photo by: Contributed

Erin Schmidt, owner of Douglas County-based decluttering business Home Liberated LLC, finds new homes for all sorts of items that her clients don't want to keep, such as these balls of yarn.

Decluttering, with its talk of “sparking joy” and making life simpler, may sound innocent, but Erin Schmidt knows that it has a hidden dark side.

Schmidt is the owner of Douglas County-based decluttering business Home Liberated LLC. She says many people don’t know that when they get rid of their old junk — even if they try to do it responsibly by donating it to a thrift store — it still may one day end up in a landfill, or even in a river or stream in a low-income country.

That’s part of why Schmidt wants to help people tidy up in a more sustainable way — parting with some of their trash in a way that ensures it will become someone else’s treasure. After Schmidt helps clients organize their homes, she connects with charitable organizations, nonprofits and schools around Douglas County to find someone who will actually use the things her clients are getting rid of.

“A lot of people when they’re discarding things, they’re not discarding junk, but discarding good items,” Schmidt said.

And our country throws out a lot of usable things. According to a review from Environment America, a federation of environmental advocacy organizations, the U.S. produces 12% of the world’s trash, despite being home to only 4% of the world’s population, and 19.5% of goods it throws out are “durable goods,” like furniture and appliances, that could be repaired or repurposed.

Schmidt recently spoke with the Journal-World about how she started a career in decluttering, some strategies to tidy up your home and how to make sure the items you get rid of don’t go to waste.

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Many fans of decluttering got their inspiration from the Japanese expert Marie Kondo, author of “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” and star of the Netflix series “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo.” She’s famous for her method, which involves examining your belongings and choosing to keep only the ones that “spark joy.”

At around the time Kondo’s show came out, Schmidt said she and her husband had just become empty nesters. She watched Kondo’s show, and they decided to give the Kondo method a try.

It was “so liberating and freeing,” she said, that she wanted to start a business to help others feel the same feeling.

“You feel more in control in your own home, feeling free and light with less stuff,” Schmidt said.

Schmidt started offering three-hour sessions with clients to help them start the decluttering process. Many of them at first felt the process would be “stressful and overwhelming,” she said, and they weren’t sure where to start. It’s her job in these sessions to help them take the first steps.

“A lot of people just need help getting going,” Schmidt said. Many of her clients work with her for one session, she said, and then do the rest of the decluttering themselves.

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Once a client has decided what to keep and what to give away, the next step for Schmidt is to find someone who can use the unwanted items.

Schmidt said she regularly works with a number of charities, nonprofits and other organizations around Lawrence and Douglas County. These include Catholic Charities of Northeast Kansas, the Sunrise Project, even the Lawrence Public Library. She figures out what they can use, then brings them donations from decluttering sessions, transporting the items herself.

Some of the items she distributes are fairly common and straightforward to re-home, like clothes or office and school supplies. Others are more unusual.

One client had 15 trash bags full of yarn that they wanted to get rid of. Instead of throwing it all away, Schmidt brought the yarn to local arts organizations, including the Lawrence Arts Center, the Lumberyard Arts Center in Baldwin City and Liberty Memorial Central Middle School’s Fiber Club.

She once found a home for a paper shredder at Centro Hispano. She matched an old sewing machine with a young artist at Van Go. There are also medical items like shower seats or walkers, which are important for nonprofits that help older residents who might need those things but can’t afford them.

The charitable aspect also helps people part with more of their clutter, Schmidt thinks, since they know their items won’t be wasted.

“They are often able to let go of more stuff knowing their stuff will go to help someone else in our community,” Schmidt said.

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As a kid, Schmidt said her parents would always give her and her sister a “coupon book” for Christmas, which they could reimburse for a special trip. Schmidt said her sister would ask to go to the mall. She would ask to be taken out to country roads so she could pick up aluminum cans.

“I joke I was born green,” Schmidt said.

That eco-friendly ethic comes through in her tidying work, too. Schmidt said that when people donate items to a thrift store, many of those items — especially textiles — might not end up on the shelves. Some of those items end up in a landfill or get shipped thousands of miles away, harming the environment in another country.

According to the U.N. Environment Programme, 92 million tons of textile waste are produced each year, and much of that waste is exported to secondhand markets in countries in the Global South. In Ghana, for example, which The Associated Press describes as a leading importer of used clothing, those secondhand clothes pile up in markets and even choke off vital waterways or beaches.

One way to donate clothes more responsibly, Schmidt says, is to look for local charities that can get them back into the community quickly. Schmidt said local clothing closets are normally able to rapidly hand out donated clothes, making sure those items stay in the community and out of the landfill.

There are also items that aren’t donated enough, Schmidt said. One group of items that is often overlooked are health and beauty items or first aid items. These are things that often can’t be bought with food stamps, and that can make a huge difference for struggling families, Schmidt said.

Other direct donations that Schmidt would recommend are bedding, towels or hygiene items to homeless shelters; pet items or old linens to animal shelters; furniture to Habitat for Humanity ReStore; and craft, school or office supplies to local public schools.

Schmidt also understands that people who are thinking of decluttering might not always have a ton of energy to make trips all over town, so one solution to that would be posting items for free on social media sites like Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist. In her experience, she said she will get a lot of requests for odd or oversized items.

The amount of stuff that may just seem to pile up in your house — Schmidt said people often “spend (their) lives accumulating things” — may seem overwhelming, so it’s important to take baby steps when you first start decluttering, she said. Working a couple of hours at a time can gradually chip away at a mountain of stuff and make the task less daunting.

Whatever people do to reduce their clutter and their stress, Schmidt hopes they do it in a way that doesn’t stress the Earth.

“Those items leave the home of my client, but they never leave planet Earth,” Schmidt said. “It’s up to us to figure out if there is someone who can use this so it doesn’t end up in the landfill.”