Unwanted bounty
WASTE: GHANA STRUGGLES WITH TSUNAMI OF SECOND-HAND CLOTHES
➳ Traders import 15 million garments a week – OR Foundation environmental group.
It takes Nii Armah and his crew of 30 fishermen hours to haul their weighty nets to shore on the bustling Korle-Gonno beach of Ghana’s capital Accra. Finally, their catch emerges – a colossal barracuda and a less welcome bounty of bundles of discarded clothing.
Where once nets teemed with fish, they are now tangled with tons of clothes thrown into the Atlantic from the nearby Kantamanto market, one of the biggest second-hand markets in the world.
“Our nets are lost to the clothing from the markets,” said Armah. “And the fish are slipping away... our sustenance” with them.
Kantamanto market is vast, spanning over eight hectares in the heart of Accra’s business district, and its stalls are dominated by used clothing and shoes from the West and China.
Its traders import a staggering 15 million garments a week, according to the OR Foundation environmental group. But roughly 40% of each bale ends up as waste, they say, dumped in landfills and often washed into the ocean, causing a public health crisis and harming the environment.
Ghana became the world’s largest importer of used clothing in 2021, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC) data site, with garments worth $214 million (about R4 billion) shipped mostly from China, the United Kingdom and Canada.
But the rise of fast fashion over the last two decades has caught the country in a double bind, with an even bigger wave of throwaway clothes coming from richer countries and falling prices for the Ghanaian traders as the quality drops.
Although the business has created up to 30 000 jobs by some estimates, local NGOs say it is at the price of an “environmental and social emergency”, with Ghana earning less than $1 million in 2021 exporting the used garments it receives to other African nations.
The clothes “are mostly dumped indiscriminately because our waste treatment is not advanced”, said Justice Adoboe of the Ghana Water and Sanitation Journalists Network.
“When it rains, floodwaters carry the old garments and dump them in drains, ending up in our water courses and begin to cause havoc to aquatic life,” he added.
The local council, the Accra Metropolitan Assembly, spends about $500 000 a year collecting and disposing of unwanted items from Kantamanto market.
But it can only handle around 70% of the market’s waste. The rest is either burned nearby, causing air pollution, or dumped in fragile ecosystems, according to the Or Foundation.
Things got even worse when Ghana’s only sanitary landfill dump exploded in August 2019 after being swamped with secondhand clothing.
The Kpone Landfill was closed after the fire, leaving one of the world’s fastest-growing metropolises without a properly engineered dump.
The result has been disastrous. The sand is no longer visible on some sections of Accra’s beaches, with mounds of discarded textiles and plastics more than 1.5 metres high in places.
OR’s beach monitors counted 2 344 textile “tentacles” – tangled masses of second-hand clothes – along a seven-kilometre strip of Accra’s coastline over the course of a year.
That’s an average of one mass of clothing every three metres, with some tentacles dozens of metres long, containing thousands of items. –