Every garment is handled by someone.
These hands clean up the waste when too many items of too little value overrun the world’s largest secondhand clothing market.
After all the efforts to reuse, repair, remanufacture garments flowing into Accra’s Kantamanto Secondhand Clothing Market from around the world, tons of clothes are still discarded every day. The industrial scale is met with manual intervention to keep this waste out of Accra’s waterways and airways, where it might otherwise be dumped, burnt and left in the away.
Building on our cleanup efforts to successfully remove at least 10 tons of textile and other plastic waste from Accra’s beaches on a weekly basis, we are now mobilizing to turn off the tap of global textile waste overflowing into Accra’s coastal ecosystem.
Over the last six months we’ve built a cohesive waste collection and haulage program across municipal authorities and diverse stakeholder groups within Kantamanto Market, including informal waste collectors.
We’ve repaired a municipal trash truck, organized 36 informal waste collectors and over 20 leadership groups in order to ensure that textiles leaving Kantamanto as waste are hauled to a sanctioned dumpsite, greatly limiting additional textile waste from entering Accra’s coastal ecosystems.
The new initiative, dubbed Kanta Keepers, is hauling tons of textile waste everyday directly from the market. This is in addition to the waste that is already being collected in mixed municipal waste.
Cleaning up is a team sport and requires getting our hands dirty.
Not only do the Kanta Keepers collect, bag and haul away unwanted clothes, but our Tide Turners beach cleanup team hacks away at the textile tentacles tangled deep in Accra’s beaches and carries tons of waste up the stairs from the beach to the road to load in municipal trucks, weighing the hauls and counting the tags.
Environmental data established by our Ecological Research and Remediation team has proven critical to engaging waste collectors, market members, and beach dwellers to organize around the clear goal of environmental remediation.
Continued ecological sampling and monitoring will allow us to track the net positive impact of preventing textile waste from entering the environment, but we know there is still a long road ahead toward making the Korle Lagoon swimmable, restoring Accra’s beaches to their natural beauty, seeing Kantamanto as a global hub for re-use and tackling the root issue of overproduction.
That is why Globally Accountable Extended Producer Responsibility is vital to ensure a Justice-led transition to a circular economy for all of the communities involved.
Our work turning off the tap and cleaning up the mess is enabled by the financial support made available through the SHEIN EPR Fund, which we announced on June 6th, 2022. With SHEIN’s commitment to support waste management efforts in communities deeply impacted by textile waste, we have embraced the opportunity to lead the way as the first recipient of this first-of-its-kind fund, and have been working to demonstrate how Globally Accountable EPR can be implemented.
We have simultaneously worked diligently over the last year to advocate for emerging EPR policies in the EU and USA to mandate Global Accountability, ensuring that the funds brands pay will follow clothing to its final destination in support of all of the hands doing the hard work of social and environmental transformation.