The Netflix series Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, which offers tips for reorganizing personal space and getting rid of untidiness, has inspired many to shrink their overstuffed closets. Charity shops have seen an increase in donations of used clothing, a phenomenon that’s been credited to the influence of the show.

But people have a popular method of dealing with unwanted clothing. They simply throw it in the trash. And that’s become a real problem.

According to Fast Company, people of New York City throw 200 million pounds of clothing into the garbage each year. The used clothing goes on to take up space in landfills for an unlimited period of time. The Environmental Protection Agency reported in 2015 that 10.5 million tons of clothing wound up in the trash that year. New York’s fashion leaders and the city’s sanitation (公共卫生) agencies have started an advertising campaign directing people to cover 1,000 drop-off points where unwanted clothes can be deposited for recycling or repurposing. But if you can’t find one of the collection points in your neighborhood, what can you do with your old clothes?

Selling is one option. Local clothes stores may offer only a modest price for your used clothing collections, but they’ll likely fall into other hands rather than a landfill. There are also online marketplaces like ThredUP and Material World that pay cash or offer store credit for designer or chain-store clothing that you mail in. To maximize their value, it’s best to present clothing folded, buttoned, and cleaned.

You can also try sites like Rehash Clothes to promote a clothing exchange with others who are looking to clear up their closet. If you want to throw clothing because it’s damaged, give some thought to repairing it instead. Things like loose or missing buttons can be simple fixes; stains can be covered by dyeing material (染料). All of these options can keep some of your clothing’s value.

Whatever you decide to do, it’s best to keep clothing on someone’s back in one form or another—not in the trash.

Edward Davis was a professor who worked on ocean research. However, bored with writing death records of ocean species, he quit his job in 2007. Rather than spend any more of his life recording the dying, Edward decided to try to protect the living creatures in the few remaining areas of the ocean.

These areas are the last wild places of the sea still undamaged by overfishing, pollution and climate change. “It is necessary for us to go to places that still look like the ocean as it was 500 years ago,” Edward says. “These places are the examples of sustainable (可持续的) development. Maybe we can’t bring all of the ocean back to this state, but these places show us what the potential is.” Beneath the surface of a stormy sea off Palau in the western Pacific lie various lively corals. The tiny island nation has protected 80 percent of its waters as a no-fishing area — the largest percentage of protected ocean area in the world. The remaining 20 percent can be fished only by Palauans.

To protect these places, Edward and his team started a project on ocean protection in 2008. Over the past years, the project has helped create 22 ocean reserves. These make up two-thirds of the world’s fully protected ocean areas. Now Edward and his team have set an even bigger goal — to protect more than a third of the world’s oceans for the purpose of keeping biological diversity.

For Edward, one of the most satisfying aspects of his job is working with local communities in the places he and his team are seeking to protect. The team worked closely with about 50 local people on the island. “We showed them an underwater world they had never seen,” Edward recalls. “Huge schools of fish will surely swim in some of the clearest waters ever measured in the Pacific.”

In the 2010s, 34-year old Brianne Miller travelled around the world as a marine biologist. No matter how remote the location, she made the same alarming discovery: huge amounts of plastic littering the water and threatening marine life. Miller knew she needed to do something.

Canadians throw out three million tons of plastic waste each year, 33 percent of which comes from food packaging. Approximately one third of all food produced worldwide goes to waste, too. Miller, determined to fix the problem, imagined a shop that went further than banning plastic bags—a place that avoided both wasteful packaging and the bad habit of wasting food itself.

In June 2018, Miller opened her first zero-waste grocery store in Canada. She named it Nada, and ensured everything was designed to make the zero-waste shopping experience easy. You can bring your own containers, though it’s not necessary: right by the front door are sanitized (消毒过的) glass or plastic containers, free for the taking.

Nada sells various food items, all 100 percent package-free. Miller is clear that the store doesn’t try to compete on price. For example, popcorn with paper package at a regular store may cost 70 cents per 100 grams; at Nada, a customer might pay $1 per 100 grams. Even so, zero-waste shopping can still come with savings. Take products that typically come packaged in large containers, like spaghetti sauce, a large part of the traditional cost would be in that glass jar.

Although the early days of the pandemic were tough on the business, Miller timely turned to online ordering and delivery, though in a very Nada way. Everything from olive oil to fresh eggs comes delivered in sanitized containers, which are collected with the next round of deliveries.

Those containers do so much more than just reduce waste. They get people thinking big, just as Miller hoped. “They’re tagged with Nada stickers, so you can see how many times the container has been used,” she says, and then smiles.