A once beautiful beach in Ghana is now unrecognizable thanks to the 15 million pieces of old clothes that were left over it to rot.
The main chief culprits of this disaster are textile waste from nations in the west.
Used clothing is donated by countries in the west are sent to places like Ghana.
According to reports, around 15 million pieces of used pieces of old clothing arrive in the market in Accra, the capital of Ghana, on a weekly basis.
The garments, used ones, are packed in large bales and are sold by traders in the country.
The thing is that resellers have no idea what’s inside the bags, so they just gamble with the purchase each time.
The things they can sell, they sell and the ones that they cannot, they throw out at the beach.
Sammy Oteng, a designer and activist, said:
Before, they used to have good quality clothes. But now there’s a lot of trash and a lot of very low-quality clothes. The whole fast fashion model is built around, like you know, building cheap clothing. I feel like waste is being built into the model of fast fashion, overproduce overproduce overproduce. In the end, people wear clothes for just like two weeks and then just discard them. The waste doesn’t end up in America. Ultimately, it ends up here in Kantamanto.
The sad part is that the beach now has over 15 million pieces of unused clothes and no one wants to get them.
They end up getting washed in beaches and are now towering landfills.
