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Some back-to-school clothes aren't good for the planet. Here’s a better option.

The most sustainable clothes are the ones that already exist.

True
Savers

There are three constants in late summer life.

One: It’s impossible to apply sunscreen without missing a spot. Two: S'mores that fall in the campfire for a few seconds just taste better. Three: Nothing is a bigger adrenaline hit than back-to-school shopping.

Instantly iconic. GIF from "Clueless."

Thanks to the internet and fast-fashion outlets, buying stylish new clothes on the cheap is easier than ever before. Designs that used to march down the runway a year before they’d show up in your local department store are now being churned out for sale in just a few weeks. Keeping people looking Instagram-worthy is a $3 trillion-dollar industry that’s growing every year.

Fast fashion gives a quick hit, but it’s also fueling some less-than-sustainable habits.

Pictured: Not a good look. Image via Savers.

The truth is super-cheap, fast fashion comes with big environmental price tags. As a society, we’re buying a lot, then throwing much of it away, and that’s really adding up.

Our passion for fashion has made the clothing industry one of the world’s biggest polluters. In 2013 alone, Americans threw away 15.13 million tons of textile waste.

But landfills aren’t the only concern. The clothing industry also uses a shocking amount of water. Making a single cotton T-shirt can consume up to 700 gallons of water. A new pair of jeans can consume 2,900 gallons of water. With record global temperatures that just keep increasing and climate change fueling extreme long-lasting droughts, being smarter about water is about to become even more important than it already is.

Being more careful about our clothing purchases can create a ripple effect, conserving millions of gallons of water that can be used for other purposes, like drinking water or sustainable agriculture.

One of the easiest ways to start making mindful choices is to buy thrifted clothes.

Enter Savers, one of the world’s leading textile recyclers. Through its unique business model, Savers is keeping over 650 million pounds of reusable items out of landfills annually. This year they’re stepping up even further: encouraging people to really think about the life cycle of their clothes and how that affects the rest of the world.

Fashionable fabric fountains in Toronto's Dundas Square. Image via Savers.

Earlier this month, Savers installed a beautiful and surprising art installation in Toronto’s bustling Dundas Square, transforming a public water fountain into one made of clothes.

The installation was meant to inform people about the water that goes into making their clothes. It really got people thinking.

(After checking out this neat video, be sure to scroll down for more information about how you can get involved!)

Its message was loud and clear.

Thousands of Torontonians viewed the installation, and more than 1,000 who walked by were inspired to take a simple next step in reducing their fashion footprint: "giving a shirt" and committing to making their next T-shirt purchase a thrifted one.

It's time to give a shirt about textile waste. Image via Savers.

Folks still doing their back-to-school shopping can help Savers, too!

This back-to-school season, Savers is hoping to get 1 million people to "Give a Sh!rt" about their clothing footprint through one simple ask: replacing one new tee purchase with a thrifted one.

If they do, they say it’ll be the equivalent of offsetting over 1,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools full of water.

There are plenty of wonderful clothes to be found at local thrift stores, and none of them come with extra fashion footprint of new clothes. Plus, brand-new is relative. It can also mean brand-new-to-you!

Fast fashion is easy and addictive. But like any bad habit, it’s one we have to break. Not just for our closets, but also for our planet.

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ACUVUE launches a new campaign to inspire Gen Z to put down their phones and follow their vision

What will you create on your social media break? Share it at #MyVisionMySight.

True

If you’ve always lived in a world with social media, it can be tough to truly understand how it affects your life. One of the best ways to grasp its impact is to take a break to see what life is like without being tethered to your phone and distracted by a constant stream of notifications.

Knowing when to disconnect is becoming increasingly important as younger people are becoming aware of the adverse effects screen time can have on their eyes. According to Eyesafe Nielsen, adults are now spending 13-plus hours a day on their digital devices, a 35% increase from 2019.1. Many of us now spend more time staring at screens on a given day than we do sleeping which can impact our eye health.

Normally, you blink around 15 times per minute, however, focusing your eyes on computer screens or other digital displays have been shown to reduce your blink rate by up to 60%.2 Reduced blinking can destabilize your eyes’ tear film, causing dry, tired eyes and blurred vision.3

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social media
Family

Mom who packs her child a meal when going out to restaurants has parents fired up

Does she have a good point?

via UnbreakableMomma/TikTok

Karlie Smith shows the meal she's bringing to the restaurant for her son.

A mom who admitted she packs her 2-year-old a meal when they go out to dinner has started an interesting debate on TikTok about restaurant etiquette and how it applies to young children.

The video posted by Ohio mom, Karlie Smith (unbreakablemomma on TikTok), has received nearly 600,000 views and has over 1,850 comments.

“Call me cheap, call me whatever, but if we’re going out to a restaurant, I’m packing my kid a meal," Smith, 21, said in her post. "I do this for many reasons. On Friday nights, my family and I get together, and tonight, we’re getting food out. My son is not getting food out.”

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parenting
Pop Culture

Man rewatches shows from his childhood and his recaps of the bonkers storylines are priceless

Rob Anderson's hilarious recaps of shows like "Mighty Ducks," "Beethoven," and "7th Heaven" might make you wonder how they got made in the first place.

@hearthrobert/TikTok

These plots makes zero sense.

While there are no doubt some timeless classics from our childhood that remain every bit as amazing as we remember, many are straight-up cringey upon a later viewing. Really, it’s to be expected as societal viewpoints change…sort of a marker of how far we’ve collectively come.

And so, what do we do with these problematic pieces of old-school pop culture? Well, we can certainly update them to better reflect a more modern attitude, but that also comes with a set of potential problems. Or we could simply never watch them again. Certainly an option given all the content out there. But then we might miss an opportunity to better understand what seemed to work for the mainstream then, and why it doesn’t work now.

And then there’s the third option—allow ourselves to be entertained by their cringiness.

That’s certainly the route taken by Rob Anderson. Over on TikTok, Anderson has taken ultra-popular movies and television shows from his childhood and given them hilarious recaps capturing how absurd some of the storylines are.
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movies
Joy

18-year-old took her college savings and bought the restaurant where she was a dishwasher

Samantha Frye, the newest owner of Rosalie's restaurant, is proving there's more than one way to invest in your future.

Canva

There are many way to invest in your future

Eighteen year old Samantha Frye has traded college life for entrepreneurship, and she has no regrets.

Frye began working at Rosalie's Restaurant in Strasburg, Ohio at 16 as a dishwasher, working up the ranks as a kitchen prep, server, then line cook. All while working a second job, sometimes third job.

After graduating high school, Frye started college at Ohio State with plans of studying business or environmental engineering. But when she came back to work a shift at Rosalie’s for winter break, an opportunity arose—the owners had planned to sell the restaurant.
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college
Joy

Woman decides that she is the love of her life and marries herself at her retirement home

“I said, you know what, I’ve done everything else. Why not?”

KCEN|YouTube

77-year-old woman decides she's the love of her life and marries herself.

We joke about marrying ourselves or a platonic friend if some arbitrary amount of time has passed without a proposal from an imaginary suitor. And sure, some people do wind up marrying a friend in more of a business arrangement, but it's not very common that someone follows through with marrying themselves.

Dorothy "Dottie" Fideli, decided that she was going to break the mold. The 77-year-old sat down and thought about all of the things she had done in life and who was with her the entire time cheering her on. It was an easy answer: herself. She was her biggest cheerleader, the person who always showed up and the love of her life, so Fideli made the plan to marry herself.

On a beautiful May day, friends and family gathered in the O’Bannon Terrace Retirement Community, where Fideli is a resident, to witness the ceremony.

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love
Joy

12-year-old Texas girl saves her family from carbon monoxide poisoning

She knew something was wrong with her mom and brother, which wound up saving her whole family.

WFAA|YouTube

Fort Worth 12-year-old helps save family from carbon monoxide poisoning.

Carbon monoxide is called a silent killer for a reason. Many people don't realize they're experiencing carbon monoxide poisoning before it's too late. The gas is colorless and odorless and tends to have a sedating effect that causes people to sleep through the fatal poisoning. Having carbon monoxide detectors is one of the most effective ways to identify the gas before it's too late to get out of the house, but not every home has one.

A little girl in Fort Worth, Texas, experienced a terrifying encounter with the deadly gas, but her quick actions saved her entire family. Jaziyah Parker is being held up as a hero after she realized something was wrong with her family members and called for help.

The girl called 911 after she noticed her mom pass out. On the call with the dispatcher, Jaziyah says she thinks her mother has died before explaining that there was something now wrong with her baby brother, who was just 5-months-old.

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kid hero
Pop Culture

In a touching, unscripted moment, Drew Barrymore rushes to comfort a crying audience member

"Are you okay?"

via Eva Rinaldi/Flickr

Drew Barrymore speaks during the FLOWER Beauty launch at Westfield Parramatta on April 13, 2019, in Sydney, Australia.

Drew Barrymore, 48, has been in the public consciousness since she starred as Gertie in 1982’s mega-blockbuster, “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial,” a performance that earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. So, it makes sense that many people of a certain age feel as if they’ve grown up with her.

Barrymore has consistently starred in hit films and movies that are rewatchable cable-TV staples, such as “Charlie's Angels” (2000), “Never Been Kissed” (1999), “Scream” (1996), “The Wedding Singer” (1998), “50 First Dates” (2004) and “Fever Pitch” (2005).

Now, she’s an even more significant part of people’s lives as the host of “The Drew Barrymore Show,” which runs every weekday on CBS. So far, the show has been a big success, attracting an average of 1.21 million views per show, and ranks as the #4 talk show in syndication. It was recently renewed through the 2024 season.

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