Peer-to-peer resale markets are economically parasitic on luxury excess waste.

Evidence

This turn to Depop is an adjunct to everything we’ve discussed so far. The existence of the actual economies of peer-to-peer resale is parasitical on the existence of the massive, endless waste that is the expenditure of luxury. Thrifting, here, is “sustainable” or “environmentally friendly” because it manages to reabsorb some of the endless stream of waste and return it to economic circulation, to revalorize waste through a symbolic act of differentiation that refuses the commodity’s subsumption into the endless stream. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 270

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to reader’s piece ‘Grafting & Growth’—both concern how secondary/parasitic infrastructures revalorize supposed waste of a primary system; also to Milgrom on informal institutions absorbing what formal ones shed.
• DEFINE: Defines the mechanism by which thrifting claims sustainability: revalorization of waste via symbolic differentiation, not reduction of waste itself.