“Please, please, please can I have this,” my 12-year-old daughter, Evie, pleads, brandishing the latest must-have from Shein. The familiar debate ensues. “Sorry, no,” I respond, suggesting we explore Vinted for a more sustainable alternative. “But one person buying something new won’t make any difference,” she counters, “and it’s so cheap!” The predictable cycle of teenage sulking and parental tutting follows, a microcosm of the larger conflict between desire and responsibility in the age of fast fashion.
As a fashion writer deeply immersed in the complexities of sustainability (or the glaring lack thereof), these exchanges with my daughter are particularly jarring. Yet, I understand the allure of trends and the teenage desire to fit in. My own attempts at sustainable fashion, often manifested as wearing the same clothes for years, likely have the opposite effect on a trend-conscious tween. The irony isn’t lost on me. Even professionally, the industry’s resistance to sustainability is palpable. Pitches focused on ethical fashion are often met with editor’s dismissals: “Sorry – readers aren’t interested in sustainability.” The pressure to pay bills has, at times, led me down the path of trend propagation, contributing to the very “cerulean machine” I critique.
So, I try to articulate to Evie the inherent problem with fast fashion. It’s precisely the affordability, I explain, that fuels unrestrained consumption. This relentless cycle of cheap production and rapid disposal results in mountains of poorly made, often plastic-based clothing, accumulating at an alarming rate. The British Fashion Council’s stark statistic – enough clothes already exist to dress the next six generations – becomes my well-worn parental refrain.
However, abstract reasoning often fails to resonate with a child of the digital age. It was a trip to Ghana this summer, visiting friends in Accra, that finally brought the harsh reality of where fashion truly ends into sharp, unforgettable focus for both of us.
Ghana stands as a major global hub for secondhand clothing imports, receiving a staggering 15 million garments weekly, according to the Or Foundation. This Accra-based non-profit, founded by activist and former fashion stylist Liz Ricketts and her partner Branson Skinner, is on the front lines of fashion’s waste crisis. A disproportionate amount of this waste ends up on Ghana’s shores, a literal manifestation of the dark side of our disposable clothing culture.
[‘It’s like a death pit’: how Ghana became fast fashion’s dumping ground
Read more](https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/jun/05/yvette-yaa-konadu-tetteh-how-ghana-became-fast-fashions-dumping-ground)
The journey of these garments culminates at Kantamanto market, a sprawling 18-acre site a mile from Jamestown beach, one of the world’s largest secondhand markets. Here, they are known as “obroni wawu,” meaning “dead white man’s clothes,” a stark term hinting at the sheer volume offloaded, implying someone must have died to relinquish so much. A staggering 40% of the imported clothing is deemed unsaleable, immediately transitioning from secondhand goods to trash. Accra’s waste infrastructure is woefully inadequate to handle this influx. The rejected clothing is discarded in gutters and illegal dumpsites, much of it amassing into a textile mountain near an informal settlement, bordering the Korle Lagoon, ultimately flowing into the Atlantic and onto Accra’s beaches.
Greenpeace Africa is actively addressing this crisis, recently launching a petition urging the Ghanaian government to regulate textile imports and demanding greater responsibility from fashion corporations. Their petition highlights the alarming statistic that “every week up to 500,000 items of clothing waste from Kantamanto market end up in open spaces and informal dumpsites.” This action coincided with the release of their report, Fast Fashion, Slow Poison: The Textile Crisis in Ghana, further illuminating the scale of the environmental and social catastrophe.
The stark reality of fashion’s endpoint became even more tangible when I met Liz Ricketts. Having written previously about Shein’s $15m donation to the Or Foundation as part of their “extended producer responsibility” (EPR) initiative, I was keen to understand the impact firsthand. Ricketts, recognized by the Business of Fashion as a leading voice against textile waste and climate injustice, has dedicated 13 years to confronting Ghana’s clothing waste crisis. She generously agreed to guide me through Kantamanto market and show me the grim reality at Jamestown beach.
Navigating the labyrinthine stalls of Kantamanto, Ricketts, clad in a locally upcycled shirt, explained how the Shein funding has enabled the Or Foundation to expand significantly, from a small team to over 50 individuals. Their work now encompasses market safety improvements, worker upskilling, political advocacy, and textile recycling and repurposing efforts, diverting over 40 tonnes of textiles from landfills to date. They are also actively campaigning to pressure more fashion brands to commit to EPR and organizing weekly beach cleanups. We eagerly volunteered to join their efforts.
This led us to Jamestown on a sweltering July day. Despite the Or team’s warnings to wear old clothes and shoes, nothing could have prepared us for the “fashion graveyard” we encountered. The sand was virtually invisible, buried under meter-high piles of decaying clothes and shredded plastic bags, with waves relentlessly depositing more waste. Our naively packed swimsuits remained unused; swimming was unthinkable.
The scene profoundly shocked and upset Evie. Seaside trips are not supposed to look like this. I took her hand and led her towards the Or’s team of 60 volunteers and paid workers, identifiable by their hi-vis vests and gloves. The taskforce, largely composed of local community members directly affected by the waste, was divided into teams. Evie’s younger brother, Zac, joined the men in the physically demanding task of filling reusable sacks with clothing waste and plastic debris, which were then carried up the cliff to waiting trucks. Evie and I joined the all-female data collection team, armed with clipboards and scissors, tasked with salvaging legible clothing tags. These labels are crucial for building the evidence base needed to hold fashion brands accountable and demand they contribute to waste management.
Evie quickly grasped the significance of her contribution. “This one’s Tu – it’s from a British supermarket,” she announced to the data leader, holding up a salvaged tag. We unearthed garments from Next, Primark, Pretty Little Thing, Marks & Spencer, Adidas, and Nike, even a Paul Smith raincoat in surprisingly good condition. However, the majority of the clothes were distorted, discolored, and ripped, their seams and hems bloated with sand, often with labels eroded beyond recognition. As we attempted to extract garments, many disintegrated in our hands, weakened by sand and entangled in “textile tentacles,” as the Or calls them – often meters-long networks of deeply buried clothing. We also found countless single shoes, flip-flops, cow horns, hooves, and even a polyester Nemo toy, a poignant symbol of plastic pollution permeating every aspect of life, even childhood innocence.
Marine life is suffering immensely. Solomon Noi, Accra’s head of waste management, explained the devastating impact on local ecosystems. The sheer volume of textile waste hinders native turtles from laying eggs, pushing them towards extinction. Local fishermen struggle to sustain their livelihoods, forced to navigate motorized canoes only about three nautical miles out to sea, precisely where the textile waste accumulates. “The fishermen harvest a lot of plastics and polyesters,” Noi lamented. Greenpeace’s infrared analysis for their recent report revealed that a staggering 89% of the clothing waste in Ghana’s dumpsites is composed of synthetic fibers, further exacerbating the environmental damage.
The visible waste on the shores is merely “the tip of the iceberg,” Noi emphasized. Heavier items like jackets, jeans, bags, and shoes sink to the ocean floor, devastating aquatic life and damaging the seabed. He warned of a looming “whole-world problem,” predicting that tsunamis or typhoons could carry this submerged waste to the Mediterranean and beyond.
It’s impossible to ignore the weight of history and culpability as a British citizen in Ghana. Local guides readily recount the historical injustices – wars waged to enforce UK rule, land seizure, resource exploitation, the horrors of slavery, powerfully brought to life during our pre-cleanup visit to Jamestown’s UNESCO-funded slave museum, Ussher Fort. Now, the UK, as the largest exporter of used clothes to Ghana, is a primary driver of “waste colonialism,” according to the Or. Wealthier nations exporting their waste to poorer countries ill-equipped to manage it. Ricketts connects this directly to colonial legacies: “There’s a colonial legacy for all the trade routes. Secondhand clothing started coming here from the UK under colonialism, because people were required to wear western-style clothes to enter certain buildings, get certain jobs, or even to go to school.”
This influx of fast fashion discards is now overwhelming the local market. Ricketts explained that Kantamanto market, initially a mix of secondhand and locally made goods in the 1950s, has been overtaken by foreign products. “It’s the legacy of 25 years of unregulated fast fashion, and that’s all that is being donated to charity shops in the global north.” While some donated clothing is genuinely unsellable, the core issue is the sheer volume of low-quality items flooding the market. “It’s really unfortunate that you have all this space and skillset in the city centre that’s being applied exclusively to solving a foreign problem.”
In four grueling, sweat-soaked hours, our team removed 20 tonnes of trash from the beach, transporting it to a “sanctioned dumpsite” roughly 50km inland. Ricketts acknowledged the limitations: “There is no engineered landfill available. But it’s better than having it burnt out in the open.” Leaving the beach, the impact of our efforts was visible – a small patch of clean, albeit still dirty, sand, roughly the size of a volleyball court. Ricketts explained the disheartening reality: during the rainy season, this area would likely be re-covered with market waste within a week, as rain pushes debris out of the lagoon. This underscores the vital need for the Or’s ongoing market-wide waste collection program, which intercepts hundreds of tonnes of textile waste, preventing its entry into the environment.
Our tag count reached 561, with Adidas, Nike, M&S, Next, and Primark emerging as the most frequently identified brands. The Or has found more Marks & Spencer items than any other brand to date. “We’d really like to see Marks & Spencer take responsibility,” Ricketts stated. The Or has engaged with M&S and other major fashion brands, urging them to contribute to waste management in countries like Ghana as part of their EPR. “Most brands don’t yet see it as their responsibility. So it’s about helping them recognize how this applies to their circularity goals.”
A Marks & Spencer spokesperson responded, stating: “As the UK’s largest clothing retailer, we take our responsibility to provide end-of-life options for our clothes seriously and offer our customers options to repair, resell or recycle their garments, including in-store take-back schemes for clothing and beauty products.” They added that unsold stock is redistributed to charity partners, including Oxfam.
While UK brands often assert they don’t intentionally send used clothing to Africa, the Or Foundation does not advocate for a ban on secondhand imports. Kantamanto market supports approximately 30,000 workers, many actively involved in circular fashion solutions, repurposing and revamping castoffs for resale. Nor does the Or blame UK charity shops, recognizing they are simply processing donated clothing. However, Ricketts believes charity shops could become “part of the solution” by helping to calculate the true costs of cleaning, repairing, reselling, and upcycling garments in both the UK and Ghana, advocating for EPR fees “that are high enough to do the job.”
The fundamental issue, Noi stressed, is the “overproduction of fast fashion in the global north – brands must ensure their production capacity is reduced.” This is why the Or is reigniting its Speak Volumes campaign, demanding the top 20 brands found in Ghana’s waste stream – including Marks & Spencer, Nike, Adidas, Primark, George, F&F, H&M, Boohoo, and Tu – to publicly disclose their annual garment production volumes by Black Friday in November. While the campaign launched last year, no major brand has yet complied, although smaller, more ethically conscious brands have.
“I think they’re afraid because they know it’s the most honest data point,” Ricketts suggests. “It’s not complicated – we’re not asking them to calculate their carbon footprint. It’s a piece of information that everyone has.” Zara already publishes volume by weight, but Ricketts argues this “abstract” metric “doesn’t help us get a real picture.”
Sophie De Salis, sustainability policy advisor at the British Retail Consortium (BRC), responded, stating: “Retailers take their responsibility to tackle textile waste very seriously and are investing millions to divert used clothing away from landfill, through take-back schemes, resale marketplaces and donating excess stock to charity.”
However, the inherent growth imperative of capitalism remains a significant obstacle. Last year, Greenpeace reported that global garment production is projected to double to 200 billion items by 2030, up from an estimated 100 billion in 2014. “Everyone has plans to grow,” Ricketts notes. Personally, I find it increasingly difficult to view mainstream fashion as an art form, seeing it instead as a cynical engine of profit.
So, what can we do individually? For starters, refuse single-use clothing. “The hen night shirt, the 5k run shirt, the conference shirt,” Ricketts points out, “is the No 1 culprit in our research, with no meaning to a secondhand wearer.” We must fundamentally shift our relationship with consumption, “embracing secondhand and upcycled garments instead of always buying new.”
The positive takeaway is that the beach cleanup profoundly impacted Evie. “Maybe I shouldn’t buy stuff from Shein,” she admitted back home. “And it did make me think about overconsumption generally.” While I know the lure of new clothes will resurface, I am hopeful that she now understands that choosing to be part of the solution is far more meaningful than contributing to a problem of truly devastating scale. Fashion’s journey ultimately ends somewhere. We have a choice in determining where that end lies – in a mountain of waste or a more sustainable future.
