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Every week, an estimated 15 million used garments from North America, Europe, and Australia arrive in Ghana’s capital city of Accra. These are the unwanted clothes that well-meaning Westerners have donated to be reused or resold, bombarding countries such as Ghana with clothing waste.
The small country of 30 million is expected to receive, disseminate, and dispose of billions of garments a year that aren’t theirs to begin with. Items in poor condition that arrive in Accra are immediately thrown into landfills, while the rest are left for resellers to hawk in hopes of turning a profit. But as the quality of clothes has declined thanks to fast fashion, so too have resellers’ ability to earn a living. Accra has “become the dumping ground for textile waste,” the city’s waste manager told ABC News in August 2021. Local water systems have been polluted; landfills have become fuel for catastrophic fires.
Yet, no corporation or country has been keen to take responsibility for Ghana’s waste crisis. It exists seemingly out of sight and out of mind. In n Consumed: The Need for Collective Change: Colonialism, Climate Change, and Consumerism, fashion journalist and activist Aja Barber urges Western fashion companies and sustainability advocates to consider the workers and people of the Global South, who produce our clothes and contend with our waste. The pace of how fashion is produced, sold, and bought in the West has a direct impact in developing nations, Barber argues in the book: “This [fast fashion] cycle doesn’t just harm everyone within the supply chain, it harms those at the end of the supply chain as well.”
Consumed isn’t just a sustainability guidebook. It’s a much-needed history lesson and warning about how forces like colonialism and capitalism bleed into our consumer society, right down to the clothing we choose to wear and keep.
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Photo by Qilai Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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James' World 2 
Jul 20, 2023 @ 03:34:13
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Jul 21, 2023 @ 14:09:28
Thanks!
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