How 7.5 Million Pounds Of Donated Clothes End Up At A Market In Ghana Every Week | World Wide Waste

welcome to one of the largest used clothing

market

s in the

world

hey why city why Ghana's contamanto

market

is estimated to handle over 15

million

items of clothing each

week

used clothing comes in from all over the

world

many started as donations around 30,000 people work here these Today they struggle to make a living with cheap fast fashion brands. More than a third of

every

thing we come into contact with is

waste

and ends up in landfills and on beaches. What we believe is that what you are seeing is a sliver of what it really is. lying at the bottom of the ocean now Ghana's capital is drowning in other people's used

clothes

, so how do

clothes

end up here and why does so much of the leftovers become global

waste

?

Around 100 containers filled with

million

s of garments arrive at the market

every

week

. They arrive in these bales that can weigh up to 125

pounds

at headquarters they walk up to 10 miles on their busiest days carrying bales from bins to stalls retailers buy bales for between 100 and three hundred dollars without knowing exactly what's inside Jeanette began to selling clothes 12 years ago on the side of the road and saved enough money to rent his own shop at the market. Hey, Jeanette usually tries to sell the contents of one bale before buying another, so it's a race against time to move inventory and try to make money.

Good things can be sold for about 10 CDs, that is, about 1.60 a piece. Items made from cheaper fabrics or that have tears cost 16 cents. Jeannette says bale prices are increasing every month even though the quality of clothing has decreased most weeks. She cannot sell everything she has in her bag, often she is in debt, sometimes the money she earns barely covers a week's expenses. Jeanette also partners with tailors as a nanny to fix tears or resize a garment for a client. She pays Nana 16 cents to repair the tear. your blouse other tailors polish shoes to change their color or die on starched jeans to make them look new in another area workers steam iron garments before displaying them you see the way I squeeze my face the fire burns me they use charcoal to heat up your irons and then run a damp cloth over the garment to create steam and watch it become soft.

The market is flooded with cheap clothes from so-called fast fashion brands such as Marks and Spencer and Zara Edema, so every day many of the clothes they do not wear. They are not sold, they are thrown away in ancient Fátima. It is a small community with a large landfill. Some trash piles tower more than 30 feet higher than some buildings around here. The landfill is a breeding ground for mosquitoes that spread malaria and the water can spread cholera. The fabric is soft. waters, so we just put a little dust on top so we can go up and what doesn't go to the landfill often ends up on beaches like this one, a mile away from contamanto, very degraded.

Today, activists are tracking how clothing waste is washed. offshore, so much of Contemporanzo's clothing waste will basically be washed into the open sewage system and then tangled on itself, contributing to flooding, which will then cause a public health crisis and eventually , will be pushed out to sea. and it will reach the bottom of the ocean liz ricketts is the co-founder of the ore Foundation, a charity based in the US and Ghana, draws attention to Accra as one end of a wasteful supply chain. This team is measuring what they call long tentacles, tangles of fabric and sand.

They found more than three hundred and fifty piles of clothing along the coast in just the first two months of doing this work. The second market for clothing is not a bad thing, but then I can see it is causing a lot of damage. on our beaches the most common brands found on the beach so far marx and spencer next h m nike and gildam this is very bad clothing it literally looks like a rock and you walk on it as if it were part of the natural landscape and it is It is devastating to see how it ends up here

donated

clothes.

Americans often donate clothes to charities like Goodwill or the Salvation Army, which then sell them in their stores for cheap, but not everything sells, so donation centers turn to exporters like Bank and Vogue. Our business is a lot like cleaning beer cans at three in the morning Steven Bethel sells clothing from the United States, Canada and Europe to 27 countries around the world sells containers full of clothing to what is known as a sorting facility sorters in some places like Pakistan, sort through millions of used clothes in hundreds of categories women's blouses for office women's blouses for casual women's jeans men's jeans children's clothing skirts women's shorts men's shorts lingerie pajamas corduroy is your own category the most valuable item women's bras if you're at home and you're looking at your bra and you're thinking, "Oh, the wire is sticking out or this isn't right." Donate your bras.

There are never enough used bras. Graters are supposed to weed out items no one will buy, but low-quality clothing will. go unnoticed and end up in contact anyway we were visiting a retailer to study the material contents of the waste and discovered that more than 90 percent of the bail I had purchased just two days before was completely stained, the stain smelled of something places and it was sticky in places, so he was only able to salvage less than 20 items from that entire bond. Liz says more than a third of the clothing in her inventory goes to waste, but her organization is trying to do something about it.

Welcome to our the lab space says there is no more human capital fast fashion the business that was here before was called human capital the mineral foundation recently built a lab here to figure out how to recycle clothing waste retailers like jeanette are learning to shred clothing unsold to be sold as insulation for mattresses and furniture, but shredding is a last resort because it does not generate much profit. The headquarters can also learn to sew here by acquiring skills that will help them leave the dangerous job of carrying bales on their heads, which is why abiba adam ayesha has been working with the foundation since April 2021 yes, we need help, serious help to live in this situation and have peace because we don't have peace for Liz, the problem is much bigger than just with so much, she wants to hold the global fashion industry responsible for creating this.

Our goal with this work has never been to cancel the second-hand clothing trade, it has been to improve it and for us it is about the root problem, which is overproduction over fast fashion consumption in the global north. One tool to do this could be the law. The European Union, the United Kingdom and parts of the United States are considering laws that would make fashion brands fund clothing recycling. So far, France and Sweden are the only countries that have passed the law. What is known as extended producer responsibility laws for the textile industry is almost impossible to eliminate clothing waste, but Liz believes the global north could learn from the second-hand market if we had a version of this in our shopping malls and bought our clothes and next to it there would be a tailor or seamstress who could modify them.

Not as much waste will be produced and for consumers the solution is even simpler: buy less.