Kenya Drowning in Clothes, that's Fast Fashion’s Waste

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A very good example of the kind of waste produced by fast fashion is what's happening right now in Kenya. There's mountains of clothes piled up at the Dandora dumpsite in Nairobi. I've shared similar scenarios about my home country Ghana and stated that it's happening in many places, a lot in the African countries and Kenya is one of those many other places.

When you look at the site, you observe the smoke in the air from burning, the birds feeding on scraps and people searching through trash for bottles or bones, it really does paint a sad picture. Of course, you might look at it and say it's just a dumping site but when you look closer you'd realize that the site didn't need to be as massive as it is.

The most shocking part to me is the clothes, scraps of fabric mixed with plastic waste. This is all proof of the fast fashion cycle that has become a global problem.

From statistics Kenya alone, imported more than 900 million pieces of secondhand clothing in 2021. We're looking close to a billion items and more than half of them could not even be sold. Millions upon millions end up on these dumping sites.

Since I live in Ghana, I understand practically how most of this fast fashion clothes shipped down to Africa look like, and trust me when I say that many of them are almost useless from the start.

To make the matter worse, a large part of these clothes are made of synthetic materials like polyester and nylon. If you're familiar with the nature of those materials you'd know that they do not break down naturally. They end up splitting into microplastics and these microplastics are full of dangerous chemicals, chemicals like PFAS and phthalates. The chemicals end up leaking into the soil, poisoning the water and also filling the air, all of which the people around feel the negative effect.

Some of the chemicals after the leaking end up inside the stomachs of animals, life stock that people eating, and that carries links to health problems including cancer.

So cheap or affordable is creating a big health problem that would require more money to solve, is it worth it? I've come to learn that many things we do have a long term effect that makes it wrong, it feels right for the moment but wrong for the future.

We have fast fashion and now something called ultra fast fashion, it's all built on a model of making plenty which has become too much.

The Factories manufacture clothes so quickly, sell them cheaply and push consumers to buy more than they need. Most people want a lot and if they had the money they would get them. There's more of those kinds than minimalists so this consumer culture is really working for the factories.

People wear them once or twice and then throw them away. From 2016 to 2020, the value of secondhand clothing imports into Kenya rose 80 percent, that was from $100 million to $180 million.

The more people in some of the richer countries consume, the more unwanted clothes flow into places like Kenya. Some are donations and I'm not hitting on that, if you want to donate to the people in need it's a powerful thing.

But it is the same pattern we see in Ghana, Madagascar and across much of Africa.

It looks good, poorer people get access to affordable fashion, but the truth is a little different because a lot of these clothes are already at the end of their life cycle.

When bales arrive, traders find half of what they paid for cannot even be sold. The so called business model ends in waste and that waste has to go somewhere doesn't it? The result of this cycle is quite visible in dumpsites, in blocked drainage systems, in flooding gutters and even on the shores of the ocean, that's the saddest part for me.

Some of the governments have realized this cannot go on forever. France recently passed a new law to fight back against ultra fast fashion. In June of this year, France Senate agreed unanimously to ban online advertising for ultra fast fashion, and that was to force brands to show environmental ratings on clothes and in a way to punish the items that score badly.

A Shein Tshirt will not be treated the same as a Zara Tshirt made in Morocco. This was quite a step, necessary, but not the whole solution. Activists are right when they say the problem is much deeper than we think. The real issue as I keep stating is overproduction itself. There are just too many clothes being made and charity shops everywhere are drowning in items they cannot sell. If it was more quality and more useful it wouldn't end up in dumping sites that quickly.

Even the mainstream brands contribute to the pile and some are linked to forced labor and deforestation.

Overconsumption is not about one country, one company or one dump, it is an entire system. A person buys more clothes than they need, a company produces more clothes than the market can ever use, then we see the extra getting shipped away, and what happens in the end is another community bearing the cost. So one is forced to carry the burden of another's lifestyle choices.

No nation should have to live under mountains of synthetic rags because someone on the other side of the globe decided they no longer liked last month’s fashion trend. African nations do share a blame on this one because you don't see that problem for other rich nations, it's not like we're sending our fast fashion to them and it's creating piles of waste for them.

The point I'm making with the article is that overconsumption always has a cost, it sometimes just does not always fall on the one who did the consuming.

Screenshot taken from this website, explicitly showing the waste, a huge portion from fast fashion clothes