The shelf, that little piece of furniture that we fill without thinking much about it over the months, until the day it overflows and we wonder how it all could have accumulated. A question to which an official French experiment has provided quantified answers, as precise as they are enlightening.
In April 2021, ADEME, the Ecological Transition Agency, launched the “Dare to change: Consume better and live lighter” operation, by recruiting 21 witness households across France, with deliberately diverse profiles. For seven months, these families were supported by tidying professionals to list, sort and declutter their homes. The result of this full-scale experiment is clear: decluttering allowed these households to get rid of, on average, 31% of the objects they owned, a figure which even rises to 37% for the clothing and shoes category alone.
What makes this study particularly interesting is that it does not stop at the simple observation of the decluttered volume: it also documents what becomes of these objects once we decide to part with them. Of all the items evacuated during the experiment, 52% were donated, 24% sold and the remaining 24% recycled. These proportions reflect a clear desire to give a second life to objects rather than simply throwing them away, an approach which is directly in line with a logic of reducing environmental impact. As a benchmark, ADEME points out that a French household has on average 2.5 tonnes of furniture and household appliances, a volume which required the extraction of 45 tonnes of raw materials to be manufactured.

What this task actually involves

Sorting and arranging a shelf involves removing all of the items on it, deciding individually what is worth keeping, donating or throwing away, then rearranging what remains in a coherent manner. Allow approximately 15 minutes for this task, a time which varies depending on the accumulated volume and the frequency of previous sessions.

Tips and tricks for effective decluttering

Emptying the shelf entirely rather than sorting object by object in place remains the most effective method: this allows you to really become aware of the accumulated volume, an effect documented by the professionals who accompanied the homes in the ADEME experiment, and cuts short the frequent illusion that "it doesn't take up that much space."
Providing several clear destinations for each item removed (donate, sell, recycle) rather than a simple pile “to sort later” reproduces the logic that allowed the witness households to give a second life to the vast majority of their decluttered belongings, rather than throwing them away by default for lack of an organized alternative.
Asking yourself a simple question for each object, “have I used it in the last year?”, allows you to decide quickly without falling into endless reflection which always ends up favoring conservation out of habit rather than out of real utility.

With 31% of objects on average discarded during the experiment conducted by ADEME, a cluttered shelf generally hides much more superfluity than one imagines before tackling it. And the good news is that the vast majority of what comes out finds a second life rather than ending up in the dumpster, as long as we organize this sorting with a minimum of method.