Resale is projected to hit $393 billion by 2030 and markets itself as sustainable fashion. But a Yale study finds secondhand shopping supplements new buying rather than replacing it, and experts say brand resale can drive more consumption, not less.
A Yale study published last December in the journal Scientific Reports set out to test fashion’s most reassuring assumption about secondhand clothing and found the opposite. Surveying more than 1,000 Americans on how they buy and discard clothes, the economist Meital Peleg Mizrachi, a postdoctoral fellow in Yale’s Department of Economics, found that secondhand shopping tends to run alongside new-clothing consumption rather than replace it — an effect strongest among the youngest and most frequent shoppers. “Our study provides strong evidence that secondhand clothing markets contribute to a self-reinforcing cycle of overconsumption,” Peleg Mizrachi said, adding that “rather than solving the problem, secondary markets may inadvertently encourage unsustainable purchasing patterns.”
Resale’s entire cultural license rests on the opposite assumption: that every resold garment is one kept out of a landfill and one new garment not made. The market built on that promise is enormous and getting larger; ThredUp’s 2026 Resale Report projects the global secondhand market will reach $393 billion by 2030, expanding at roughly twice the rate of apparel overall. The Yale data leaves the landfill half of the pitch intact and takes a chunk out of the displacement half. The researchers reach for two mechanisms to explain what they found: the rebound effect, in which making something cheaper or guilt-free increases how much of it people consume, and moral licensing, in which one virtuous act, thrifting, quietly authorizes a less virtuous one, buying more. More than 69 percent of those surveyed had bought secondhand at least once, and the heaviest secondhand buyers were frequently the heaviest buyers of new clothing too, churning through all of it fast. “Ultimately, those most engaged in the secondhand market are generating more textile waste than other consumers,” Peleg Mizrachi said.
Are brand resale programs built to sell you more?
If secondhand buying can function as permission to keep consuming, the resale programs that brands have rushed to launch are engineered around that permission. The writer and consultant Aja Barber told Business of Fashion that a brand putting a resale platform on their site when they’re selling you this idea of constant newness, “that’s not a positive change.” The sustainable fashion editor Brett Staniland was blunter in the same piece, describing brand resale as “a guilt free shopping trip where we can do whatever we want; we can continue to overproduce as much as we want.” Many of these programs hand shoppers store credit for the items they send back, which turns a resale into a fresh purchase.
The effect is not incidental, and there is evidence it is intended. A 2025 Harvard Business School working paper on branded recommerce found that buyback programs can raise a shopper’s intention to buy a brand’s new products, the opposite of the cannibalization that a company might fear from selling its own used goods. Offering to buy an item back, the researchers argue, increases the resale value of the new one, which makes the new one easier to justify buying in the first place. Resale, in that framing, is less a brake on consumption than a feature that greases it.
Someone else’s problem
The most uncomfortable take is about where the surplus goes. A garment listed and unsold, or donated in the name of virtue, does not vanish; much of it is baled and shipped abroad. Exports of used textiles from the European Union have nearly tripled over two decades, reaching 1.26 million tonnes in 2024, and a great deal of it lands at markets like Kantamanto in Accra, Ghana, where roughly 15 million garments arrive every week and, by The Or Foundation’s estimate, about 40 percent leaves as waste. Liz Ricketts, the foundation’s cofounder, has spent years describing what that system actually is. “The secondhand trade is the outlet necessary for the firsthand trade to exist,” she wrote in Atmos. “A clothing company that calls itself ‘circular’ while continuing to overproduce is not interested in solving the problem — it is interested in extracting profit from the problem.”
Even the logistics of doing resale properly can undercut the environmental case. Scott Kuhlman, whose company ReCircled began as a resale operation and pivoted to recycling, told Retail Dive that the math rarely closes: “how does it make sense for you to ship a used sweater? You send it to us, we spend the time, the energy, the money, the water, the everything else to clean and repair it. And then we ship it back to somebody else. We’ve measured all that, financially and environmentally, and it doesn’t make sense at all.”
None of this is an argument against ever buying secondhand, which remains a better default than buying new and is genuinely powerful at the durable, high-quality end of the market, where a Rodarte dress can appreciate 721 percent on resale precisely because it was built to last. It is an argument that resale cannot do the one job it is most often assigned, which is to offset a rate of consumption that keeps rising. A Fashion for Good report this year concluded that “without parallel efforts to slow production,” the resale economy “risks becoming either a greenwashing tactic or a parallel market that leaves the industry’s core environmental harms untouched.” Ricketts said it with fewer words. “There is too much clothing in the world,” she wrote. “This is not a radical opinion. It is a fact.”
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