Horrific cost of fast fashion obsession exposed as mountains wash up on beach
Britain's love of fast fashion is fuelling an environmental “catastrophe” in Ghana, experts warn. Many items donated in the UK are so cheaply made they can’t be reused. Ghana’s capital has a toxic mountain of ditched clothes and garments rot on a beach. It is an environmental crisis caused by our obsession with fast fashion.
Nearby, at a beach in the Jamestown district, kids play on a rotting carpet of old clothing wedged in the sand. I found dozens of British labels including items from John Lewis, Marks & Spencer and New Look. These garments were donated to charity shops or put in clothing recycling banks by well-meaning Brits expecting them to be reused.
But campaigners say much of the clothing being donated in the UK is cheap and mass produced, leaving Ghana – the main recipient of our second-hand garments – at breaking point. Liz Ricketts, co-founder of The Or Foundation, a non-profit organisation probing the impact of the second-hand clothing trade in Accra, said: “It’s an environmental catastrophe.”
Nada among the clothes that have washed up on beach in Jamestown, Accra (Adam Gerrard / Daily Mirror)Fast fashion is the mass production of cheap garments to cater to changing trends. Items are often worn just once. Chinese fashion retail website Shein sells tops for just £1.05. But the desire for cheap, disposable clothes comes at a cost. I found the full scale in West Africa where Ghana’s capital is drowning in used clothes.
With no facilities to deal with it and the official landfill site overflowing, much is burnt or left in the gutter. It makes its way to the sea via drains or is dumped at the textile mountain at Old Fadama, where 40,000 of Accra’s most vulnerable citizens live. Cattle, chickens and egrets forage on the heap, while waste pickers search for scraps to salvage. It is a breeding ground for malaria-carrying mosquitoes. The river, also overflowing with waste, brings with it the risk of cholera.
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Cows at informal landfill site in Accra (Adam Gerrard / Daily Mirror)Two miles away, bustling Kantamanto Market is full of clothes. There are tops from Asos, Tesco, Primark and H&M, suits from Next, and even second-hand bras and glasses. The size of three football pitches, it is the world’s largest reuse market. Its 30,000 tailors, seamstresses and dyers repurpose the stuff we ditch.
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The garments are known as “obroni wawu” – dead white man’s clothes – and 25 million are recirculated each month. But 40% is such poor quality it can’t be sold, and leaves as waste. Millions of garments arrive each week at the main port and are sorted into bales. I joined Janet Kyerewaa, 48, who sells women’s tops from the UK, as she set up at the market.
Routes clothing takesCutting open her 8st bale at 6am, which cost her the equivalent of £208, just a handful of items made it into her first selection, which she can sell for 75p each. Items that need fixing are sold for 12p. The larger pile, which she called waste, was full of fast fashion items.
Janet, who is in debt and whose sales barely cover her expenses some weeks, said: “When I see clothes thrown away it pains me, but we can’t sell this stuff.” T-shirts from events such as hen and stag parties are a common problem. They are cheaply made and of no value on the secondary market. Sellers say many items fall apart.
The Or Foundation is against a ban on second-hand imports, adding that over 30,000 people work in the market and there are no immediate alternative jobs. When I joined Joe Ayesu – who runs the foundation’s beach monitoring programme – at Jamestown beach, we found piles of degraded clothes buried in the sand like rocks.
Garment from M&S is among the pile (Adam Gerrard / Daily Mirror)Joe said: “The second-hand clothing market is not a bad thing but the poor quality of what is being sent here is destroying our beaches.” Nearly 40% of the £167million of used clothing imported by Ghana is from the UK. We are the world’s third-largest exporter of second-hand clothes.
Textiles Recycling International, which represents the UK’s five largest textile recycling firms, said many issues are due to rogue companies not sorting clothes properly. It added: “If used clothing is exported without being sorted it isn’t surprising items that can’t be worn... will be discarded. The TRI group sorts all products before export to Ghana.”
Kantamanto, one of the world's largest second-hand markets (Adam Gerrard / Daily Mirror)All the shops named in this article say cutting clothes waste is important to them and they do not send unsold stock to Ghana. Sophie De Salis, at the British Retail Consortium, said: “Retailers take their responsibility to tackle textile waste very seriously and are investing millions to divert used clothing away from landfill.”
M&S said: “We make our clothes to last, ensuring our customers can wear them for years and then confidently give them a second life. Our simple commitment is to send no clothes to landfill, ensuring any unsold stock is redistributed to our charity partners.” John Lewis said: “We offer recycling points in all our shops, provide care/repair information on clothing and provide rental options for customers to prolong the lifespan of garments.”
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New Look said: “We have partnered with organisations to give pre-loved... clothes a second life. We sell and distribute [leftover stock] to trusted providers. In 2019 we banned partners sending products to Africa to minimise the possibility of our product ending up at landfill sites like this.”
Solomon Noi, director of waste management for Accra Metropolitan Assembly, said the city can’t cope with this much clothing waste. He added: “It’s growing in the sea – turtles can’t come to the beach to lay eggs, the coral is dying, the fishers can’t fish.”
How did clothes end up there?
Almost all textiles made for fast-fashion retailers come from China, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia and several other Asian countries.
Items arrive in UK after being shipped around the world to be sold in stores. On average, clothing is worn seven times before it is binned or donated, but increasingly items are worn just once.
Clothes are donated to charity shops, recycling banks or through door-to-door collections. Items not sold in shops are then bought by textile merchants.
The lowest-quality items are separated and may be recycled for mattress stuffing, carpet underlay and cleaning rags, or incinerated. Garments are sorted for eastern European countries and Africa.
Items are packed into bales and loaded into shipping containers. If the sorting plant is outside the UK, quality thresholds may be lower, which leads to waste items ending up in the bales. Some merchants in the UK may send unsorted textiles.
Bales are shipped to the recipient country via an importer, then onwards to retailers to sell at shops or markets.
The waste may be distributed for use as rags or cloths, but is often burnt or dumped at landfill or other unofficial sites.
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