Out of Fashion

Here's one way the apparel industry is not keeping up with the times: It barely recycles

- Natalie Obiko Pearson, Ekow Dontoh and Dhwani Pandya

Tangled coils of waterlogged clothes roll like carcasses in the waves along the coast of Ghana, one of the world's biggest importers of used clothing. The castoffs arriving by the bale are known here as obroni wawu, or dead White people's clothes, a phrase in the local Twi language that seeks to assign a reason to the inexplicable flood of garments from overseas. Surely their owners wouldn't choose to throw away so much clothing? At Chorkor beach, near the capital Accra, layer upon layer of rich-country detritus forms a wall more than 6 feet high, like geological strata from different fashion eras. A Crocs sandal peeps out here, a blue Ralph Lauren polo shirt there, a red Victoria's Secret bra some way down. So solid is the putrid heap that huts sit on top, a shantytown built quite literally on a foundation of rags. 

The waste stretches into the distance in both directions. When it rains, the city's waterways and gutters belch garments into the ocean, says Solomon Noi, the city's head of waste management, then waves deposit much of the refuse back on shore.

Noi and his sanitation crews fight a losing battle every day as they attempt to corral Accra's textile waste into landfills.

His fleet of trucks is too small, and the garments destroy the vehicles' hydraulic systems that compress waste. A landfill that was supposed to have a life span of 25 years filled up in three.

Noi reckons that 40% of the used clothing coming through Accra's port doesn't get reworn or repurposed; it simply ends up as garbage. "The government of Ghana doesn't have the money and infrastructure to take care of the White man's waste," he says. He concedes the answer isn't simply to ban the imports, which is what some outraged Western activists and researchers would like to see Ghana's government do; the trade supports too many livelihoods.