UMSU's Environment Department held a two-day thrifting market at the Market Hall from September 16 to 17, as part of the UMSU’s (University of Melbourne Student Union) Enviro Sustainability Festival. 

Students were able to purchase second-hand clothes, tooth gems, DIY bracelets and graphic T-shirts.

The thrift market returned this year, following its first event in 2025. One of the market's big goals is to encourage students to engage more in the circular economy and to reinforce the idea that a piece of clothing isn’t rubbish just because you’re not wearing it anymore. 

The thrift market has been a good way to draw a huge crowd in, whilst keeping materials and resources in circulation for as long as possible, encouraging the circular economy. 

Today, clothing production doesn’t think about what happens to the clothes when they can’t be used anymore. More than 500 billion is lost every year from not using the clothes to their full extent and not recycling. 

“Clothing has use until it falls apart”, UMSU Environment Officer and main organiser of the Student Thrift Market, Kay Pritchard says. 

Co-President of Sexpression, Mabel Shelley is running one of the clothing stands in the thrift market. She likes the idea of her clothes getting a new home. “There are already so many clothes in the world”. She follows up by saying that holding a thrift market like this at a university is a great opportunity for getting more young people and students involved in practices of recycling and thinking about the environment. 

“It’s a really positive way to enforce these changes”. “I think being able to participate in this circular life of these pieces is really important, and it's a great way to make all these fun clothes accessible to people, you know, by making them really cheap and easy to get”, Shelley told Farrago. 

Australia is the highest consumer of textiles per person in the world. It is better to buy used clothing rather than brand new clothing; today there are already too many clothes. Every year, about 1.55 billion new textile items are sent to the Australian Market. 10% of global CO2 emissions come from the fashion industry. 

It’s not only new clothing that is contributing to overconsumption, but second-hand clothing has also become a new way of overconsumption. Thrifting has also gotten more expensive.

“It does break my heart a little bit”, says Pritchard about the higher prices for clothing. 

Growing up, shopping from op-shops was a necessity. Today, the prices have increased, and he says that thrifting shouldn’t be an excuse to buy a lot of things just because they are second-hand. 

“A lot of people go to thrift stores to buy it cheap, to later resell it more expensive than it originally was.” 

Another big goal for the thrift market has been to ensure people are pricing their items fairly, aiming to push people to not overprice their clothing unless it is clothing with more value. 

This has also been something Shelley has thought about when pricing her clothes. Shelley sells an item for as cheap as possible, unless she has paid a lot for it: “I just want to make sure they get given to people that will bring them new life”. 

Shelley says how the popularity of thrifting is positive in many ways: “It is nice to see more people willing to try it out”. Most people she knows have thrifted clothes and will say they have thrifted a clothing item. 

Shelley is also someone who grew up in a family that had to shop secondhand out of necessity and says there was more prejudice around secondhand stores. For her, it has been nice to see how it is more trendy and not looked down upon to go to a second-hand store and buy used clothing. 

She also recognises that thrifting becoming trendy has its ups and downs and how, at times, not only other people, but she, herself puts those overconsumptive behaviours onto second-hand shopping. 

It is important to be mindful about what you buy and think about whether you actually need it, because even donating might not be helpful, as most of the clothing ends up in the landfill. As reported by the ABC, 20 per cent of textile wastage is in good enough condition to be sold, whilst 80 per cent has to be sent to the landfill. 

Pritchard says not only selling your clothes second-hand will help the environment, but you could also make it a personal experience. This can be done by giving clothes away to friends and doing clothing swaps. There are a lot of different ways to make sure the clothes aren’t just sitting around or going to landfills and are actually being used. 

The market’s message isn’t just to buy more second-hand, but rather to keep clothing in use, whether it is to sell, swap, give away or to turn it into something new. 

Image source: UMSU Enviro