There is no doubt that the emergence of fast fashion in the United States is continually supporting a huge market for antiques that are no longer in fashion, with thousands of tons of vintage and second-hand clothing being exported annually.
According to “CBS News”; US waste clothing is shipped to faraway countries, filling markets, clogging beaches and sweeping landfills, and this has worsened significantly, after a 5-fold increase in the amount of clothing Americans buy over the past three decades, especially since each item is worn on average Only 7 times, and that's shed more clothes than ever before.
Many Americans donate their used clothes to charity when they're done, assuming they'll be reused, but with the increasing amount of clothes being discarded, and the poor quality of fast fashion, smaller quantities can be resold, and millions of clothes are baled and shipped overseas every general.
“Whatever they can't sell in their thrift stores is being sold in the second-hand market,” Liz Ricketts, co-founder and director of OR, told CBS.
In Ghana's Kamanto market, about 15 million items of second-hand clothing from Western countries arrive every week, and Ghana's population is only 30 million.
“The entire fast fashion model is built around making cheap clothes, and the US is the biggest culprit, exporting more second-hand clothes than any other country on earth,” says Samuel Otting, fashion designer and project manager at Or Foundation.
In Ghana, trucks unload bales of textiles called Obroni Wawu, or “Dead White Man’s Clothes.” The unloading takes place on a 7-acre land of more than 5,000 small shops, where the bales are bought by market traders who do not know what’s inside. For between $25 and $500 each, they clean, detail and repain the clothes they can to give them new life.
But Oting says recycling is becoming increasi
ngly difficult because of the poor quality of fast-fashion clothing arriving from America. "Previously they had good quality clothes, but now there's a lot of trash," he said.
He added, “I feel that waste is being incorporated into the fast-fashion model: overproduction, overproduction, and in the end, people wear the clothes for about two weeks, and then just get rid of them. It doesn’t end up with waste in America, in the end it ends up here in Cantamanto.” .
The recycling business in Katamanto, Ghana, is not enough to reduce the clothing glut caused by America's addiction to fast fashion. It is estimated that 40% of all clothing bales sent to Ghana end up in landfills.
And some unsold clothes seep onto the beaches when it rains, creating huge tangled webs called “claws” in the beach sand. He added, “Do not hide under the guise of donations of used clothes, and then ship them to us just to cause us problems.”
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