I at all times considered the thrift retailer as a comforting place. Someplace I might reliably and carefully take undesirable clothes to be resold and re-worn, or as the style business has just lately rebranded it, re-loved. Within the course of, charities do nice issues with the earnings from reselling them: supporting troops. Saving pets. Curing most cancers. However, like many people, I by no means knew the complete story.
Amid the explosion in on-line procuring and TikTok developments for fast-fashion hauls, thrift shops—and thrifting apps—have exploded in the previous couple of years. In reality, in small cities like mine, brick-and-mortar shops have stopped being primarily a spot to purchase items, however extra usually a spot to eliminate them. In accordance with one British research, we solely put on 44 per cent of the clothes we personal. And after we want extra room, how higher to eliminate our outdated garments than donate them to charity?
Sadly, it’s by no means that easy. Contemplate: solely between 10 and 30 per cent of second-hand donations to charity retailers are literally resold in-store. The remaining disappears right into a machine you don’t see: an unlimited sorting equipment by which donated items are graded after which resold on to business companions, usually for export to the World South.
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The issue is that, with the onslaught of quick trend, these donations are too usually now one other technique of trash disposal—and the system can’t cope. Contemplate: round 62 million tons of clothes is manufactured worldwide yearly, amounting to someplace between 80 and 150 billion clothes to dress 8 billion folks.
We hardly ever see the networks of individuals concerned in processing, reselling, and ultimately reusing the issues we donate—huge networks that encircle the globe like a ball of yarn, conveying our undesirable issues to folks in locations like Afghanistan or Togo or Bangladesh. Like something we put within the bin, they’re despatched “away.” On this case not thrown, however given.
I wished to observe that yarn—tracing the motion of donations by way of the textile merchants who ship them off, after which charting the stunning locations these garments find yourself. Which is how, on a spring day final 12 months, I ended up on a flight to West Africa.
Saturday in Accra, the capital of Ghana. Market day. Consumers pack the streets of the central procuring district, the roads clogged with stalls and road hawkers. While you’re on the lookout for second-hand garments in Accra, there is just one vacation spot: Kantamanto, the biggest second-hand garments market in Ghana, and maybe in West Africa. Each week, 15 million clothes transfer by way of Kantamanto, the place an estimated 30,000 merchants are crammed into simply seven claustrophobic acres. The bulk arrives, through container ship, having been donated to charities in Europe and North America. From right here, the garments will unfold throughout Ghana and throughout borders, into Côte D’Ivoire, Togo, Niger, Benin and past.
The second-hand commerce in Ghana and throughout West Africa exploded within the Nineteen Eighties and ’90s as Western charities flooded Africa with clothes, supposed each as fundraising and support. When second-hand textiles first arrived in Ghana, the native inhabitants had no expertise of such wastefulness. In reality, they assumed the house owners of the garments will need to have died, resulting in the Akan phrase nonetheless marked on one of many entrances to Kantamanto: Obroni wawu, or “useless white man’s garments.” (In Tanzania, second-hand clothes is equally typically referred to as kafa ulaya, or “useless Europeans” garments’.) However the donations, nonetheless nicely supposed, have finished as a lot hurt pretty much as good. Unable to compete with the flood of low cost items into Africa, native textile manufacturing sectors collapsed. Between 1975 and 2000, the variety of folks working within the textile commerce in Ghana fell by 75 per cent. Companies merely couldn’t compete on value with a product folks had been throwing away.