What Really Happens to Your Used Clothing
Faiza Salman
On Wednesday mornings, Janet and Grace buy bundles of used clothing that have been shipped to Accra, Ghana, from across the world. They spend the rest of their day sifting through these bundles, picking out what’s salvageable and sellable.
After discarding fast fashion items, often stained or torn, they hang up the better things in their small, adjoined stalls in the Kantamanto Market, the largest secondhand market in the world, which covers a sprawling 24 acres in the heart of Accra. Nearly 30,000 other people also work here, many of them sellers like Janet and Grace, all competing, all buying from the same piles of used clothes to resell.
With the amount they pay to rent their stalls and buy bundles of used clothes, every item counts. The bundles are filled with apparel and shoes that don’t sell at charity stores like the Salvation Army in the US and UK. What doesn't get sent to a landfill is shipped, via trade agreements, to countries like Ghana for people in those communities to handle.
On the surface this may seem like a positive thing. People in Western countries donate their unwanted clothing rather than throw it in the trash, potentially providing free or low-cost garments for those in need, fueling commerce in places like Kantamanto, where sellers like Janet and Grace use the discarded items to make a living. But that’s not the full story.
The declining quality of clothing is working in tandem with insatiable consumption habits to exacerbate the global fashion waste crisis. While we are buying more fast fashion than ever — a report released by the United States Slow Fashion Caucus found that in the last eight years, the rate of textile waste grew 50% — clothing is being made with cheaper, fossil fuel-based materials and with poorer construction due to cost-cutting measures at factories. The Slow Fashion Caucus report also pointed specifically to fast fashion brands that are intentionally making cheaper clothes so consumers will continue to buy more and more.
Says Branson Skinner, cofounder of the Or Foundation, a nonprofit based in Accra working on solutions to problems caused by overproduction, “Certain communities have tried to recirculate clothes, but they are getting less and less material they can do that with — which is ultimately impacting the quality of clothes here too.”
As the Global North discards its unwanted, dirty, or damaged pieces, it's harder for market sellers to move the product, which worsens their financial situation and contributes to insurmountable debt. What's happening in the Kantamanto Market, in many ways, mirrors the larger fashion industry, where exploitative wages often lead to a cycle of debt that means workers like Grace and Janet get stuck.
Even with innovative ways to resell or repurpose textile waste, often it’s not enough. More discarded clothing is coming into Accra than the community can manage. The lack of landfill infrastructure and the fact that recycling solutions for textiles, especially polyester, are poor at best means clothing ends up in the streets, in water systems, and in small neighborhoods where it piles up or gets burned.
In Chile, a massive fire fueled by fast fashion waste sent plumes of toxic smoke into the environment. And in Indonesia, where more than 2.7% of the globe’s textiles are made, garment workers know that the volumes they are tasked with producing contribute to an issue that will harm their own communities, but they have little choice.
This has become a dire issue across the Global South — and it just got more urgent. On January 2, a massive fire tore through the Kantamanto Market, devastating 60% of stalls, including Grace and Janet’s, and taking the livelihoods of thousands of sellers. Sellers have been trying to manage the textile waste that chokes Ghana's shores, but their ability to do so is even more hindered, a disaster for the environment and the families who now have no source of income.
According to Fafa Mensa, market liaison for the Or Foundation, rebuilding is going well, but there is more to do. Three weeks after the fire, she says, “Kantamanto Market remains the embodiment of what a circular economy can achieve. While it may not be perfect, we continue to take meaningful steps to reduce textile waste and extend the life of every garment that passes through our hands.”
Mensa continues, “Now, it’s time for fashion brands to do more than just acknowledge Kantamanto’s role in holding the industry down — it’s time to give back. True gratitude means action.”
Dignified Work
“Tell your friends to stop sending these stained and ripped clothes,” Grace says to me on an afternoon in January 2024. By “your friends” she means Americans.
I’m with Grace and Janet, going through bags, hanging up every 10th item on a wall lined with other sellable pieces. Janet won’t let me stand; it’s hot and I’m not used to it, she points out, watching me sweat in my denim overalls and boots. She has me sit in a white plastic chair while we analyze each piece of clothing together.
There's a yellow Shein blouse with a massive hole in the sleeve. A white H&M top with a giant brown stain on the back has the original tags and the tags placed on it from the charity shop in London, where it likely came from. “This clothing stinks,” Janet says, surveying the wares she must sell to make a living.
We do this for about two hours, as it gets hotter and hotter in the poorly ventilated area of the market. We pause to make a few TikTok videos on Grace’s phone. She directs me to dance along to a song: “You share my story, and I’ll share yours,” she tells me.
The whole four hours I’m there, two women come by to look at the clothes, but no sales are made — there are thousands of other stalls just like this one throughout the market, lined with the same style of clothing. Shoppers have a lot of options.
Every day in the market, Grace explains, she has to pay for something, whether it's the clothing bundle, help getting the clothing to her stall, or stall repairs. For two years now, she has not made a profit.
Sammy Oteng, community organizer at the Or Foundation, says this problem has worsened and changed how the market is viewed in the community. “It was always in the news that bankers are going there to collect their loans and things like that,” Oteng explains. “So people started feeling more embarrassed to talk about the fact that they worked there or that they want their children to get into that line of business. Why should they be embarrassed to speak about their work?”
This is especially true because the problems within the market are expressly due to a situation that countries in the Global North have created. It’s why the term “waste colonialism” is often used to describe the unequal dynamics of wealthy countries getting rid of waste through exploiting certain financial needs in smaller countries, like Ghana. The agreement that allows for this situation in Ghana and other African nations was meant to encourage duty-free trade between the region and the US, but without guardrails to ensure that textile waste is being shipped to Ghana in a usable condition, it has created a disaster.
Selling clothing isn’t the only type of work being done in Kantamanto. Because of the small aisles that seem to get ever tighter with more and more clothing, it's not easy to get the large bundles inside; head porters, typically young women, carry large loads of clothing on their heads — a practice that is dangerous and can lead to permanent damage or even death.
“They're trying to survive,” says Hajara Musah Chambas, the outreach manager for the Or Foundation, who goes by Nabia. Many young women come from the north of Ghana and can’t find work, she explains, and head porting is a skill they already have. “They go in the markets and help people. [Help] retailers carry their goods, help shoppers carry their goods, because you can't move — the alleys are very small. The people are so much, there's so much heat. Where they live, you need to pay rent on a weekly basis. You need to pay to bathe, you need to pay to pee, you need to pay to eat.”
Says Oteng, the Or Foundation and market leaders are working on solutions to fix the physical space, including widening aisles to reduce head porting, adding bathrooms and ventilation, and storage space for sellers. To do this, though, they needed to create a physical example so that community members could understand what it would look like; they had been using a smaller area that was burned down by a different fire in 2022.
“After the fire [in 2022], we were able to support relief funds to up to a thousand people within the section,” Oteng recalls. “Each of them getting up to $400 to restart their businesses. Most of them got their money, and then they didn't want to come into the business anymore. For some, all they needed was just that hundred to [pay off their bills], and then leave the market."
Oteng explains further, "Some people are genuinely traumatized by being in the market, but they just can't get themselves out of it. The only way they can survive is to be there; it’s the only way they can feed their kids. Most people, especially women, are single parents. So they don't have any fallback if they should leave the market.”
This idea of the market being a traumatic space has been exacerbated by the more recent, more destructive fire, which highlights a desperate need for a shift in an already fraught system. The heat, the amount of clothing, the close quarters, and the poor electricity make the market rife for constant distress — which the Global North continues to look away from despite causing these issues.
When the Clothes Won’t Sell
The clothes that aren’t sold in the market have to go somewhere. I encounter them on a beach in Accra, where David Kwabena Akpabie, the clean-up coordinator with the Or Foundation, leads a group of 10 people through the thousands of shirts, dresses, and underwear that line the rocks and sand. It’s a stark juxtaposition to the beautiful shoreline just yards away. On the other side of us, a group of fishermen stand near colorful boats, eager to show how their oars are covered with clothing as they lift them from the water.
According to a 2024 report from Greenpeace Africa and Greenpeace Germany, about 15 million items of used clothing arrive in Ghana each week — and only about half of them are sellable. The clothing on the beach represents just some of the discarded other half, and it’s wreaking havoc on the ecosystem. “The accumulation of textile waste is smothering natural habitats, polluting rivers, and leading to the creation of ‘plastic beaches’ along the coast,” according to the Greenpeace report.
As we sift through tags that read Zara, Primark, H&M, and Marks & Spencer, other volunteers from the Or Foundation take water samples on the shore to test how much plastic from polyester garments is making its way into the ocean. These microplastics are then eaten by marine life, which can be detrimental to their health, and to the health of humans who eat them too.
Later we mark an Excel sheet for each brand's tag we find. This is one way the Or Foundation and its community partners go directly to fashion businesses: with photos of clothing lined up on Accra beaches, showing this isn't a far-off issue. The name of the responsible party is right there on the label for everyone to see.
The clothing-filled shores are a striking visual example of the global textile waste crisis, but the aspects of this crisis that we can’t see are equally harmful. A large share of the unsellable clothing shipped to Accra ends up in dumping sites or massive backyard piles, many of which get burned as residents make way for the next shipment. And because fast fashion is increasingly made with synthetic fibers, residents end up breathing toxic fumes from the burning plastic and chemicals in these garments. Greenpeace tested the air at three burn sites located at bath houses near Kantamanto and found levels of carcinogenic chemicals as much as 200 times the acceptable range, as determined by the German Ministry of Environment.
This same problem has been perpetuated across Africa and the globe. In Nairobi, Kenya, clothing waste piles up in the neighborhood of Kibera, a massive informal settlement and home to hundreds of thousands of people. The poor drainage system in the city means that excess clothing coming in from the Global North fills up the rivers and streets, according to David Avido, a Kenyan fashion designer from Kibera. “I was born and raised in the streets, and I have friends that are still living there,” he tells me on a phone call one morning.
During our conversation Avido asks me to look up pictures of what Kibera looks like today. When I search, I find images that are reminiscent of scenes from Accra, with clothing waste surrounding homes and lining waterways. Then he texts me a photo of what it could be — what that area of Nairobi used to look like, pre-industrialization: It was clean, with grass and a flowing river. “People will send [clothes] and they'll be like, ‘Oh, I sent some stuff so that you can help your community,’" he explains. "But at the end of the day, it's not really like that. Because it'll come this way, and then people have to sell all the stuff that they send back here.”
In Uganda’s Owino Market in Kampala, sellers process tons of imported clothing, more than anyone can sell, even though secondhand fashion is estimated to make up more than 80% of all purchases in the country. Reselling is a main economic driver and a reason many people in the country have been against banning secondhand clothing imports, which was proposed by the government in 2023. Still, the quantity and quality aren’t helping anyone; Ugandans need more local resources to manage the load without further impacting the land and people.
The Atacama Desert in Chile is yet another place where clothing is overwhelming the land and community. Chile is the largest importer of secondhand clothing in South America, but the infrastructure in place to deal with the volume is similar to Accra and Nairobi. Secondhand markets handle some of the influx, but what doesn’t sell ends up piled in the beautiful, sprawling desert. In 2021, a massive fire created a toxic wasteland as thousands of fast fashion items burned and clouds of smoke filled the air.
The notion of the Global North shipping off its overconsumption problem for someone else to deal with is multifaceted. Most people don’t realize it’s happening, and with so many people sharing the blame, it’s easy to skirt responsibility. Yes, consumers are buying too much. Yes, brands are making too much product. And yes, the governments in both the Global North and the Global South could be working to change this system.
For the fashion industry’s part, the issue is volume, but “there's a lack of solidarity there,” says Liz Ricketts, cofounder of the Or Foundation. “I think the reality is most [brands] don't understand their own supply chain.” So Or started an initiative called Speak Volumes to encourage manufacturers and brands to release their production numbers. Without information on the amounts being produced, it may be impossible to come up with a solid solution – especially when there seem to be no signs of slowing down.
Haul culture, for example, where massive amounts of cheap clothing are bought at once, appears to be getting a new co-signer. In 2024, Amazon launched Amazon Haul, where the company advertises the cheapest pieces with encouragement to buy a lot of them at once. The pieces are made for trendy wear, not necessarily to last; they are likely worn once or twice before they end up in one of the bundles that Janet and Grace, and hundreds of thousands of others around the world, sift through — before the items ultimately reach their demise on a beach or in a burn pile.
Editor's Note: This story focuses on what happens after clothing is produced, but the cost of this system is wreaking havoc at every stage of development. Three Indonesian garment workers, Sonia, Sakinah, and Nursya, with whom Teen Vogue spoke for this series, mentioned that they are making upwards of 200 units of clothing and shoes per day at around $170 a week. The waste from the factories that push them to make more and more piles up outside, close to housing where workers live with their families. They say the air is toxic and the smell is unbearable.
“Man Makes Clothes, Clothes Don’t Make Man”
Kantamanto and markets like it — created to boost financial stability for residents — are a solution to a layered problem, but this has now become a debt trap for many of its workers. Despite the strife sellers face, however, these markets have also become centers for creativity.
In one area of Kantamanto, for instance, the sound of sewing machines is just as loud as the chatter coming from dozens of people walking around. It’s here that vendors are making new pieces from discarded clothing, upcycling fast fashion into unique, well-crafted garments. One man, George, designs new shirts by stitching together the best parts of two polos. There are so many shirts to sell, and they are so popular, that as he happily shows me his designs, there is no time to talk.
A few steps away, Upcycle It Ghana, a stall run by a group of young Ghanaian designers, has a decidedly different feel than many of the other stalls. The lighting is dark with a blue hue, and the designers have set up wood shelving to display their upcycled denim creations. On the wall is a pair of black jeans with white stars sewn into the legs (I genuinely regret not buying them), next to three corduroy jackets featuring expertly stitched patches, reminiscent of something you’d find at the Bode store in New York's Soho neighborhood.
Avido says his solution in Kibera was to start an annual fashion week in the area. He struggled with substance use and dropped out of school at 11 years old, but he found hope in fashion design. He feels that fashion can also be a solution to a problem that fashion itself has created. For Kibera's fashion week, the runway is a lifted platform built on broken buses that were sent from London to Kenya, where they are unusable.
Designers often use pieces that are upcycled in their area, repurposing plastic and metal they have found into incredibly creative designs. “I try to help designers understand themselves, understand about financial literacy, understand what they want to achieve as human beings, as individuals, as artists," Avido says. "What are their goals as designers? What do they want? Things like that. So you help them do that and make them understand how they can easily achieve this kind of thing.”
In the Atacama Desert in Chile, young people have started to do similar things with clothing waste. Atacama Fashion Week sees young designers creating pieces from the garments in the desert and using the piles of additional waste as a runway backdrop. “My slogan is, ‘Man makes clothing, clothing doesn’t make man,’” Avido tells me. But he isn’t referring to style; he’s referring to the idea that both the problem and the solution will come from the people — and that’s going to require global input.
On the community level, this means empowerment and financial support for upcycling, and larger commitment from the fashion industry to use materials that are already in circulation instead of constantly creating more and more textiles. There is also a consumer responsibility to push brands to create less, and using that voice to amplify the issues.
Then there is extended producer responsibility (EPR), by which brands are responsible for the post-consumer cycle of the products they make. Legislation in France and California has already been passed as a potential way to hold manufacturers responsible.
Enough Clothing to Last a Lifetime
As thousands lost their homes in wildfires that consumed Los Angeles County last month, people nationwide came together to donate clothing. Within days, charities were overwhelmed by the generosity of people sending in things — but they also had to ask people to stop. Not only was the volume more than they could sift through, the amount of used clothing donated that was not actually suitable to give to a family was hurting efforts. Reporting from Business of Fashion found that “the LA Dream Center megachurch received over 10,000 pounds of donated clothes, while streetwear boutique Bricks & Wood posted that it had received 30,000 items in a day.”
The tragic irony here is that the production of clothing and the subsequent waste of that clothing is helping to heighten climate change issues that cause worsening fires like the ones in Kantamanto and in Los Angeles. How each community has come together is proof that there is enough existing clothing to go around and that we will help each other in times of dire need. So why is the fashion waste crisis often overlooked at a critical time?
Explains Mensa, EPR is one way to better address this crisis: “Paying an independent extended producer responsibility fee is the least they can do to support the ecosystem that has carried them for over five decades.”
Oteng says of the global fashion industry, “You have all the money, all the resources, all the people, access to literally everything that you would need to make this possible.”
He notes, too, that solutions to clothing waste issues are already being practiced within communities that — despite a lack of resources — have been forced to deal with them. “You have everything to be able to upcycle, to scale this to a point where it makes a cultural relevance. And then all you can say is that ‘Upcycling is very difficult’? You saw people [in Kantamanto] don't even have the space; they're cutting fabric in the air, but still able to do it in a straight line."
Adds Oteng, "I still think there is an opportunity to elevate and empower designers to do this too. Maybe it will not happen in my lifetime, but that's something I am looking forward to as a form of change.”
Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
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