KEY POINTS:
Imagine buying nothing shop-new, except food and toiletries, for a whole year - by choice. This is what one Taranaki family decided to do, and the experience has profoundly changed the way they spend and consume.
Emma O'Sullivan, 35, works part-time as a primary school teacher, and her
husband Evan Lobb, 41, is a beef farmer. They live on a farm in Tongaporutu Mokau with 4-year-old Francis and 17-month-old Claude.
O'Sullivan got the idea of eschewing the new from an article in her local paper about an American woman who did the same.
"Her take was a stand against consumerism and it had an environmental bent, and that appealed to me."
The resolution took shape: from January 1, 2007 to January 1, 2008 they would avoid as many new goods as they could.
"It was quite hard going," says O'Sullivan. "Initially you're all fired up with enthusiasm for the project, but it got a bit tedious towards the end."
Trawling the second-hand stores with two toddlers in tow could be trying, and good used shoes were hard to find. They made it easier for themselves by putting a "No Junk Mail" sign on the letter box, so they weren't being bombarded by ads.
The family ended up buying three new pieces of furniture, after failing to find what they wanted second-hand. But everything else, from Claude's cloth nappies to the toaster, was pre-used.
Lobb was surprised by the quality. "I went in and had a ball: had a spend-up (all of $30) and I'm still wearing a pair of good jeans I got for $6."
The benefits outweighed any hassles. They rediscovered the lost art of mending and the rewards of making do.
"You appreciate things more," says O'Sullivan. "You make sure you look after what you've got because you know it's got to last... and you save heaps!"
"I've always had an environmental bent but this compounded it," says Lobb. "The best thing was getting down with the kids in the veggie garden - to see the look on their faces. It's a great legacy you can leave them."
"The biggest benefit," says O'Sullivan, "is getting out of that consumer cycle. I always think it's a corporate con: we're conned into buying things that we don't need, we get convinced that we'll feel so much better if we buy that plasma TV or whatever.
"That creates environmental effects: all the rubbish that comes with it; the crap toys that break and end up in landfills... It does make you sort the wheat from the chaff: do you really need that 10th shirt?"
When the year was up, O'Sullivan bought herself a new running outfit for a marathon.
"But I've lost interest in the spending thing already," she laughs. "I think I'm done with the spending habit."
