Via Rachel Sarnoff

on May 26, 2010

Date Your Closet: Inspiration from “The Rules.”

No more hook-ups and one-night-stands: just say no to disposable fashion and create a long-term relationship with your closet.

By Rachel Lincoln Sarnoff, EcoStiletto.com

The average American family throws out more than 6,000 pounds of trash every year.

There’s a plastic bag cemetery the size of two Texases floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Obviously, reducing, reusing and recycling are on everyone’s minds. But what about our textile waste? According to the EPA, each one of us throws out 70 pounds of clothing and textiles every year—that’s four percent of the landfill. It’s time to learn to work what we’ve got—to save money, and the planet.

It’s time to date your closet.

No more hook-ups and one-night-stands: Just say no to disposable fashion and create a long-term relationship with your closet. Think about clothing purchases as things that you want to live with for a long, long time.

To expand on the date your close concept, we went to the experts: The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right, the wildly successful self-help-meets-dating book by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider.

Yes, it’s gotten heavy flak for being retro and anti-feminist and recommending a rather mercenary view of romance, but as this best-selling tome has everyone from Oprah to Beyonce on its bandwagon, we thought it might be fun to interpret its ideas here.

Relax, ecoista, it’s a metaphor..!

To get EcoStiletto’s “date your closet” rules, please visit ecostiletto’s Fashion section and sign up for the free newsletter for a chance to win $700+ in eco-swag this week!

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Rachel Lincoln Sarnoff is a writer, editor, producer and spokesperson who represents a new vision of eco-friendly living. Rachel publishes EcoStiletto.com, an online magazine dedicated to eco-friendly fashion, beauty, lifestyle and celebrity, which recorded 1.5 million page views and 500,000 unique visitors in 2009, and MommyGreenest.com, about eco-friendly parenting her three children, ages 11, eight and three. As a small-screen ecoista, Rachel has appeared on “CNN,” “Extra,” “Living With Ed,” “Hollywood Green,” “Good Day L.A.” and TV Guide Channel’s “The Fashion Team;” she is one of non-profit Healthy Child, Healthy World’s “Voices for Change.”