Scandal of UK's fast fashion as discarded clothes pile up in Ghana
Last year, British consumers spent a record £62.2billion on new outfits – the most in Europe and double what the stylish Italians buy.
The quick turnover of cheap fast fashion is coupled with an estimated 13 million items of clothing that are discarded every week. Some 300,000 tonnes end up in landfill or are incinerated, a fraction is resold here in charity and vintage shops but almost 400,000 tonnes are exported overseas each year.
In 2019, we sent used clothes and shoes worth a total of £70.5 million to Ghana – more than 20 times as much as in 2000. The West African nation is where our secondhand items, known as “obroni wawu”, or “dead white man’s clothes, are mainly sent.
The heavily polluted Odaw River in Accra, Ghana (Adam Gerrard / Daily Mirror)Millions of these items are donated to charity shops or put into textile “recycling” bins every year, which is seen as a guilt-free option. But the amounts are simply too large for charity shops to cope with. Oliver Franklin-Wallis, author of Wasteland, said: “Few people realise that by some estimates, only around 30% of donations are resold in stores. The rest is usually sold on to textile traders, who resell it on the global secondhand market.
Fast fashion is resulting in heavy pollution (Adam Gerrard / Daily Mirror)“Charity shops are trying to do a good thing. Unfortunately the system is overwhelmed. Often donations are little better than rubbish. "In Ghana, market traders often cut open bales of clothes to find they’ve been stuffed full of rubbish, and can’t afford to send it back. The result is debt and landfills and open dumps piled with our old clothes.” The problem is so bad that in the Ghanaian capital of Accra, the Odaw River is now said to be virtually dead, with clothing waste and discarded plastics making it uninhabitable.
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400K tonnes are exported to buyers overseas each year (Adam Gerrard / Daily Mirror)Experts say we need to reduce our purchases, keep clothes for longer and donate only high-quality goods. The Or Foundation works within the Kantamanto Market in Accra, where tonnes of such items are resold each year. Its co-founder Liz Ricketts said: “The first thing I’d want people to understand is that for donating to be sustainable, they also need to shop from the places they ’re donating to. We could also look more closely at the things we’re passing on. A good rule of thumb when donating to a charity shop is to ask yourself if you’d give the item to a friend.”
A man sifts through rubbish dumped in the Odaw River (Adam Gerrard / Daily Mirror)Dragons’ Den star Deborah Meaden has vowed to restrict her fashion purchases to replacing worn-out items only. She said: “By buying fewer clothes and keeping old ones for longer, we can reduce the adverse effect on our planet.”
Earlier this month, France introduced a scheme where the government subsidises the cost of items taken to be fixed and altered, something the UK should be taking a closer look at. Ex-Labour MP Mary Creagh, who was chair of the Environmental Audit Select Committee, said: “The way we buy, use and dispose of clothing is an environmental disaster which hits the poorest people in the poorest countries.
Dragons’ Den star Deborah Meaden (Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for)“Less than 1% of our clothing is recycled, which is why we need a penny levy on every garment sold, to invest in better recycling facilities, to keep clothes in use for longer. The Mirror’s shocking investigation shows the consequences of [the Government’s] failure to tackle this pollution."
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