Ghana: The final destination for unwanted clothes
Ghana is a dumping ground for poor quality clothes, and these clothes are contributing to an environmental crisis.
Weekly, about 15-million items of used clothes end up in Accra, the capital of Ghana, shipped in bales from Europe, North America and Asia, according to Business Day.
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GHANA: THE WORLD’S LARGEST SECOND-HAND CLOTHING MARKET
Kantamanto, located in Accra, is the largest second-hand clothing market in the world, with over 30 000 traders. Sarah Bonsu, a trader for the past 10 years, usually spends an equivalent of $150 on goods she cannot inspect until they are delivered at her stall, according to Forbes Africa.
“If you get quality in one batch, the next batch could be completely rubbish. That is just the way things work,” she said. The retailers buy blindly. The content they receive could be worth thousands of dollars or nothing at all.
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ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS
Heaps of unwanted clothing have now lead to an environmental crisis in Ghana. In 2019, over 65 million tonnes of used clothing was sent there and about 40% of that was not sold and was discarded, as per a report by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. These items end up in landfills or in the sea.
Abena Essoun used to sell second-hand clothes in Ghana, but is now part of a group travelling across Europe to lobby for help tackling the waste crisis according to Business Day.
At least 100 tonnes of fabric waste are generated daily in Accra, while city trash trucks can only carry 30 tonnes.
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DEAD WHITE MAN’S CLOTHES
In Ghana – a poor country with many challenges – the concept of such excess of items such as clothes, is a foreign concept. From there the expression for these unwanted clothes – obroni wa wu, literally meaning ‘the clothes of the dead white man’. The expression comes from the belief that only those who are dead could turn their backs on such material abundance.
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