Ghana: fast fashion's dumping ground | Unreported World

an environmental disaster is hitting ghana's shores and the arrival of fast fashion is making it worse a once thriving second-hand clothing market is now creating mountains of waste all of these fibres are problematic namely polyester and nylon those ones take forever to decompose millions of items a week are going unsold leaving a damaging legacy this is literally a waterfall of waste and livelihoods are being lost along the way how can i say this how can i sell a trash [Music] [Music] a shopper's paradise in ghana traders flock from miles around to buy and sell in the largest second-hand clothing market in west africa this is kantamanto market it's one of the busiest if not biggest used clothing markets in the world now there are about 30 000 traders here and each week millions of items of clothing are coming in here including garments from the uk now i love to thrift but i have never seen anything like this before this market opened in the late 1950s selling clothing imported from the uk locally referred to as dead white man's clothes because they were seen as high quality for years business was booming for retailers here but that's changing with an influx of fast fashion and substandard items obinna is one of thousands of independent retailers at kantamanto who rely on second-hand clothing imports this cramped market stall has been her life and only source of income for the last eight years now for obinna and her friend shatter business is bust a vampire [Music] [Music] is a market that never stops all of ivenna's clothes come from abroad through a series of middlemen many of which source their imports from our charitable donations and clothing bins [Music] so it's 4 a.m in cantomento market i've come to meet abhinav traders get here first thing to get the best pick of the bill as you can see like it's already really busy [Music] so every morning you get hurt this time yes i got up early but today i'm late so you meet the importers now yes i'm going to meet them okay let's go even has to buy in bulk and the quality has become a lottery one bad buy could break her business we tag along as she goes to her importer but it's almost impossible for her to make a choice the clothes being imported today into cantamanto are from the uk but the importers are wary of the camera they fear it's bad for business so we've just been stopped from filming a dinner the importers aren't happy that we're here they don't want us to film what's going on abina has invested in two bales spending over 100 pounds on each one but she has a tense few days ahead she won't know what's in them until they're delivered to her stall another early morning and the busiest day in the market it's the day of the big reveal for ebene and she's praying for good fortune she needs the clothes to be good quality or she worries she'll fall into debt [Music] her friend shatter is also hoping that today will be a good day for business so ebenezer's bales have just arrived as you can see from the uk it's six o'clock she's already got customers coming in they want to get the first and best selection of what's coming into the market abina desperately wants to support her family but as she goes through her bail the rewards don't appear to be worth the sacrifice i don't have any business to go and do so i have to do it i have children if you're doing this for your family i have to work hard to take care of them you know ghana yeah we women we take took care of our children most of them [Music] so many women at county manta yes so many are single parents so it's not easy how difficult is it for you as a mother getting up every day to come here this early to work and be disappointed yes because i'll be tired when i get home i can cook for them and i have to get up early and come here in the morning i don't see them going to school in the morning coming from school in the afternoon always i sleep yeah i sleep the more urbena inspects her stock the more she's disappointed by the quality when they're bringing clothes the clothes are not clean or new they're just something like somebody has thrown it thrown away what do you think about it it's not good it's very bad how can i sell it how can i sell a trash if you come will you buy it you want to buy it this is an old h m top it's old it's worn it's bubbled it's trash she can't sell this it's trash as she sorts through the bundle she finds even more worn out clothes you can see see the armpits okay stain stains sweats no one will bite if i hang it here nobody will buy it so this like something like this it's trash do you understand so i can't sell this one a binner picks out a few cloves for the early customers these are good enough to get sold on or the binacle's first selection so this is pretty little thing very popular fast fashion brand in the uk the clothes are very cheap you just order it online it's there the next day pretty little thing what else have you got here george another asda so all of these clothes here are what i've been now called second selection meaning these aren't first choice for her or her customers there's so many that i can't pick them up over here first selection we've only got four this bell has been a disaster for rebecca she'll make just 45 pounds out of her initial 112 pound investment losing over half so we're bin is finished opening her bales now you can see the whole place is covered with clothes like you can't even see the floor the first bell was disappointing the second slightly better but without a doubt much of this clothing will be going to waste [Music] this is what the west's addiction to fast fashion looks like textile waste has now become a huge environmental issue in 2019 over 63 million kilograms of old clothes from the uk were sent to be sold in ghana that figure has doubled in a decade and this is where those clothes that we donate to charity shops and recycling bins can often end up 150 trucks full of waste arrive every day at this landfill site the man in charge here ernest ijawan tells me it's a huge challenge for the city's authorities who are dealing with clothes that were made for consumers thousands of miles away do you think that all of the people in the uk or in the us who are sending over these second-hand clothing do you think they have any idea of of where it ends up not really something what they sent to african countries maybe in ghana or are useful to us but the fact is that when the groups get here some are not useful and they end up in the waste dump site every day not all textile waste goes to official landfills anyone can dump clothes at informal sites springing up all over accra with tons of waste from cantamanto ends up this is old fatima home to many other cars poorest residents look at this smoke behind me and what's being burnt waste some of it textiles waste which has come from kantamanto market unsold cloves some of which takes about 200 years to decompose so what do they do they have to burn it [Music] [Music] back in the market i'm meeting sammy a fashion designer turned fashion activist he comes here each week to do waste data collection he wants to see how much people are selling and how much is going to waste [Laughter] while some of the wasted clothes from this market are simply damaged or soiled sammy is also concerned about the fast fashion items that are often full of plastics so basically collecting all the information that comes on here um the type of fiber so this one has 100 polyester it was made in canada and i also find out the brand all of these fibers are problematic there's no single one of them that is not because none of them easily decomposes but there's one of them that is more problematic would be the synthetic ones namely polyester and nylon those ones take forever to decompose [Music] every day sammy sees clothes from the uk coming here he estimates 40 of all textiles imported into cantamanto is waste that can't be sold what kind of responsibility should the uk be taking for the large amount of textiles that are coming in here the idea of the nation is kindness it's not an insult and if you think about it if you're going to donate a piece of clothing or a t-shirt item that has a wine stain or amp stain white marks tears and everything you would not wear that you wouldn't give that to a friend you wouldn't give that to someone you know you can donate a piece of item that you wouldn't wear it doesn't work that way if their weights are coming in there has to be some reparation there has to be some money that comes with the waste so the people here can work with the ways that that is coming in here there's so much waste that he even finds a way onto the coast in a craft so this is the exact point where the clothes that are washed in pantomento market come down through the sewers and go straight into the sea and if you look closely over there you can see cloves hanging down this is literally a waterfall of waste sami wants to show me along the coast to get a sense of the scale of the problem there's literally no publicly accessible beach in ghana from the west the body beach to the eastern colorado you can't find any spot where you won't find any of these clothing textures they are everywhere literally sammy and his team have counted hundreds of what they call clothing tentacles on this stretch of beach alone so this is one of the close tentacles here why do you call them tentacles because that's what they literally look like you can just see like a sleeve pull it out somewhere you know and a leg pulling up somewhere it just looks like a bunch of tentacles popping out of the sand why do you use the gloves for this is it because it just washed from the sewers and it stacks those it picks up anything so this is a health hazard to everyone on the beach as well more so it's very easy it's very easy to spot oh someone's spot yeah that's that's that's underwear yeah right like she's mixed in with seashells and sand and and that looks like what is that a fishing net or a mop i don't even know what that is the tentacles are deeply embedded and almost impossible to remove oh it's just stuck oh my gosh it can't go you can't get this out from the from the beach and more clothing imports add to their number so more clothes tentacles yeah more clothes and you can just actually find anything here like all in terms of clothing what is that bra uh i think so it has a bra so you've got underwear being washed up on the beach along with everything else and this is wait oh debenhams yeah that's dependent yeah yeah that's the uk brand sami and volunteers are working with a local university to assess the impact of this textile waste [Music] samples of water are collected from the sea to get a better understanding of the damage being done to gang's marine life [Music] those samples are being analyzed here at the university of ghana [Music] hi dr mahu hi hey good morning good morning dr mahu is looking in the waters for microplastics and specifically microfibers to determine the severity of the problem okay let's put something here oh wow looks like you found something this is um a fiber so how do you know that it's coming from the second second-hand clothing that's coming into ghana the fibers are textile related unlike the other types of micro plastics so the polyethylene bags they will also break down into micro plastics the microfibers we know come from synthetic fabrics and dr mahu's research shows these fibers are affecting a vital food source we have taken oysters from nigeria we've taken oysters from gambia sierra leone benin including organa um oyster samples and clearly the research is showing that these organisms are taking in a lot of microfibers and microplastics in the fish and that indirectly links to human health believe you me the consequences are great they are big if not for now think about the next 10 years so i knew there was a high likelihood of us finding the microfibers in the samples we've seen them in the sea but it's still so shocking to see just how it's impacting the marine life and also humans not just in ghana but across the whole of the west african coast there are people in ghana trying to turn things around and do something positive with the clothes we throw away hey hey guys how are you doing good to meet you yaya and kuamina run an upcycling fashion house in east aircraft their aim to turn trash into hot trends when we go into the market is more like a rescue mission we don't go with any intention we don't go with any mood board wanting to find certain specific things we go in and whatever we find that we feel like it has like a very high risk of getting into the garters or into the ocean or anything then we just collect them and bring them through here all these things are coming here and they're coming in huge quantities look at this this is for winter yes this is a sweet leatherish kind of thing the challenge for these designers is turning winter clothes arriving from the uk into something that can be worn in sunny ghana you find these things here so something like this what we do is we turn it into something we just saw this is it and this is a backpack okay so how did they oh so you've closed the bottom close the button oh wow yes i see yeah so this is um a backpack made from a butterfly what else have we got here yeah we have pants that we also employ we use the screen print as well on the pants yeah that's where we fix them up we have t-shirts then we dye and then we use okada boys well security policeman's code yes the policeman is good and here we have um also the london fire brigade yep yeah yeah this is official this is an official london fire brigade jacket you have to ask yourself how did it get all the way from there to here what's this doing in that craft [Music] yara and commoner have made a collection of 30 000 denim uniforms for farm workers those uniforms will keep 17 000 tons of waste textiles out of landfill in ghana so we realized that denim could be something that could fight to prevent their skin from that injury so we created um this jumpsuit to solve that problem and using waste to create uniforms for um that will impact you know industry sanitation workers and all of that because the waste is coming so much and if we don't figure out a fine strategic way to upcycle and move to create um a circular economy around it then we would be upcycling so much of the waste but then we'll be left in storage wouldn't find a demand for it so there is only so much upcycling clothes can do and the decision to allow second-hand textiles into ghana is ultimately one for the garnet in government it created an environmental protection agency bill with powers to reduce imports yet it still allows the trade to continue should ghana ban the importation of secondhand clothing we have to look at the fact that we are not exactly a very rich nation and in one fell swoop if you bring the ban on the importation it will impact on those at the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum a very far-reaching ban could serve our purpose absolute man i'm not too sure and we have to draw the balance we must pick and choose what we want what would you say to the global manufacturers and the consumers and the foreign governments who are sending this waste over if we went on the trajectory of development of the west the path that the west chose to develop their countries said that their economies are huge now there will be nothing for us in the future yes talking to the minister highlights the complexities of this topic livelihoods depend on secondhand clothing but the damage being done has the potential to ruin this beautiful coastline what ghana doesn't need is the waste that's coming in here it simply can't cope what began as a sustainable business model that worked for so many people has now become a broken economy the country has become a dumping ground because of the west's addiction to fast fashion which is destroying the livelihoods of thousands of traders like habena it's a lasting legacy of cheap fashion full of plastic that will leave its mark on this country for hundreds of years to come [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Unreported World

Views: 77,886

Keywords: Unreported world, unreported world documentary, docs, documentary, documentaries 2022, fast fashion, fashion, ghana, accra, environment, environmental disaster, pollution, shorts, fashion documentary

Id: VC5KYX74AP4

Length: 24min 1sec (1441 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 10 2022