Clothing is a major pollutant in our landfills and that's because a lot of fibers are made up of plastics.
Valhalla Clothing Resale is similar to national programs like Rent the Runway.
"Those plastic fibers then, when you wash them, they sit in the washing machine, they go to landfills, they never biodegrade. And we're just producing more clothing than we've ever produced before," explained Danielle Ferrari, Owner of Valhalla Resale.
Re-using clothes can help protect the environment.
"Clothing has become essentially disposable. We've taken a durable good and created a disposable economy around it. And what we do here is we make it circular, we sort of embraced the idea that once we've had it all, we're not going to go back. Women have experienced being able to wear something different every single day. I'm not going to be able to change their mind about that. But instead, I'm able to produce an environment where they can, without hurting the environment, have it all, they can wear something different every single day. That item that they wore yesterday will be worn by someone else tomorrow," explained Ferrari.
One of the other things at Valhalla is they added a filter to keep microfibers out of Tampa Bay to their washing machine.
"So it's sort of like when you clean out your filter for your dryer. Every time clothing rubs against it, it's shedding fibers, your dryer catches that. Your washer throws it into Tampa Bay. That's just how it always has been. You just can't see it because it's going straight into the waterways. Filters that out and gives us the opportunity to dispose of it properly without it going into the waterways. And that system is about $200. Anybody could put it on to their washer," explained Ferrari.
