The environmental disaster fuelled by used clothes and fast fashion | Foreign Correspondent

The dark side of the world’s fashion addiction. Many of our old clothes, donated to charities, end up in rotting textile mountains in West Africa. This is a story about how our waste is creating an environmental disaster. Have you ever thought about what happens to your old clothes after you drop them off at the op shop? It might be time to start, because these goodwill gestures are helping to fuel an environmental catastrophe on the other side of the world. When charities in Australia can’t sell donated clothing, tonnes of it ends up being exported to countries like Ghana, in West Africa. Ship after ship docks every week with bales from Europe, the US, China and Australia. They call them ‘Dead White Man’s Clothes’. Once they arrive in Ghana, they’re taken to the bustling Kantamanto markets in the capital Accra and from here, they make their way to villages and towns across the country. The industry provides jobs for thousands of people, like Asare Asamoah, a successful importer. He brings in clothes, mainly from the United Kingdom, and if they’re good quality, he can make a decent living. But it’s risky business. He has to pay upfront for a bale and never knows whether it’s trash or treasure. With cheap, fast fashion flooding the world, the quality of the clothes arriving in Ghana is getting worse and worse. ‘Sometimes you’ve gone and bought something, then you don’t get what you want’, says Asamoah. ‘Then you lose your money.” And there’s a dark side to this industry. Correspondent Linton Besser travels to Ghana to uncover the dirty secret behind the world’s fashion addiction. While 60 per cent of imported fashion items are reused and resold, 40 per cent are rubbish, creating an environmental catastrophe for this poor nation. With the main dumpsite for textile waste now full, unregulated dumpsites ring the city. These fetid clothes mountains are often set on fire, filling the skies with acrid smoke. ‘It is totally a disservice to us in this part of the