@guardian: Do you ever wonder where all our fast fashion cast-offs end up? In Ghana, Joseph Ayesu has seen the beaches in the capital city where he grew up become increasingly choked by the weight of fast fashion waste disproportionately ending up on its shores from countries like the UK, US and China. “Instead of fishes, [fishermen] are catching clothes,” Ayesu says. The west African country is one of the world’s largest importers of secondhand clothing from the global north, which is known locally as “obroni wawu” – meaning “dead white man’s clothes”. Ayesu and his team at The Or Foundation, an Accra-based non-profit trying to tackle textile waste in Ghana, have headed to the city’s beach every week for the last year to try and shift the “mountains of clothing”. They collect an average of 25 tonnes of waste clothing each time. But their progress comes in the face of increasing amounts of fast fashion ending up on their shores. By 2030, global clothing consumption is projected to rise by 63% to 102 million tons from 62 million tonnes in 2019 – equivalent to more than 500 billion additional T-shirts – according to the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee published in 2019. To tackle what they call “waste colonialism”, The Or Foundation is calling for the top 20 brands found in Ghana’s waste stream to publish how many garments they produce each year, with a deadline of Black Friday in November. To find out more about what needs to change – and how these clothes end up here in the first place – head to the link in bio as reporter Fleur Britten and her teenage daughter joined The Or foundation for one of the group’s cleanups. Thumbnail image credit: The Or Foundation.

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Saturday 16 November 2024 11:39:40 GMT