In between runways and retail stores, the fast fashion industry has created 52 annual micro seasons - one for every week of the year. Caught in a shopping frenzy like never before, the Global North buys 60% more clothes than 15 years ago, but wears them for only half as long. An estimated 85% of all textiles go to the dump every year; every second a truckload of garments is burnt or sent to a landfill.

So, where do our clothing donations go? To Africa: the Global North’s backdoor for textile waste. From Ghana to Kenya, worthless donations are flooding environments and communities, amounting to an environmental, economic and social catastrophe. 

From donations to the dumpsite

When we think of fast fashion, we often think of factories across Asia overcrowded with low-wage workers mass-producing copies of western-style runway trends. In the past years, much has been done to improve working conditions and supply chains, with consumers taking a higher interest in how their clothes are produced. Most people, however, do not know what happens to their clothes once they’re donated: they are dumped in Africa, the last link of the fashion industry’s value chain. Almost half of all donated clothing globally ends up in the hands of for-profit brokers, with 70% of that ending up in huge landfills in countries that have no infrastructure to dispose of them. Some 15 million used garments pour into Accra every week, of which 40% are unwearable upon arrival because they were produced cheaply. Immediately dumped, these clothes ruin local businesses that trade second-hand clothing. Ghanaians call this textile waste “Obroni Wawu”, dead white man’s clothes. Similarly, Kenya struggles with the millions of “Kafa Ulaya,” clothes from someone who died in Europe, which are practically wiping out its homegrown textile industry. Left on dumpsites, synthetic textiles poison river beds and the human food chain, and can take hundreds of years to decompose. 

Development or downfall? 

According to statistics published by the United Nations Environment Program and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, the fashion industry is the second-most-polluting industry—coming in right behind oil. It is responsible for 10% of annual global carbon emissions, more than the aviation and shipping sectors combined, and contributes 20% of waste water production. Regardless, fast fashion is thriving and looking to tap into African economies where the fashion and textile industry is already the second-largest sector after agriculture. In Kenya, data shows that every job in the garment sector generates five other auxiliary jobs. With closer proximity to European and North American markets, even lower working wages, and a workforce of 720 million young people, Africa is getting ready to replace Asia as the next “world’s low-cost manufacturer”.

Many economists hail the textile industry as a major opportunity for African countries to create jobs for millions of women and youth by building infrastructure to manufacture their goods, instead of solely relying on export. In Burkina Faso, the largest cotton producer in sub-Saharan Africa, farmers complain that their cotton only seems to gain value once exported and turned into clothes elsewhere, since it does not have the necessary facilities to manufacture textiles.

Building factories and infrastructure across Africa will help generate wealth. East African countries like Ethiopia are already becoming a new favourite for manufacturing, because the working wage is as low as 60-70 dollars per month. This prompts the question: hat kind of development African countries want to pursue, and at what cost? Will low-paid factory work actually improve the lives of African women and youth? And can the continent handle the consequences of textile overproduction? 

Fast fashion as climate colonialism

Africa’s role as both a consumer and producer of fashion is on the rise. Cumulatively, the continent’s market value of fashion is estimated to be $31 billion and growing every year. At the same time, fast fashion’s linear business model is failing Africans. The practice of labelling donated clothes as recycled even though they are dumped in Africa, combined with capitalist aspirations of turning the continent into a cheap textile overproducer sets it up to become a manufacturer of the same low-quality clothes that will be resent to suffocate it. Richer nations are perpetuating a legacy of waste colonialism as they exercise their privilege and power to live in luxury while undermining the rights of African communities to clean and safe living conditions.

Fashioning with waste

While environmental activists in the West are inventing all sorts of concepts to convince consumers that circular fashion is our future, it is already the present in Africa where 80% of people wear second-hand clothes. This is partly due to an inability to afford new western-style clothes, but it is also rooted in a cultural heritage of sustainable fashion practices. Yes, fashion holds immense potential in Africa, and not in the form of low-wage factory labour or toxic dumpsites. Instead of falling into the industrialisation trap of immeasurable human and planetary sacrifice, African youth can use their human capital and local knowledges as an opportunity for diversification and innovative climate action enterprises.The first step to stopping the floods of textile waste is to slow down overproduction and overconsumption. Next, ways must be found to fashion existing waste into usefulness. 

Businesses and entrepreneurs across the continent have identified the goldmine that is sustainable African fashion and the creative industries. Ghanaian businesswoman Roberta Annan founded the African Fashion Foundation, and The African Development Bank Group initiated Fashionomics, to encourage and facilitate green manufacturing and production processes. 

In the diaspora, we must widen our focus to the afterlives as well as the production of sustainable garments, and take responsibility for how we have been disguising our textile waste as donations. Simply moving clothing from one place to another does not make it circular. Fast fashion does not have to continue poisoning Africa, if African sustainable clothing can instead become mainstream across the continent and beyond.