower

I think Neuton kind of looks like a turtle.

Tips for Buying Secondhand Tools & Equipment

The seasoned homeowners among you (or people who have ever done lawn care in their lives) are probably scoffing at how long I took to choose a mower, and I admit that my learning curve about lawn care was probably steeper than it should have been. However, I learned a lot through the process, and for those of us who are beginners to home maintenance and want to avoid buying a lot of new gadgets and tools to take care of our homes, I have a few important tips to keep in mind:

  1. If you’re going to buy used tools or equipment, don’t expect to find exactly what you need right away. It may take days or weeks for the type of equipment you want to come onto the secondhand market, or the available items may be in poor condition or unfairly priced. Be prepared for the shopping process to take time.
  2. Always test used equipment for its intended purpose before buying. Just because a tool powers on doesn’t mean it works properly. If it’s a mower, cut some grass. If it’s a drill, drill a hole in something. Five minutes of testing will save you the grief of getting home and finding out your purchase was useless.
  3. It’s better to buy directly from a person if possible. What I learned from comparing my two lawn mower-buying experiences is that at the pawn shop, I had no sense of how well (or badly) the mower had been taken care of. I didn’t know how old it was, I didn’t have the manual, I didn’t know if it had any quirks; I was buying it pretty much blind. None of that occurred to me at the time, but when I bought the second lawn mower from Craigslist, the difference in the experience was like night and day. The sellers described the ways they took care of the mower and provided helpful background information about the battery and the attachments, plus they gave me the manual and an extra blade. They also suggested I test out the mower on their yard before I could even ask. Obviously not all Craigslist experiences are this stellar, but buying from a person at least gives you the opportunity to ask questions and get a sense for how well-maintained the equipment might be.

With what I’ve learned from this process, I think I’ll definitely feel more prepared when buying secondhand the next time I need a new tool for my house. Have you ever bought used tools or equipment for your home? How did it work out? What kind of lawn mower do you use?