You see it all around you, the country is “going green.” But did you know thrift stores have been “green” for over 100 years? They have! At thrift stores you can find good quality clothing and household items that are no longer needed by their first owner. Each moderate sized thrift store will collect millions of items each year and prevent them from going to landfills. Now that’s recycling!

At Planet Thrift, we collect these items, process them, and offer them to you at a fantastic value! Merchandise at Planet Thrift costs only a fraction of what it costs new in department stores. And sometimes, just sometimes, you can find wonderful treasures at Planet Thrift such as antiques and vintage music, books, and clothing. Once we saw a valuable original copy of the Declaration of Independence sold for 50 cents. That copy was later valued at over $100,000. Who knows what a treasure YOU might find at Planet Thrift!

But at Planet Thrift we go beyond the inherent green practiced by other thrift stores. Planet Thrift takes thrift green to the next level. The foundation of living green is to Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. At Planet Thrift we try to maximize our efforts in each of those areas.

Many thrift stores simply take what they cannot sell to a landfill. At Planet Thrift, we seek other uses for our unsellable items by shipping unsold clothing in bulk to other countries or by finding recycling companies that can take what we cannot sell and turn it into anther useful product. We also practice green in our facilities and operations. Here are some examples:

• Planet Thrift uses LED lights in our signage rather than neon or fluorescent lighting. This costs more but reduces our energy consumption by 90%.

• Planet Thrift uses used earth-friendly soy based stain for our concrete floors rather than vinyl flooring or carpet. This is more costly than vinyl or carpet but eliminates our use of those products which are made from toxic chemicals and do not break down in landfills. Also soy based stain is a natural product and is safer for the workers to work with than acid stain.

• Planet Thrift finds other uses for any items we remove from store spaces we take over. We find a church or other store who needs the carpet. We reuse walls that we move to build other walls such as break rooms. We reuse any wood we remove to build our sorting tables and other items.

• Planet Thrift finds as many fixtures as it can from other retailers who are upgrading or closing. More than 80% of our fixtures such as cash stands, dressing rooms, shopping carts, shelving, clothing racks, chairs, desks, and even computers and phones are reused from other retailers.

• Planet Thrift offers reusable shopping bags to our customers. In America more than 100 billion plastic bags go to landfills each year. Although the enormous cost of bagging requires us to use these economical plastic bags. We offer reusable bags to our customers below our cost of purchasing them in an effort to reduce the use of plastic bags. We also offer recycling bins in front of our stores for the plastic bags to prevent them from going to the landfills.

• Planet Thrift also plans to offer inexpensive new green products to our customers as they become available.

These are just some of Planet Thrift’s green initiatives. Thank you for shopping at Planet Thrift and helping us take thrift green to the next level. [top]