April 22, 2023 |
There’s a scene in the 2008 Pixar animation Wall-E that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. The film’s desolate, futuristic landscape is made from the detritus left behind by the last humans to vacate the planet. Skyscrapers built out of rubbish tower above the dumping ground and Wall-E, the cute little robot unit tasked with the impossible mission of cleaning up this toxic landfill, spends his days picking up the bits of treasure that catch his mechanical eyes. A plastic spork or a Rubik’s cube to add to his tenderly scavenged archive in the container he calls home.
He stops and picks up an old bra, playfully stretching it over his eyes like a mask. Perhaps he knows this polyester undergarment isn’t going to biodegrade for at least a century or two. The song “Put On Your Sunday Clothes“ from the musical Hello, Dolly! plays from an old record player. It’s a dystopian vision of a future where the idea of putting on your Sunday best, a set of special clothes you keep for one day of the week, is long dead. The population of Earth has trashed the planet and found another one to colonise, where life is one long holiday binge. As Wall-E passes a newspaper lying in the rubble, the headline reads “Too much trash!!! Earth covered”.
You may think all this is science fiction. But in December 2020, a research paper published in the scientific journal Nature calculated that the amount of plastic, metal, asphalt, concrete and other man-made materials on Earth outweigh the natural mass of the planet. We forget sometimes that our clothes, too, are part of this forever layer of plastic and pollution we are littering into our oceans, deserts and soils. Next year, Elon Musk’s SpaceX will embark on its first civilian “dearMoon” expedition, a weeklong journey to orbit the white planet. From there, they may be able to see vast swathes of our precious Earth covered not with trees or oceans, but a strange new landscape made from unwanted tracksuits, PVC raincoats, acrylic jumpers, fake fur coats, trainers, sequin dresses, tights, bras and polyester knickers. There might even be the odd moonboot.
Our addiction to clothes is having profound knock-on effects. Last May, I spent a couple of days in Copenhagen at the annual Global Fashion Summit, where brands go to feel good about their latest efforts to save the planet and change the world. It was quite a low-key affair, not the packed hall of years gone by. A hot ticket on the opening day, however, was for a conversation between Clare Press, founder of the must-listen podcast The Wardrobe Crisis (check out episode 150, ‘Waste Colonialism and Dead White Man’s Clothes’), and Liz Ricketts, CEO of The Or Foundation, an organisation based in Kantamanto Market in Accra, Ghana, one of the largest second-hand retail centres in West Africa.
Since 2016, Ricketts, a former fashion designer and stylist, has been based at Kantamanto, dedicating her time to Dead White Man’s Clothes, a research project which aims to both address the inequalities of the fashion industry and create a blueprint for circular clothing systems. Her foundation also provides medical, psychological and business support to the kayayei, the local, female head porters who carry gargantuan bales of clothing on their heads from the importer to the seller. These bales weigh anything from 120 to 200 pounds, more than the weight of the porter herself, and often result in neck and back injuries. According to Ricketts, girls are sometimes injured when bales fall on a limb. Some have died from the sheer weight of the load itself. Their pay per trip? It can be as little as 15p.
The interview on stage at the Copenhagen Opera House aimed to reiterate the problems facing communities in countries like Ghana, which have become recipients of a post-colonial system of rubbish-dumping. Towards the end, a clearly emotional Ricketts dropped a bombshell. She announced that over the next three years, the faster-than-the-speed-of-light Chinese fashion brand Shein had agreed to donate £12 million over three years to support the work of the foundation. For her small, grassroots, boots-on-the-ground team, this is an injection of cash which will fund a medical centre and examine the causes, conditions and effects of the kayayei trade.
The Or Foundation’s programme ‘Our Long Recovery’ provides what it describes as “research, advocacy and community engagement work around the environmental, socio-cultural and economic impacts of fashion’s waste crisis in order to manifest tangible interventions to clean up the mess and break the exploitative patterns of the colonial legacy embedded within the second-hand trade.”
For an activist working on the ground, trying to make change against a tsunami of 15 million items that arrive every week, who could blame Ricketts for accepting the Shein donation? Indeed, she put out the plea for more brands to come forward and acknowledge that their clothes end up in clothing slurry heaps, creating new geological synthetic strata, or are washing up on beaches, suggesting that they pay towards the work of organisations who are trying to clean up the mess. But for many in the sustainability world, this was a massive greenwashing opportunity for Shein, a brand which adds 2,000 new items every day to its online store, making them one of the biggest contributors to the problem. The £80 billion business was the subject of a recent Channel 4 documentary, Untold: Inside the Shein Machine, which exposed how the company exploits its workers: many are paid 3p per item produced on 18-hour days and don’t get weekends off, breaking labour laws.
We may think we want these shiny, cheap, new things. But we shouldn’t. You only need to look at the mountains of clothes being dumped in many corners of the world. In 2018, Priya Ahluwalia travelled to Panipat in India, one of the country’s main textiles centres, to see how unwanted clothes are sorted into different colours and materials to be sold on or recycled into new yarns or blankets. She published the resulting research in her book Sweet Lassi. This is a well-oiled system, set up to ensure that the textiles sent there are given a second life. But for the women and girls who sort the clothes, it’s a mystery to them why perfectly good, well-made clothes are being discarded. The idea of having bulging wardrobes, umpteen pairs of jeans and so many dresses you’d lose count is completely alien to the poorest of women, many of whom are the ones making our clothes and then sorting through the same stuff we throw away. Like our grandparents and the generations before them, they have few clothes and they look after, repair and keep them for as long as they possibly can.
And if it’s not West Africa or India, we find other places that are out of sight and mind to offload our unhealthy fashion habit. Who could have ever imagined the unfathomable sight of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile? This is a place you imagine would be unspoilt, not least because it is the driest place on earth, with 41,000 square miles of emptiness. But it’s not empty at all. It’s filled with mountains of clothes, many with their price tags still on them.
Each year, 59,000 tonnes of clothes arrive in the Chilean port of Iquique. Around two-thirds are sold at thrift stores and markets around South America, but the rest are dumped, having simply been made to fit an economic equation that says it’s cheaper to make 10,000 units than 1,000. And that may well be the case. We are always told that the reason high street stores can sell their clothes so cheaply is not because they pay their workers so little, but because of “economies of scale”. But that economy is false and the glut of clothes which result from this out-of-control system is not only damaging to the people who are overworked and underpaid to make them, but to the communities at the other end of the whole needless journey, who have to deal with the pollution and chemicals which will poison their ecosystems for decades to come.
The shocking sprawl of unwanted clothing that has spread like a volcanic eruption in the Atacama is the textile equivalent of an oil slick. One way of clearing oil slicks at sea is what’s called “in-situ burning”, where the oil is contained and then set alight. These clothing mountains are dealt with the same way. They’re set on fire, meaning that the heavy smoke compounds the pollution and greenhouse gas these clothes have already caused. From the production of the oil-based polyester and the dye houses to the toxic waste, production lines and shipping, it’s one huge, environmental disaster.
Sometimes we don’t know why we’ve bought a piece of clothing, and we might not even wear it before stuffing it into a bin bag to be sent to “charity”. According to Oxfam, 70 per cent of all the clothing donated in Europe gets shipped to Africa. We don’t want it and, not surprisingly, they don’t either. There is nothing charitable about it. And I can’t help thinking that The Or Foundation is doing the right thing. It’s not about taking money from the polluters, it’s not about greenwashing. It’s about engaging with the worst offenders, rubbing their noses in the mess and making them understand the effect their untenable business models are having on the world.
Photography by Martin Bernetti. Taken from STOP WASTE within issue 70 of 10 Magazine – ROMANCE, REBEL, RESISTANCE – out on newsstands now. Order your copy here.
