Narrator: Welcome to one of the largest
used clothing markets in the world.
Janet: One cedi!
Narrator: It's estimated that Ghana's Kantamanto market
handles more than 15 million garments every week.
The used clothes arrived from around the world.
Many started out as donations.
About 30,000 people work here.
These days, they struggle to make a living
from cheaply made fast-fashion brands.
Patricia: When it's torn like this, we trash it.
Narrator: More than a third of everything
that enters Kantamanto leaves as waste.
It ends up in landfills and on beaches.
Liz: What we believe is that what you're seeing
is a sliver of what is actually lying on the ocean floor.
Narrator: Now, Ghana's capital is drowning
in other people's used clothes.
So how do the clothes end up here?
And why do so much of the leftovers become worldwide waste?
Around 100 shipping containers filled with millions
of garments arrive at the market every week.
They arrive in these bales that can weigh up to 125 pounds.
Head porters walk up to 10 miles on their busiest days
carrying bales from the containers to the stalls.
Come pick clothes to wear! Come pick clothes to sell!
If you are here, come over.
Narrator: Retailers buy bales for anywhere
from $100 to $300 without knowing exactly what's inside.
Vendor: Shatta Wale! Janet: That's me! That's me!
Janet: Shatta Wale will bring trouble.
Trouble will come! Trouble will come!
Narrator: Janet Kyerawaa started selling clothes
12 years ago by the side of the road and saved enough money
to rent her own shop in the market.
Sister, come pick one. One cedi.
One. Who will come pick one for me?
Come over!
Huge discount!
Narrator: Janet usually tries to sell
the contents of one bale before buying another.
Then, it's a race against time to move the inventory
and try to make her money back.
The good stuff can sell for about 10 cedis.
That's about $1.60 apiece.
Items made with cheaper fabric, or that have rips,
go for 16 cents.
Janet: My family benefits from this because they get clothes to wear.
But now, it's not like that anymore.
Sometimes, we come and try to woo customers all day,
and we can't even make one sale.
Narrator: Janet says prices of the bales increase every month,
even though the quality of the clothes has declined.
So most weeks, she can't sell everything from her bales.
She's often in debt.
Sometimes, the money she makes
barely covers a week's expenses.
We are going this way.
Sister, take this and sew it for me, OK?
Narrator: Janet also partners with tailors
like Naana to fix tears or resize a garment for a customer.
The bales they give us are garbage, and we sell them at a loss.
Who has ever gotten rich from selling them?
Narrator: She pays Naana 16 cents for repairing
the tear in her blouse.
Oh, won't you reduce the price? I come here every day. So reduce it.
These days, when the clothes sellers buy their goods,
they are not good enough for me to sew.
At times, I don't even get money to go back home.
So before, it was very profitable, but now it is very bad.
Narrator: Other tailors buff shoes to change their color
or dye and starch denim jeans to make them look like new.
In another area, workers steam-press garments
before they go on display.
Man: You see the way I am squeezing my face?
The fire burns me.
Narrator: They use coal to heat their irons,
then smooth a wet cloth over the garment to create steam.
Narrator: The market is flooded with
cheap garments from so-called 'fast fashion' brands
like Marks & Spencer and Zara.
Patricia: When it's torn like this, we throw it away.
We trash it. No matter what you do, it can't be fixed.
Narrator: So every day, many of the clothes
that don't sell are dumped in Old Fadama.
It's a small community with a big landfill.
Some piles of trash tower over 30 feet,
taller than some buildings around here.
At Kantamanto, there are people who sell clothes but have nowhere to keep them.
So the rain causes damage.
So they trash them here.
Narrator: The dump is a breeding ground for mosquitoes
that spread malaria, and the water can spread cholera.
Delle: Clothes absorb water, so we just put some dust on top
so that we will be able to step on top of it.
Narrator: And what doesn't go to landfill
often ends up at beaches like this one,
a mile away from Kantamanto.
Liz: They're very degraded.
Narrator: Today, activists are tracking how clothing waste
washes out to sea.
Liz: So a lot of the clothing waste from Kantamanto
will basically be swept into the open gutter system.
And then it'll tangle around itself.
It contributes to flooding,
which then causes a public health crisis.
And eventually though, it will be pushed out to sea,
and it will make its way to the bottom of the ocean.
Narrator: Liz Ricketts is the cofounder
of the Or Foundation, a charity based in the US and Ghana.
It brings attention to Accra
as one end of a wasteful supply chain.
This team is measuring what they call tentacles,
long tangles of fabric and sand.
They found over 350 piles of clothing along the coast
in just the first two months of doing this work.
Joseph: The secondhand clothing market is not a bad thing. But then I can see that
it is causing a lot of damage at our beaches.
Narrator: The most common brands
found on the beach so far? Marks & Spencer,
Next, H&M, Nike, and Gildan.
Clothing literally looks like a rock
and is being walked on top of as if it's part
of the natural landscape, and it's devastating to see.
Janet: Two cedis.
Narrator: So how do donated clothes end up here?
Americans often donate clothes to charities, like Goodwill
or Salvation Army, that later sell those in their stores
for a low price. But not everything sells.
So donation centers turn to exporters like Bank & Vogue.
Our business is very much like cleaning up
the beer cans at 3 o'clock in the morning.
Narrator: Steven Bethel sells clothes
from the US, Canada, and Europe
to 27 countries around the world.
He sells shipping containers filled with clothes
to what's known as a grading facility.
Graders in places like Pakistan
sort millions of pieces of used clothing
into hundreds of categories.
Liz: Ladies' tops for the office, ladies' tops for casual,
ladies' jeans, men's jeans, children's clothes,
skirts, ladies' shorts, men's shorts, lingerie, pajamas.
Corduroys is its own category.
Narrator: The most valuable item? Women's bras.
If you're at home, and you're looking at your bra,
and you think, "Oh, the wire's sticking out,"
or this isn't right, donate your bras.
There's never enough used bras.
Narrator: Graders are supposed to weed out
items no one will buy,
but those low-quality clothes can slip through the cracks
and end up in Kantamanto anyways.
Liz: We were visiting with a retailer to study
the material content of the waste,
and we found that over 90% of the bale
that she had purchased just two days before
was completely stained.
The stain smelled in some places
and was sticky in some places.
So she was only able to salvage like, less than 20 items
from that entire bale.
Narrator: Liz says more than a third of the clothes
at Kantamanto go to waste.
But her organization is trying to do something about it.
Welcome to our lab space.
It says "No more Man Capital fast fashion."
The business that was here before was called Man Capital.
Narrator: The OR Foundation recently built a lab here
to figure out how to recycle clothing waste.
Retailers like Janet are learning
how to shred unsold clothes to sell as insulation
for mattresses and furniture.
But shredding is a last resort, because it doesn't turn
a large profit.
Head porters can also learn how to sew here,
gaining skills that help them leave the dangerous work
of carrying bales on their heads.
Soabiba Adam Ayesha has been working with the foundation
since April 2021.
I am praying to God to guide me to be able to learn sewing well.
Because it is better than carrying the loads.
Janet: When I see clothes thrown away, it pains me a lot.
Man: We need help, serious help for us to live in this situation,
to have our peace. Because we don't have peace.
Narrator: For Liz, the issue is much bigger
than just Kantamanto.
She wants to hold the global fashion industry
accountable for creating this mess.
Liz: Our goal with this work has never been to cancel
the secondhand clothing trade.
It has been to make it better.
And for us, this is all about the root problem,
which is overproduction, overconsumption
of fast fashion in the Global North.
Narrator: One tool to do that could be the law.
The European Union, the United Kingdom, and parts of the US
are considering laws that would make fashion brands
fund clothing recycling.
So far, France and Sweden are the only countries to pass
what are known as extended producer responsibility laws
for the textile industry.
It's nearly impossible to eliminate clothing waste,
but Liz thinks the Global North could learn
from Accra's secondhand market.
Liz: If we had a version of this in our malls,
and buy our clothes, and then next door
there was a tailor or a seamstress who could alter it,
we wouldn't be producing so much waste.
Narrator: And for consumers,
the solution is even simpler.
Buy less.