Why ABC's Ginger Zee Stopped Buying New Clothes for 2 Years and What She Learned About Waste (Exclusive)

“We have so much clothing on this planet, and there’s nowhere for it to go," she tells PEOPLE in this week's issue

When ABC viewers watch Ginger Zee deliver the forecast or report from the scene of natural disasters on Good Morning America, one of the first things they notice is her outfit.

It's a reality for everyone who works on-air in TV news — which the network's chief meteorologist and climate correspondent doesn't love.

“I never got into this to do a fashion show, that wasn’t my intent,” Zee tells PEOPLE in this week's issue.

“It’s always been the one part that hasn’t felt like it fits," she says.

So it was about two years ago that she decided to try the #NoNewClothes Challenge from Remake, a clothing industry social-justice group, with the hope of mitigating mass produced fashion's impact on the environment and learning more about how to consume less while staying stylish.

The stats Zee, 43, learned through the nonprofit were alarming, like that fashion is the third-largest industry contributing to greenhouse gasses that warm the planet. What’s more, according to the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, 85% of discarded fabric ends up in landfills.

"There’s such beauty in fashion," she says, "but boy do we have a broken system.”

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What started out as a 90-day goal for herself — no shopping trips, no online splurges — turned into a lifestyle. “I said, ‘I can do less renting, less consignment shopping,’ ” Zee says. “Less, less, less.”

That means that she has had to unleash her creativity to keep her closet fresh.

One May morning, "We were leaving for [Arizona] for my sister-in-law’s wedding, I realized we had a major miscommunication. She didn’t have a formal wedding party, but I didn’t have the dress [she expected],” Zee recalls.

Having no time to rent, her producer suggested she reach out to her network of female meteorologists and see if anyone had the color dress she needed.

“Sure enough, I had four offers within 30 minutes,” Zee says. “That was such a refreshing reminder that there are a lot of clothing items out there and we don't have to buy it new every single time.”

Oftentimes, Zee doesn’t need to reach out to her broader network and instead leans on the women in her ABC News family for their support. Crediting pals Lara Spencer and the chief medical correspondent, Dr. Jennifer Ashton, she says she has created many fun looks — and funny anecdotes — from their loans.

“Dr. Jen was cleaning her closet and left me a shirt and a skirt. The following week, a dress showed up, and I walk out and Lara goes, ‘I have that dress.’ I realized our wardrobe woman accidentally put it in my room,” Zee tells PEOPLE with a laugh.

“It’s become this joke: We share so much that I even steal it.”

As Zee has learned more about the effects of increasingly "fast" fashion on a global scale — and how it can lower the quality of clothing and the treatment of those workers who make it — she is eager for others to join her on the journey, telling PEOPLE that "the least I can do is to just raise the awareness."

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“We don’t want to take away the creative license and the beauty of fashion,” she says, “but there’s a real choice of need versus want without much thought about what this is doing to the world.”

While Zee does not plan on partaking in the challenge forever, the lessons will last.

"I'm now starting to go, 'Where can I put that spotlight? Who can I put that spotlight on? A designer who hasn't been elevated yet, who hasn't had that opportunity? Is there someone that I can support who's upcycling clothing that's been trashed?' Absolutely," she says.

"There are so many places we can go to express that, and hopefully somebody will hear. If we can get to a mass change, then the companies that are making the clothing can change the way that they're doing it," she continues. "Because I don't want fashion to stop. We don't want it to just die. It's important."

For more on Zee's story, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday, or subscribe here.

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Read the original article on People.