The Environmental Disaster that is Fuelled by Used Clothes and Fast Fashion | Foreign Correspondent

on the coast of west africa the ships arrive day after day with an unrelenting cargo [Music] [Music] they're the charity shop cast offs from the western world it's sweat it's yeah rubbish it's like a insult too many of them arrive in unwearable condition while the trade in used clothes has created thousands of jobs it's also turning parts of ghana into a toxic landfill this place is serving as a dumping ground for textile waste in the name of secondhand clothing the world's unwanted fashion ends its journey here we call them tentacles when they first wash up on sea they're very long it's creating an environmental catastrophe of unthinkable proportions [Music] [Music] in akra the working day begins long before dawn [Music] as thousands of ghanaians make their daily migration into the centre of this west african capital from old fatima akra's biggest slum aisha idrisou and her 18-month old son sharif joined the throng working in the second-hand clothes trade [Music] [Music] [Music] asari asamoah starts his day early too he's a successful importer of used clothing i always follow my brother for as we are doing in the business and unfortunately my brother passed away so he handled everything to me i always think about him here because he made me who i am today new bales arrive and asari is checking on his order yeah yeah and i'm afraid bad times [Music] these bales are being dispatched to almost every corner of accra's commercial heart the sprawling kantamanto market [Music] it's a bustling labyrinth where almost everything is for sale 25.5 these markets are one of the biggest in west africa if not the world and they're a central hub for secondhand clothing from here they get shipped all over africa [Music] for the past two decades the resale of western castoffs has boomed here it's created tens of thousands of jobs these men and women are retailers eager to seize the best clothes from a prized new bile they're old friends but this morning there's lots at stake so for the next few moments they're also arch competitors if they don't grab the best clothes they don't make money oh [Music] aisha is on her way to collect a bale of clothes from asari the importer are usually displaced from their villages in the north of the country by conflict or unemployment [Music] but even in accra aisha is lucky to earn five dollars a day the bale of clothing she's carrying weighs more than 50 kilograms it's tough and dangerous working everyone said [Music] the trade and used clothing is also risky for importers they pay up front as much as 95 000 for a container with no guarantee if the clothes inside it are any good it's not easy sometimes if you don't have money to do business this business is not easy for you sometimes you go and buy bought something then you cut you'll not get what you want then you lose your money asari imports as many as three million items of used clothing every year most of it from the united kingdom when he finds western exporters with good quality clothes profits are there for the taking we're so if you know inside that this goose is fine that one you are going to buy it then you get your profit if you don't know that this goes it's nicer you just bought anything then you lose your money asari also sells his newly imported items to other retailers in kantamanto market it looks like chaos but there's a method to this madness these retailers are picking the finest clothes that have come in from the bale in order to be ready for market day asari lives a few hours from the city centre in a good year importers can turn over 140 000. so the money i get i don't drop off i just save some so i just save it asari asamoah attributes his family's success to divine intervention and god has blessed what i'm doing and god grace living in this house it's very big conflict between sunday and my job the crew that i serve that one is somebody culture like a white man used to wear it when going into office by this one it's our own culture today is sunday and in this deeply religious country it's a day for traditional clothing western cast offs are so cheap that local textile makers can't compete since the 1980s their output has fallen by as much as 75 [Music] traditional african clothing has now become too expensive for everyday wear [Music] hey [Music] every evening with the markets customers heading home a cleanup operation begins alleys full of unsalable clothing are swept up and bundled into sacks ready for tomorrow's collection [Music] the next morning the sheer volume of waste is staggering [Music] but before it's even been driven away [Music] load of used clothing appears and is put up for sale [Music] [Applause] solomon noye is the city's waste manager this place is serving as a dumping ground for textile waste in the name of second-hand clothing close to 40 percent of whatever shipment that are coming on a daily basis hence have to be complete chaff of no value [Applause] every day this truck is full to overflowing [Music] [Music] there's roughly six million garments every week that leave kantamanto market as waste and a huge proportion of all of that clothing is trucked two hours north of accra and ends up being dumped as landfill the pressure from the used clothing industry is relentless the city of accra now has to find somewhere to dispose of more than 160 tons of textile waste every single day black black we don't like the game in ghana we don't like black cristiano manco is a retailer who sells her stock outside the city five days um it's a hand-to-mouth existence for the single mother of three who travels for hours between kantamanto market and outer lying villages [Music] she says she fell into the trade after her brother used juju or sorcery to force her off the family farm [Music] [Music] right [Music] she goes from village to village selling her clothes these two dresses are something of a luxury item to say but it's a precarious enterprise because many of her customers insist on being granted credit [Music] know cristiano works hard to care for her family but it's becoming harder because the bales of clothing being imported into ghana are arriving in worse and worse condition [Music] i am [Music] it's monsoon season in ghana and when these fierce rains come the unwanted clothing washes into the city's open sewers and chokes its waterways [Applause] you know we are in the tropics so we have very high precipitation in that form of rainfall so end the heavy downfall of rain will gather all these uncollected with into the storm drains which are not covered anyway and then it gets into the ocean it means all these layers of texture without a stockpiling at the ocean bed and that is what would choke the aquatic life in there yeah this is like dug into the ground so when we've done cleanups here you can dig like 15 feet and still find tangles of clothing liz ricketts has spent the past decade documenting the impact of clothing waste on ghana so it also becomes really dangerous for people when they're swimming because they're like rolling back and forth and it'll hit them and then also hits the fisherman's boats and wraps around their motors the textiles which wash back on shore become so tangled in the sand they're almost impossible to dig out the tangled masses of clothing we call them tentacles so this you know is all tangled up and it's a little bit harder for you to see but when they first watch wash up they're very long you know they can be eight feet to thirty feet and sometimes three feet wide these tentacles have their origins at kandamanto market [Music] [Applause] emanuel hello hey wow lynton besser abc yeah wow i'm you monroe nice to meet you thank you emmanuel ajab is another importer we are going to take this bear this one yeah this one from australia we want to see what is inside and it's a little summer jacket he's one of the few to import used clothing from australia yeah i'm going to weapon we shot them into groups okay until they open their bales importers have no idea whether they contain trash or treasure it's nice so this one is going like this top quality okay here we can weld this one so is that going to be rubbish yeah this is the rubbish and this one too we'll call it the second second okay this you can wear it yeah this one is going to look it's got it's got a stain here it's not good emanuel and his colleagues despair at the growing number of low-quality clothes arriving in ghana what do you think of this one see how it is dirty from here it's sweat you should not put it in the bed it's just like a insult it's an insult it's insult it is insulting in europe and uk and australia american they think africa here we are we are not like a human being sorry to say to use this because what they are giving to us it's like even if somebody knocks your door and you want help you you cannot just give in picking something from your dustbin and give to the person so in this case it's like they are doing this to us this bail cost immanuel 92. further away too these ones are the ones you can sell okay after sorting the whole bale he can see he's going to make a significant loss on these australian clothes five six seven seven pieces and how many all together in a bale this one there are 180 to 200 pieces in the bear and you'll find seven pieces very bad so at the end of today where will you put that we are going to throw them away the problem is there's no room anywhere in accra left to throw them [Music] massive carefully engineered landfill was meant to be the solution to accra's waste crisis it should have provided enough capacity for 15 years but once it started accepting clothing waste from kantamanto market was filled to overflowing within just five [Music] now the city's only alternative is a growing network of informal unregulated dumps [Music] so a lot of the waste is brought here by informal collectors who pick it up at the end of the day like this one on the edge of old fatima the city's biggest slum [Music] it doesn't look like there's anything wrong with them at all synthetic textiles can take hundreds of years to decompose this mountain of waste may cast its feted shadow over these neighborhoods for generations to come i think unfortunately what happens is that the waste they are blamed for the wastes the people of old fatima are not responsible for this problem but they are forced to live with it then this waste ends up in places like this where it's used to further disenfranchise people who are already living in poverty to blame them for waste that they did not create while all consumers bear some responsibility for this waste crisis liz ricketts lays much of the blame at the door of the world's big fashion houses really it's brands it's brands that are over producing waste is a part of the business model of fashion a lot of brands overproduce by up to 40 percent so when did they start burning this at least three weeks ago much of the unwanted clothing is simply burned [Music] it's not unusual for across sky to blacken with smoke for days at a time [Music] [Music] now [Music] but for many who live in old fatima including aisha idrisou the flow of second-hand clothing into ghana has been a lifeline [Music] that's [Music] there are other problems which are simply more pressing [Music] aisha lives in this small windowless room with four other women and all their worldly so perhaps it's for the west instead to think more carefully about the quality of what we donate i'm not sure they've ever been conscious to ask where is the final destination of that thing they are discarding but if they come here like you've come and see the practicality for yourself then they will know that no we better take care of this thing within our country and not to shift the problem to other peoples you

Channel: ABC News In-depth

Views: 2,888,106

Rating: 4.5393133 out of 5

Keywords: foreign correspondent, abc news australia, fast fashion, fast fashion environmental impact, fast fashion documentary, donate clothes, thrifting, fashion, clothing, Dead white man’s clothes, accra ghana, ghana documentary, clothing mountain africa, clothing landfill, environmental impact of fashion, fashion industry documentary, fashion industry pollution, old clothes, clothing industry, clothing industry impact on environment, textile mountain, abc, abc news

Id: bB3kuuBPVys

Length: 30min 3sec (1803 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 12 2021

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