31/10/2024
STOP GHANA FROM BECOMING EUROPE’S TEXTILE WASTE DUMPSITE
Africa has become Europe’s fashion waste dumping hotspot.
We were concerned by reports that 15 million second-hand items of clothing were arriving in Ghana every week. [1]
And in our just-released report, Fast Fashion, Slow Poison, we highlight that every week up to 500,000 items of clothing waste from Kantamanto Market end up in open spaces and informal dumpsites.
Mountains of unusable clothing are dumped in informal dumpsites (Accra has run out of landfills) and can be seen piling up on the edges of lagoons and beside beaches.
Infrared testing we carried out revealed that 89% of clothing waste in Ghana’s dumpsites contains synthetic fibres, leading to widespread microplastic contamination. We also found that clothes are burnt in open fires to heat water in public washhouses leading to levels of benzene exceeding European indoor air guide values by almost 200 times.
Enough is enough!
Instead of importing the Global North’s fast-fashion waste problem let’s put African solutions first.
