The American nonprofit organization, the OR Foundation, is actively trying to change the role that fashion plays in the environmental textile crisis in Ghana. Co-founder Branson Skinner says that much of the form of clothing is coming into the Kantamanto market, one of  the largest  second hand clothing markets in the world in the form of bales. 

 

“The bales have nothing to do with the individual garments inside. The overall quality is not related to price, the price is based on the commodity of this thing. So when something is baled up, it's considered weight. You go from seeing 300 individual items to seeing one bale of 120 pounds or 55 kilos,” said Skinner.  

 

Exporters, who buy unsold clothes from donation stores, typically sell it to grading facilities in third world countries such as Pakistan.  Pakistan is currently the leading country in  second hand clothing imported to them according to the UN Comtrade Database. In 2021,  the country imported up to $325,027,764 million of worn textiles. 

 

At these grading facilities, the second hand clothing is sorted into different categories: tops for women, skirts, children clothes, men’s business pants, the list goes on. Once “graded”, they are made into clothing bales, a large quantity of clothing with various items. 

 

Usually those in the facilities are supposed to keep out low quality clothing, that will probably go unbought, from reaching the bales.  Oftentimes, however, they are usually the clothing that slips through.

 

In more recent times, these clothing bales have also gotten more expensive, leaving retailers in the Kantamanto market to buy bales that have cheap clothing for more money. 

 

Dauda Mahmud, a 38 year old retailer who has been selling second hand denim in the Kantamanto market for 20 years, says that when he opens the clothing bales some of the items in it will be ripped or stained. 

 

“During the winter season, we get nicer things here. During the summer we don't get nice things… When they're bringing the clothes, some of the clothes have stains in them, so if we could get clothes that are clean we would love it,” Mahmud said. 

 

Customers in the market would rather buy clothes that are better quality rather than a low quality piece for the same price. This creates a cycle for mainy Kantamanto retailers, leaving them in debt when they can’t sell all their clothes to customers and have to buy a new clothing bale so they can sell different pieces.

 

“Kantamanto’s resilience is really driven out of necessity. It's for many people driven out of desperation. The act of reuse, the act of remanufacturer, we shouldn't romanticize that as if this is necessarily what everybody there's choosing to do, could they choose to do anything. It’s not a feast of options,” Skinner said. 

 

Mahmud began his career in Kantamanto alongside his mother, who was already working there. Despite his desire to attend additional school after he turned 18, his parents weren't able to afford it so he had no other option than to work in the market. 

 

“Never in my life do I want my kids to work in the market. That’s why I'm taking care of them right now. It's very hard, you don't sleep, it's very stressful and you don't rest,” says Mahmud. 

 

Mahmud works Monday to Saturday, with Sunday as his only day off. He begins work at 6 am and ends at 3 pm. To arrive at the market, it may take him up to two hours with traffic. 

 

Many workers in the market are stuck in a debt trap that forces them to continue to buy a different bale every week or so. The clothes from the old bale that they don't sell just get left in the aisles and swept away as waste, only to be added onto the textile mountain of waste. Some refer to these as “landfills”, but the reality of the situation is that these aren't actually landfills but human-made open dump sites. 

 

“They don't have landfills like we have landfills. The landfills that we have are our sanitary landfills and they're very expensive to maintain. There's a lot of engineering behind it in managing that waste, which is why they're so expensive,” says Dr. Kozlowski.

 

You might think to yourself, well why don’t they just burn these clothes? 

 

Many of the clothes today are non-biodegradable, meaning they take years to decompose since they're made out of material such as polyester and acrylic. Burning these clothes would only release greenhouse gasses that can be toxic. Not to mention that the ash that would burn from these clothes would spread to the communities that these dumps are right next to. 

 

Is there no solution then? Are these clothes supposed to just sit in these dumps while the cycle of overconsumption and over production creates the advancement of more secondhand clothing to come into the textile retail world of Ghana?

 

There are always solutions. Nonprofits such as the OR Foundation are continuing to create resolutions to this issue and paths that consumers can take to put an end to the cycle. 

 

Magpies and Peacocks based in Houston, Texas is the nation’s first ever non-profit design house whose sole mission is to recycle second hand clothing into new clothing while completely cutting out any waste during the design process. Founder Sarah-Jayne Smith was aghast, when she first moved from Britain to Houston, with the amount of closet space people had and their ability to fill the room as well.

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“The more I understood the more I researched about the textile industry and about fashion, the more horrified I was about why we had ended up in this situation. The way that people have been exploited, our planet has been exploited, all for us to buy a shirt for the price of a latte,” Smith said. 

 

Smith, seeing the necessity to take apart textiles but also reuse them in the way we do with washing machines or car parts, created the nonprofit in 2012.

 

“Whether it's clothing or scraps or small pieces, big pieces, we don't care, we figure out what   we can do to make it and turn it into raw materials.” 

 

Magpies and Peacocks has four pillars that make up its business model: Collaborate, Create, Educate, and Invest. When it comes to collaborating, they make sure their community is involved and connected with them. Smith says this is important for people to rely on local businesses rather than larger fast fashion brands.  

 

“Think about how we've been taught to consume: the further the better, the less you know about who produces your stuff, the better because that protects a very loose standard when it comes to maybe not doing right by animals or people or planet,” said Smith. 

 

Magpies was created to put an end to this ideology. 

 

All of the nonprofits' clothes have either been made leaving zero textile scraps or completely upcycled from previous clothing or textile scraps. Ahshia Berry, Director of Communications at Magpies and Peacocks, emphasizes that the charity's main goal is to always repurpose textiles while keeping the rights of the garment makers and workers intact so that they are receiving fair wages. 

 

“The problem that we're having now is we have so much textiles already made. We love organic cotton and new ethical, environmentally friendly textiles but we have to use what we already have. That's from the polyesters to the vegan leathers to real leathers to the cottons to the linens. We have so much on planet Earth, not just in the States, the planet Earth. We've got to repurpose that first,” said Berry. 

 

When Magpies and Peacocks reuses textiles already made, they save against polluting into the world. For example, producing one t-shirt can take up to 700 gallons of water. Since most clothing isn't biodegradable, reusing clothing that people have donated is saving many of it from being exported out to a place like Kantamanto market. 

 

“We try to make things that move fluidly but look great, that are practical and logistical while being glamorous, because that's going to keep it from landfill,” said Berry.