Fashion Footprint Calculator
Does your closet contribute to climate change? Find out with thredUP’s fashion footprint calculator.
The newly launched Fashion Footprint Calculator involves answering 12 straightforward questions, such as how often you buy new clothes and whether you buy mostly online or in-store. Then it identifies what your personal fashion footprint is and compares this to the national average, which is 1,620 pounds of carbon a year. ThredUp’s new tool is helpful because it doesn’t just help you understand your impact. Next to each question, it provides plenty of evidence-based tips that help you reduce your fashion footprint. Some of these tips are self-serving, of course, since ThredUp is in the business of selling secondhand clothing, and lifecycle analyses of garments have found that buying used garments instead of new reduces your carbon footprint by between 60% and 70%. Since most of the carbon impacts of a garment happen early in the supply chain—at the level of raw material production and manufacturing in factories—you’re cutting out all of this impact.