Second-hand does not work thanks to awareness, but thanks to infrastructure.

When I arrived in Denmark six years ago as a student, something didn’t quite add up. The students around me, living on a nice but limited budget, could afford Louis Poulsen lamps, Rains coats, Mads Nørgaard items, and Acne Studios bags. You see, in Denmark, there’s no Primark, there are hardly any cheap chains, and yet no one showed up to class naked. How did that happen?

The answer came in the summer. I arrived here at the peak of the pandemic, during long months when indoor spaces stood deserted and the cold left the streets empty. Copenhagen's circular economy—a whole culture that demands the tactile experience of fabrics, street interaction, and human closeness—patiently awaited the warm season. Then the sun approached Copenhagen, the open spaces filled up, and for the first time, after nearly a year in Copenhagen, I encountered a local second-hand market.

I was beside myself. Quality Scandinavian brands, which I had learned to admire over the past year only through shop windows, were suddenly being sold at ridiculous prices and were open to haggling. In a country where design is part of the national identity, objects are seen as things worth repairing, passing on, and living with for years. This circular economy makes high Scandinavian quality accessible even to those living on a limited student budget. Buying second-hand goods in Denmark is a local logic that allows everyone to dress and furnish their homes at the highest level.

In Israel, almost every sector knows how to identify something second-hand that they already believe in. The left will talk about sustainability, recycling, and community. In the Arab society, one can identify a strong tradition of passing things on among relatives, repairing, and reusing. In the religious and ultra-Orthodox public, they will speak of acts of kindness and not wasting. The economic and national right will discuss frugality, independence, less reliance on imports, and a local economy.

And that’s exactly the point: everyone already understands the value. Each camp holds a different moral language for that basic idea. The problem isn’t that we lack values. We have too many values.

But values don’t easily translate into everyday life. In Israel, the second-hand culture still stumbles between WhatsApp groups, piles of polyester that have taken over every good bench, and initiatives that rely on good women who carry the community on their backs for free.