*Please read if you are a current fan of Tidying up with Marie Kondo*

Trust me, nothing makes me happier than the KonMari-decluttering hype that is happening because of the new Netflix series. Following the discovery of her book a couple of years ago, I managed to get rid of 75% of my belongings and felt freer, happier and calmer.

I have wanted to write this for a long time, not knowing how to phrase things so I am just going to start easy, because I feel the need to address something extremely important even though it isn’t as feel-goody as I aim for most of my content to be.

All the bin bags full of disposed things ending up in landfills as a result of us decluttering our homes.

It is easy to get blown away by all the bags we manage to fill, we feel proud when they are collected, and we are left with a clutter free space. This is the dark side of decluttering, the hard-to-accept side. We are not taking responsibility for our planet. We are living in a culture of cheap, low quality, disposability. “Don’t like it, just bin it”. We do not think of the costs it took to produce that one kitchen curtain, all the steps before it is a complete product, and what will happen when it is dumped in one of the many overfull landfills in this World.

Most of what we give to charity does not actually get sold in the shops but are in fact also sent to landfills or shipped to impoverished countries, which challenges the development of local businesses among other cultural issues.

End of the unintentional guilt-tripping. Here are some ways to take care of the things we want to get rid of with more responsibility:

• Get them repaired, refurbished or repurposed.
• Sell on Gumtree, Ebay, or the equivalence in your country.
• Give away or sell in one of several Facebook groups that usually exist in a city for this purpose.
• Arrange a clothes/furniture/items swap day and invite everyone you know.
• For clothes, find out which local shops accept broken and stained materials to make new clothes out of.

Any other ideas, beautiful people?

These things wouldn’t even be an issue if we humans didn’t accumulate so much junk in the first place. We have a big problem with material addiction and a distorted mindset regarding possessions.

My Sunday gift to you is this hands-on, enticing article about how to break free from your consumerist chains https://zenhabits.net/free/.