Ghana: Piles of Waste Due to Fast Fashion
Tons of second-hand clothing arrive daily at Ghana’s Kantamanto Market. Clothing traders import goods primarily from Europe and the USA. However, about 40 percent of these second-hand clothes are unusable, ending up in illegal waste dumps and polluting beaches and seas.
Author: Rahel Osterwalder
Tuesday, 15.10.2024, 01:00 AM
A brown leather jacket sticks out from a massive pile of textile waste. It has reached the end of its product life and is rotting in an illegal dump in Accra, Ghana’s capital.
The jacket symbolizes a fashion system that has spiraled out of control. This is the final destination of the global fast fashion industry. While the exact path of the jacket can’t be traced, it most likely originates from the Global North, from used clothing collections in Europe or North America, imported by Ghanaian traders.
Kantamanto Market — The Heart of the Second-Hand Trade
Located in the middle of Accra is Kantamanto Market, the largest second-hand clothing market in West Africa. Among the tightly packed stalls and the noisy hustle and bustle, you can find everything: from torn jeans to fake designer bags to branded items.
Every week, ship containers carrying 15 million pieces of clothing arrive in Accra, imported by traders like Bernard Onwona. The grinning man with a gold chain around his neck explains that he makes a good living from clothing imports.
Onwona imports new goods from China because they are cheaper than second-hand clothing from Europe.
“A container from China costs me about 30,000 dollars, while a container of used clothing from Europe costs 65,000 euros,” says Onwona — about 72,000 dollars. Cheap goods from China are increasingly pushing second-hand clothes out of the market.
Overwhelmed by Waste
The market is flooded with plastic bags filled with clothes on both sides of the street. Khalifina, a fashion designer from Accra, is a regular customer at the Kantamanto Market. Several times a week, she gets up before sunrise to travel through Accra’s chaotic morning traffic by Trotro, a minibus, to the market.
She searches for the best second-hand pieces, but not always with success. Often, the piles are filled with broken or dirty garments. A jersey from an American basketball team that she likes is left behind because stains make it unusable.
“Quality is important to me,” says the 24-year-old. “My customers and I want to wear the clothes for a long time.” Khalifina gives the items she buys a new life by upcycling, altering, and reselling them.
Illegal Waste Mountains in Accra
About 40 percent of the imported clothing at Kantamanto Market is unusable, as reported by various national and international media outlets. Much of this textile waste ends up in Old Fadama, Accra’s largest slum, on an illegal waste dump.
David Kwabena Akpablie, a young environmental student, wades through the waste near a lagoon in rubber boots to take water samples. The water is brownish, the smell in the air is acrid, and the smoke from burning trash stings the eyes.
David works for the NGO OR Foundation, which seeks solutions to the second-hand clothing problem in Accra. His team analyzes the polluted lagoon for microfibers and microplastics. The results show that the microplastics originate from textiles on the waste piles. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), textiles make up 35 percent of the microplastics in the world’s oceans.
Despite having seen the waste piles in Old Fadama several times, David is still shocked by the sight of people and animals living amid the trash.
“The Global North must reduce its textile production to stop this environmental disaster,” he demands.
To solve the waste problem in Accra, David also calls for greater involvement from the Ghanaian government. There is still no infrastructure for the sustainable disposal of textile waste.
SRF inquired with the city government of Accra about their solution for the used clothing issue. The request went unanswered. Last year, the government proposed banning the import of second-hand clothes.
However, traders and importers fought back. Too many jobs depend on this somewhat lucrative business. The ban was quickly taken off the table.
Rising Clothing Consumption
The brown leather jacket, rotting on a waste heap in Old Fadama, is unlikely to have come from a Swiss wardrobe. The largest second-hand clothing collector in Switzerland, Texaid, no longer exports much used clothing to Ghana.
Nevertheless, Swiss clothing consumption likely has global consequences. The average Swiss person buys 60 new items of clothing per year, with an average of 118 garments hanging in their wardrobe.
About 40 percent of these clothes, according to WWF Switzerland, are either never worn or worn only a few times. This leads to regular closet clean-outs. According to Texaid, most clothing sacks are donated to second-hand collections in October and November.
In Switzerland, over 50,000 tons of clothes and textiles are disposed of annually, with about 32,000 tons collected in Texaid’s containers.
Circular Economy as a Solution?
As the problem of textile waste grows in Ghana, Switzerland is increasingly turning to innovative solutions. In Zurich, the “Josy” project is taking shape on the former site of a waste incineration plant. The project centers on the principles of a circular economy: swapping, borrowing, and repairing instead of buying and throwing away.
Zurich’s Disposal and Recycling hopes that players in the textile industry will also publicly share their circular approaches, as the fashion industry produces a significant amount of waste.
The four-year project is set to be supported with 5.4 million francs by the city council, pending approval by the municipal council. Such a project could prevent a brown leather jacket, like the one in Ghana, from making the long journey only to rot away. Instead, it could find a new owner in its home country, promoting the circular economy.
Reposted from SRF (Swiss Radio and Television)
Original link: Fast Fashion Ghana Abfallberge wegen Fast Fashion
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