How Much Stuff Do We Throw Away?

It's Friday, June twenty sixth. Amazon Prime Day ends today, and I need to tell you something embarrassing. I opened the app on Tuesday, the first day of the sale, and within thirty seconds I was looking at a product I had never heard of, had never searched for, and definitely didn't need. It had a Lightning Deal countdown timer. It said "67% claimed." And I almost bought it. I caught myself, closed the app, and then started wondering: how does that work? How does a countdown timer on a product I didn't know existed five seconds ago make me feel like I'm about to miss something? Americans are projected to spend $26.3 billion during this four-day sale, more than Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined. The average order is $47, down 17 percent from last year, which means more people are buying cheaper stuff. The top-selling items so far are protein shakes, electrolyte packets, and trash bags. We are having a four-day national shopping holiday and the most popular purchases are things you drink, things you mix into water, and things you throw other things away in. And that last one is kind of the whole story, because the thing nobody talks about during Prime Day is where all this stuff ends up. The psychology behind Prime Day isn't complicated. It's just effective.

Seventy two percent of online shoppers have made an impulse purchase because of an advertised sale. Not because they needed the product. Because the sale existed. The countdown timer, the "only 3 left in stock" label, the Lightning Deal that expires in two hours, all of these are manufactured scarcity cues designed to shift the decision in your head from "do I need this?" to "am I going to miss this deal?" Once the question changes, the answer almost always becomes "buy it now and figure out later whether you actually wanted it."

Economists have a term for what's happening this week: intertemporal substitution, which is a fancy way of saying you're pulling future purchases into the present because you're afraid the price will be higher later. With tariffs driving up costs on imported goods, nearly half of Prime Day shoppers say inflation is making them more likely to hunt for deals. The irony is that the deals are objectively getting worse. The average Prime Day order dropped from $58 last year to $47 this year. Average spend per item is down to $23. Seventy percent of items purchased cost less than $20. People are buying more but spending less per item, which means the quality of what they're buying is going down while the volume goes up.

And here's the part that connects Prime Day to something much bigger: forty four percent of Gen Z shoppers are using Buy Now, Pay Later services to finance their Prime Day purchases. They're taking on debt to buy $20 items during a sale. The BNPL market in the US hit $128 billion this year. We've financialized impulse buying. You can now go into debt for a protein shake because a countdown timer told you to. The average American throws away 81 pounds of clothing per year. Eighty one pounds. That's roughly the weight of a golden retriever, in clothes, per person, every year. Across the country, that adds up to over 11 million tons of textile waste annually, and 85 percent of it goes to landfills. Not recycled. Not donated. Buried.

And it's getting worse. Clothing today is worn 36 percent fewer times than it was fifteen years ago. The average garment is worn seven to ten times before being discarded. A third of young women in the UK consider clothes "old" after wearing them once or twice. We buy 60 percent more clothing than we did in 2000 and keep each item for half as long. The math is simple: more buying plus less wearing equals mountains of waste.

The most visible symbol of this is in Chile. In the Atacama Desert, outside the port city of Iquique (ee-KEE-kay), there's an illegal dumping ground where discarded clothing from the US, Europe, and Asia piles up in quantities so large that it's visible from space on satellite imagery. Much of it still has the price tags attached. Unsold inventory that was cheaper to ship to a desert than to sell or recycle.

Returns make it worse. About 30 percent of online clothing purchases are returned, and most returned items are never resold. Processing a return costs more than the item is worth in many cases, so retailers destroy them. In 2020 alone, 2.6 million tons of returned clothing went to US landfills, generating carbon emissions equivalent to 3.5 million cars. You ordered something, tried it on, sent it back thinking it would go to someone else, and it went into the ground.

The fashion industry produces 92 million tons of textile waste per year globally. A garbage truck's worth of textiles is landfilled or burned every single second. Less than one percent of clothing is recycled into new clothing. Not one percent of waste. One percent of all clothing ever made. The system isn't broken. It's working exactly as designed: make it cheap, sell it fast, replace it constantly. The environmental cost goes beyond landfills.

The fashion industry accounts for roughly 10 percent of global carbon emissions. Let that land for a second: one industry, making clothes, produces more greenhouse gas than all international flights and maritime shipping combined. A single pair of jeans requires about 7,500 liters of water to produce. A cotton t-shirt takes 2,700 liters, enough for one person to drink for two and a half years. The industry uses 93 billion cubic meters of water annually and is responsible for about 20 percent of global wastewater, mostly from the dyeing process that gives fast fashion its colors.

And then there's the part you interact with every week without thinking about it: microplastics. Most fast fashion is made from synthetic fibers like polyester, which is essentially plastic. Every time you wash a synthetic garment, it sheds hundreds of thousands of tiny plastic fibers into the water system. Those fibers pass through water treatment plants, enter rivers and oceans, and have been found as deep as the Mariana Trench. Thirty five percent of all primary microplastics in the ocean come from washing synthetic textiles. Your laundry is polluting the ocean, and the cheaper the garment, the more it sheds.

Shein, which has become one of the largest fast fashion companies in the world, can take a garment from design to store in ten days. Ten days from concept to your closet. That speed is only possible because quality is not a priority. The clothes are designed to be worn a few times and replaced. The business model depends on you throwing things away and buying new ones. The faster the cycle, the more they sell. The more they sell, the more waste they generate. The more waste they generate, the more emissions they produce. And the cycle keeps accelerating. So if this comes up in conversation, here's how to think about it. Prime Day ends today. Americans will spend over $26 billion during a four-day sale on products that are cheaper, lower quality, and increasingly financed through Buy Now Pay Later services. Seventy two percent of online shoppers have made an impulse purchase because of an advertised sale. The average garment is worn seven to ten times before being thrown away. Americans discard 81 pounds of clothing per person per year, and 85 percent of it goes to landfills. A pile of discarded clothing in Chile's Atacama Desert is visible from space. The fashion industry produces more carbon emissions than all international flights and shipping combined. Less than one percent of clothing is recycled into new clothing. A garbage truck of textiles is landfilled or burned every second. I'm not saying don't buy things. I'm saying that the countdown timer on your screen is designed to make you stop asking whether you need something and start worrying about missing a deal. The deal isn't the product. The deal is the feeling. And the feeling costs a lot more than $23.

Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.