‘So many clothes we donate end up going to a dump in Nairobi’ EYE-OPENING TRIP FOR COMEDIAN BEANZ
COMEDIAN Martin Beanz Warde has told how seeing children barefoot among 100-foot towers of dumped clothes in Kenya changed how he dresses himself for TV.
Tonight, in the second episode of his series The End Of The World With Beanz, in which he meets people around the globe affected by the climate crisis, the writer travels to Dandora dump in Kenya with comedian Gearoid Farrelly.
He said: “The biggest eye-opener was seeing how so much of the clothes we donate ends up in the middle of a dump in Nairobi in the middle of a residential area.
“It’s the largest landfill in East Africa, it’s 30 acres with piles of 100 feet — it’s bad. Seeing poor kids barefoot in a dump in Nairobi was tough.”
But the experience also proved to be “the most transformative moment” in the writer’s life.
Beanz explained: “For this, my first presenting job, I thought I’ll get a shopping list of this blazer and that shirt and I’ll colour code it, the whole shebang and when ended up shooting Kenya first, I thought: ‘Feck that’.
“It was liberating as I lost that ego and the chains I’d put around my own neck,”
He told The Star: “I didn’t care if I wore the same jacket in different episodes. We’ve all picked up five T-shirts for less than €30 and you might get a few wears out of them.
“There are fashion chains out there into ultra fast fashion — a different line of clothes for every day. Now I think: ‘What the hell are you doing boy?’”
It was a learning curve for Beanz, who revealed: “I learned that to produce enough cotton for one pair of jeans and one T-shirt takes 10,000 litres of water, not counting water needed for the dyeing process.”
Market
In Kenya, Beanz met secondhand market stall-owners who buy clothes donated by Irish people.
He remarked: “They buy in bales and don’t know what’s in them but 30 per cent of it is rubbish they can’t even sell in an extremely impoverished area in Nairobi — that shows you how bad it is — so they end up in landfill.
“The cameras weren’t even set up when I saw a kid walking on the street with a Dublin City Marathon T-shirt on him — a good example of clothes being used. If you’re going to donate clothes, send useful ones.”
During the series, Beanz meets a woman from Portrane in North County Dublin who is losing her home to the sea.
He also talks to a “hybrid” Amish with Bernard O’Shea in the US and travels 16 hours to Gometra, a remote Scottish island, with Roz Purcell.
Beanz explained: “We drove to Belfast, got the ferry to Scotland, drove up to Oban, got another ferry to a second island and then to another island and a speedboat out to Gometra in the Inner Hebrides.
“We thought of our carbon footprint where we could. The family live off-grid, no electricity, grow their own food.
“They cook with alcohol instead of gas or turf — that was a learning curve — the only phone signal on the island was 200 yards up a hill in a metal hut
“Roz was a proper wildie — she’s amazing. She was jumping into the freezing cold sea — the only way I’d belong in that sea would be if someone drilled a blowhole in my back.”
Beanz explained: “I don’t want people at home thinking: ‘Who is this fella telling me what to do?’ “I know being green isn’t easy — if you tell kids to go to the charity store, kids won’t buy that and I’m not in a position to tell people but this is about starting the conversation. It’s a journey we’re all on.
“A lot of people are sceptical as a lot of these conversations are political about green policies — if you’re asking people to make changes with levies and taxes, people shut down — I don’t want to add to that.
“This is a journey for people to come on but I’m not telling people to change. There’s a lot of craic and banter but a lot of reflection too. ”
The comedian met people feeling the impact of climate change. Beanz, went on: “I met a woman in Portrane, Co Dublin, whose house is falling into the sea — it’s absolutely mental.
“To see her living in the family home, her parents’ ashes are in the garden and seeing how the water is right up so her home and will be underwater in the next five years — that was horrible.
Future
“We met teenagers in Greystones and to hear teenagers tell us they wake up in the night with anxiety about the future, we need to have a long hard look at ourselves.
“I’ve nieces and nephews and the last thing I want is them anxious — people should be hopeful about the future. Do we want this generation to grow up with all this anxiety? It’s not healthy and we need to have a look at that.”
■ The End Of The World With Beanz airs at 7pm today on RTE One.