Hello!
West Africa.
Ghana.
Day after day, ships with bales from Europe, the USA, China and Australia arrive to the
coast of this country.
They bring mountains of used clothes here.
Welcome to one of the largest used clothing markets in the world.
It is estimated that more than 15 million items of clothing are sold in the Kantamanto
Market in Ghana every week.
In just one week, about 100 shipping containers filled with millions of garments arrive on
the market.
In Ghana, such a cargo is called "drop wawa" or clothes of dead white men.
Used clothes that are brought here from all over the world are, as a rule, clothes that
are cast-off clothes from thrift stores in the Western world.
Most clothes arrive in an unwearable condition.
Traces of sweat and dirt are visible to the naked eye.
At the same time, the used clothing trade created many new jobs.
Today, the market employs about 30,000 people.
These people are trying their best to make a living with cheap fast fashion brands.
More than a third of everything that enters Kantamanto goes to waste.
Like such a thing.
Such things end up in landfills and beaches, turning part of Ghana into one common poisonous
dump.
Thus, all the unwanted world fashion ends its journey here.
What you see is only a small fragment of what actually lies at the bottom of the ocean.
Environmental activists call them tentacles.
When they first wash out of the sea, they are very long.
This creates an ecological catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.
Liz Ricketts, who leads an NGO campaigning to raise awareness of the textile waste crisis
in Ghana, blames international fashion houses for this state of affairs.
Today, the capital of Ghana is simply drowning in a sea of second-hand clothing from around
the world.
So how does this kind of clothing end up here?
And why do so many leftover clothes end up as waste all over the world?
Clothes arrive in bales, each of which can weigh up to 60 kilograms.
Loaders carry bales from containers to retail outlets, winding up to 10 kilometers on the
busiest days.
Retailers buy bales for $100 to $300 without having a clue what's inside.
These merchants, men and women, are waiting for the new bale to be unpacked so they can
get the best clothes out of it.
And although they are old friends, there is much at stake this morning.
They talk to each other about how good they look today.
But in a few moments, these people will turn into sworn competitors.
After all, if you don’t get the best clothes, you won’t earn anything.
The merchants are worried while the worker cuts the bale.
And finally, the bale is cut.
Janet Chierava started selling clothes 12 years ago on the side of the road and has
saved up enough money to rent her own shop in the market.
Janet usually tries to sell the contents of one bale before buying another.
Therefore, time is precious, you need to try to return the money invested in the product
as soon as possible.
Good things can be sold for about 10 cedis, which is about 1 dollar and 60 cents a piece.
Items made of cheaper fabric or with holes cost 16 cents.
Janet says her family benefits from this because they have clothes.
But now the situation is changing.
There are days when Janet can't sell a single thing.
She says that the price of bales is rising every month, although the quality of the clothes
is deteriorating.
During the week, she cannot sell all the things from her bales, because of this she often
has to get into debt.
Sometimes the money she earns is barely enough to cover her weekly expenses.
Janet is forced to work with tailors like Naana to fix rips or resize clothes for a
client.
Janet believes that things in bales are just garbage, and merchants simply sell them at
a loss.
She doesn't remember anyone ever getting rich selling them.
She pays Naana 16 cents to repair a hole in her blouse and asks for a lower price for
the repair, as she is a regular customer.
But the dressmaker thinks that things are almost worthless to sew.
She says the salary is low.
Sometimes she doesn't even have the money to go home.
Other retailers polish shoes to change color or dye and starch jeans to make them look
like new.
Elsewhere, workers are ironing clothes with steam before putting them on display.
To do this, they heat their irons with charcoal and then iron their clothes through a wet
cloth to create steam.
But there are people in Cantamanto whom the market has made successful.
For example, Asare Asamoah, like everyone else, starts his day early.
He is a successful importer of used clothes.
Asare lives a few hours from the city center.
In a good year, importers can sell over $95,000 worth of goods.
Asare Asamoah attributes his family's success to divine intervention.
New bales have arrived today and Asare is checking his order.
He brings clothes, mostly from the United Kingdom, and if they are of good quality,
he can earn a decent income.
But this is a risky business.
He has to pay up front for the bales and never knows if it's rubbish or treasure.
As cheap and fast fashion floods the world, the quality of clothes entering Ghana is getting
worse and worse.
These bales are sent to almost every corner of the vast Kantamanto Market.
The market is a bustling labyrinth where almost everything is for sale.
This market is one of the largest in West Africa, and maybe in the whole world.
It can be called the world center for second-hand clothing.
Goods are shipped from here all over Africa.
Aisha goes to the importer Asara to get a bale of clothes.
Her profession is called kayaya or senior porter, or more simply, a carrier of bales
of goods.
Here she receives the goods and goes with them to the store.
Ghanaian Kayai women are usually forced to leave their villages in the north of the country
due to conflict or unemployment.
In Accra, Aisha is lucky, here she earns $5 a day.
The bundle of clothes she carries weighs over 50 kilograms.
This is hard and dangerous work.
When, after such work, Aisha comes home exhausted and sick, she takes painkillers before going
to bed.
Some carriers can not stand it and go home, back to the north of the country.
Most often this is due to injuries and further disability.
This happens quite often.
Finally, the shipment has been delivered.
The trade in used clothing is also dangerous for importers.
They pay up to $95,000 up front for a container, with no guarantee that the clothes are good.
It often happens that almost all the clothes in the container are of very poor quality.
Asare imports up to 3 million pieces of used clothing every year.
When he finds Western exporters with good quality clothing, he can expect to make a
profit.
Asare also sells his newly imported goods to other vendors in the Kantamanto Market.
At first it seems that it looks like chaos, but this madness has its own order.
It's the retailers, or to put it simply, the retailers, who gather the best clothes that
come from the bales to prepare for the market day.
The market is flooded with cheap clothing from so-called "fast fashion" brands such
as Marks & Spencer and Zara.
Western samples are so cheap that local textile manufacturers cannot compete with them.
Since the 1980s, their production in the country has fallen by as much as 75%.
Sellers show what clothes they just throw away.
No matter what they do with it, the defects cannot be fixed.
Every evening, when the buyers go home, cleaning begins.
The lanes are just full of unsold clothes.
All this is swept up and packed into bags.
The next morning, the amount of waste is staggering.
But even before the garbage is taken away, there are merchants who find clothes in these
bags that will be put up for sale.
And this is what happens every day.
Many unsellable items are thrown into Old Fadama.
This is a small settlement with a large dump.
In this largest urban slum, some rubbish heaps rise up to 9 meters, which is higher than
some of the nearby buildings.
Most often, a lot of garbage is brought here by unofficial collectors.
These synthetic fabrics take hundreds of years to decompose.
The landfill is a breeding ground for mosquitoes that spread malaria, and water can spread
cholera.
These stinking mountains of clothing are often set on fire, filling the heavens with acrid
smoke.
The landfill casts its stinking shadow over the surrounding areas, and the results of
its activities will affect the lives of future generations.
The inhabitants of Old Fadama are not responsible for this problem, but they have to live with
it.
Every day this truck is filled to overflowing.
Approximately 6 million items of clothing are taken to the city dump every week from
the Kantamanto market in the form of waste.
The pressure from the used clothing industry is relentless.
The city of Accra must now find somewhere to dispose of the more than 160 tons of textile
waste that comes in every day.
The problem is that there is no room left in Accra to accommodate them.
This massive, carefully designed landfill was supposed to be the solution to Accra's
waste crisis.
This should have been enough for 15 years.
But once the landfill began accepting clothing waste from the Kantamanto market, it was filled
to capacity in just five years.
Another problem arises when the rainy season begins in Ghana.
Heavy rains fall, unwanted clothes are washed into the open sewers of the city and clog
all waterways.
Any heavy downpour collects all this uncollected garbage and through storm drains, which are
not covered by anything, takes it out into the ocean.
This means that all these layers of textile waste accumulate at the bottom of the ocean,
and this is what will suffocate the aquatic life there.
And this is what the ocean throws onto the beaches.
For example, this one is only a mile from Kantamanto.
Today, activists monitor how clothing waste is washed into the sea.
Liz Ricketts says clothes get tangled and clog drains, contributing to flooding.
And they then cause a public health crisis.
And, in the end, the clothes again go into the sea, and go to the bottom of the ocean.
This is dangerous for people: clothes get caught in fishermen's nets and can damage
boat engines.
Environmentalists are focusing on Accra as one of the end points in the used clothing
supply chain.
This team of environmentalists is measuring what they call tentacles, long tangles of
cloth and sand.
In just the first two months of work, they found more than 350 piles of clothes along
the entire coast.
The most popular brands found on the beach are Marks & Spencer, Next, H&M, Nike and Gildan.
The clothes literally look like a rock and they walk on it, it's like part of the natural
landscape, and it's terrible.
The question arises, how does the donated clothes get here?
Americans often donate clothing to charities such as Goodwill or the Salvation Army, who
later sell it in their stores for a low price.
But not everything is for sale.
Then donation centers turn to exporters like Bank & Vogue.
This company sells clothes from the USA, Canada and Europe to 27 countries.
She sells shipping containers filled with clothes to a so-called sorting center.
One of
the centers is in Pakistan, where appraisers sort millions of second-hand garments into
hundreds of categories.
For example, women's blouses for the office, women's blouses for everyday life, women's
jeans, men's jeans, children's clothing, skirts, women's shorts, men's shorts, underwear, pajamas.
Velvet is a separate category.
The most valuable item is women's bras.
Western buyers, if they see that the wire is sticking out, they often donate their bras
to charity.
There are never many used bras.
Appraisers have to weed out things that no one will buy, but still, low-quality clothes
can slip through their eyes and still end up in Cantamanto.
Liz Ricketts and the team checked one of the bales of clothes, where 90% of it was soiled.
In some places, the stains smelled bad, and in some places, the clothes were sticky.
Thus, out of 200 pieces of clothing, only 20 could be used for sale.
Statistics say that more than a third of the clothes in Kantamanto are thrown away.
Liz's organization is trying to do something about it.
The Operations Foundation recently built a lab to figure out how to recycle clothing
waste.
Retailers like Janet are learning how to shred up unsold clothing to sell as mattress and
furniture insulation.
But shredding is a last resort because it doesn't bring in much profit.
Porters can also learn how to sew here, and thus gain skills that will help them give
up the dangerous work of carrying bales on their heads.
For Liz, the problem is much more important than just Cantamanto.
She wants to hold the global fashion industry accountable for this mess.
Liz considers her goal in this work not to abolish the second-hand clothing trade, but
to curb overproduction and excessive consumption of fast fashion in Europe and America.
One tool for this could be legislation for the European Union, the UK and the US that
would force fashion brands to fund clothing recycling.
Getting rid of clothing waste is next to impossible, but Liz believes that developed Western countries
could learn from the operation of the used clothing market in Accra.
And for consumers, the solution is even simpler - you
need
to buy less such clothes.
That's all.
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