By: Eliza Strong
Edited and researched by: Mel Anne and Shelly.
You go out and buy a nice dress shirt for a dinner you are going to attend, heck it’s a steal of a deal! After the dinner, it gets tossed at the back of the closet only to be seen months later, and you look at it with disgust. What happens now?
Typically two options; donate it to charity or throw it out. Charity is a good idea, as it supplies millions of people that are not less fortunate to get clothes that they need. Ghana is one of the many places that benefits from these donations. Once shipments arrive in Ghana, they are traded among the people in order to be able to provide for their families.
Selling second-hand clothes is a way of livelihood to many, but in the last few years, almost half of these clothes have been thrown out. Ghana has been receiving less and less clothes of good quality. The emergence of fast fashion plays a very important role in this. Many brands are recreating trending looks and selling them at low prices. While this may sound like a good deal for both the customers and the business, many of these materials are not sustainable, which leads to us throwing them out.
In Ghana, piles and piles of items of clothing are gathered together creating textile waste. It is estimated that every week, out of the 15 million clothes distributed and shipped to Ghana, about 40% of those clothes are shipped to landfills.
Some of the textile waste doesn’t end up in landfills but rather the streets. After a long day of rain, the clothes will get stuck in the sewage system causing flooding. We all know the saying, “Everything ends up in the ocean.” This statement couldn’t be more accurate seeing how there are over 1.4 million trillion plastic fibers in the ocean from our clothes alone. The chemical makeup of clothes include different types of microfibers and dyes, which once distributed into the water ways: can poison people’s accessible drinking water, harm marine life, and even cause many health problems among the people affecting them for decades.
This environmental catastrophe affects over 31 million people home to Ghana. The landfills aren’t well maintained, and meanwhile, the giant masses of these landfills are just sitting amidst the city of the capital city of Accra. The toxic waste seeps into the ground, carrying all its chemicals into the city itself.
One of the main efforts that seems to be the only solution is burning the textile waste. It seems like a viable solution, right? Tons of this waste sitting around, having nowhere to go, why let it sit around when you can make it go away so easily? All in all, this may seem like rainbows and sunshine when really - it’s a big, dark cloud hiding the truth. First of all, burning the textile waste just adds layers of issues to the already extensive challenges of atmospheric climate change. On top of the harmful fumes from carbon dioxide, combined with the toxic chemical dyes and other harmful synthetic materials being burned makes the toxicity of the air even greater. For many people, this can lead to heart disease, lung cancer and many more respiratory problems.
Shipments and donations from the western world are supporting economies in third world countries greatly, but with excessive amounts of unusable items, are we really helping them? Or throwing all our trash into another country?
This environmental catastrophe should be viewed not alone from an economic and environmental standpoint, but from the perspective of a humane crisis. These are people’s lives we are talking about, and in many cases this trade is the only way they can survive.
For a moment, put your life in their shoes and what they are going through. The next time you go to buy something, ask yourself, “Do I really need this?”
Frankly, the little things are always a start. Reducing what we use can help contribute to limiting the amount of waste we create. The next time you purge your closet, try to salvage what you can, and if you are donating, make sure they are usable.
Ask yourself if the clothes you’re donating are actually helping people or whether you’re just trying to find a way to get rid of stuff you don’t need. Other than this, the absolute best thing we can do as a society is to speak up. Spread the word of this issue, and collectively we will have the power to make a real difference.
Works Cited
Compare Ethics, compareethics.com/chemicals-in-clothing/.
Besser, Linton. “'Dead White Man's Clothes': The Dirty Secret behind the World's Fashion Addiction.” ABC News, ABC News, 21 Oct. 2021, www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-12/fast-fashion-turning-parts-ghana-into-toxic-landfill/100358702.
Cincik, Tamara. “Why Our Second-Hand Clothes Are Causing an ‘Environmental Catastrophe’ on the Other Side of the World.” Fashion Roundtable, Fashion Roundtable, 14 Apr. 2020, www.fashionroundtable.co.uk/news/2020/4/14/6rr73axzj7qlgzvi811wwqu4myvex3.
Remington, Written by Chris. “Recycling Association Slams Waste Dumping in Ghana.” Ecotextile News, www.ecotextile.com/2020022025726/materials-production-news/ghana-waste-expose-recycling-association-lambasts-dumping.html.
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