The Or Foundation

WORK

Since 2011 we have worked through education, research and direct action to manifest regenerative alternatives to the dominant model of overproduction and overconsumption in the fashion industry. While this is a global challenge, we believe that a place-based approach, tethered to local accountability, is essential. Today, through our base in Accra, Ghana, we are at the forefront of catalyzing a Justice-led Circular Economy in solidarity with Kantamanto, the largest secondhand clothing market in the world.

2023 - Present | Active

Working in partnership with the waste management department of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly and other community cleanup groups, we are removing and hauling away over 18 tons of textile and other plastic waste from Accra's beaches every week. Our paid weekly cleanup team brings together more than 50 people in addition to activating local and international volunteers.

2024 | Active

Our Community Engagement team works across the many Kantamanto Market leadership groups that govern different sections of the market to organize and pay a team of more than 30 individuals working as waste collectors within the market to separate and collect textile waste from throughout Kantamanto Market. The waste collection team, dubbed the Kanta Keepers, then loads a municipal waste truck that we operate in partnership with the Accra Metropolitan Assembly in order to haul the textile waste to a sanctioned dumpsite far from the coastline.

2020 - Present | Active

The Secondhand Solidarity Fund helps the Kantamanto Market community shift out of the crisis mode of daily survival and into long-range planning mode for transformation. From distributing direct relief funds to retailers and upcyclers after market fires and floods, to supporting community-identified vital needs, such as basic fire safety equipment and training, our Community Engagement team leads the effort to distribute hundreds of thousands of dollars through the fund, along with hundreds of fire extinguishers and other in-kind support.

2021 - Present | Active

In Kantamanto 55kg clothing bales are headcarried by young women working as kayayei, meaning ‘she who carries the burden.’ Our year-long chiropractic study found that women working as kayayei suffer irreversible harm to their spinal column. In response to this, we created a holistic, paid apprenticeship program to foster alternative pathways for young women outside of dangerous headcarrying. In addition to apprenticeships we also offer wraparound support to the women in our Mabilgu Program, which mean sisterhood in the Dagbani language.

2021 - Present | Active

We organize citizen scientists to perform weekly beach monitoring reports, tracking textile tentacles across a seven kilometer swath of Accra’s beaches. Building on these findings we conduct weekly water and air sampling analysis along with regular passive air pollution monitoring in order to track the flow of waste pollution across the coastal environment. Through our first-of-its-kind solar powered research vessel, we will soon expand this monitoring and mapping effort off of the coastline and into the Gulf of Guinea.

2021 - Present | Active

We have developed the methodology and community infrastructure to collect, sort, transport, store and process industrial scale quantities of clothing waste along the waste hierarchy of most efficient use. In addition we are pushing forward product development toward commercialization of multiple material transformation pathways based within the Kantamanto Market ecosytem. Our waste transformation machinery is designed and made locally using predominately scrap material.

2022 - Present | Active

Our Community Business Incubator provides business development support for existing upcycling and resale businesses within the Kantamanto Market ecosystem as well as for our internally developed product lines as we strive to implement cooperative business models. With a curriculum on financial planning, marketing, customer engagement and quality control, we aim to bridge Kantamanto with new audiences both in Ghana and internationally. We operate a store in Accra and and we offer catalytic seed funding to eligible program participants.

2022 - Present | Active

In October 2022 we launched Obroni Wawu October as an annual festival dedicated to celebrating Kantamanto. Obroni Wawu October is led by our Community Engagement and Community Business Incubator (CBI) teams in close partnership with Kantamanto Market leadership groups and associations to celebrate Ghana’s legacy of sustainability and also to build solidarity with other secondhand markets across the Global South. Vogue Business described OWO as a model for the fashion industry.

2022 - Present | Active

Our Stop Waste Colonialism campaign has established a new precedent for Extended Producer Responsibility, one that does not simply offset the cost of waste management within a linear economy but rather that funds the transition to true circularity. Grounded in self-representation and extensive research, we are advocating for textile-based Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) programs across the world to be Globally Accountable. Our campaign centers around a policy paper with more than 10,000 endorsements.

The Or Foundation is the facilitator of the Stop Waste Colonialism Campaign, but the Kantamanto Community is the driving force. Kantamanto is demanding to be heard. A Justice-led Transition to Circular Textiles Economy must prioritize the prosperity of the people who have been made most vulnerable by the linear economy. The Stop Waste Colonialism campaign is based on three key principles:

Kantamanto and Global Secondhand Markets Do Circularity
Every Garment Is Waste Until Proven Otherwise
Waste Should Not Transit Borders Without Accompanying EPR Funding

Our position paper is the result of 5 years of field research, global literature review and participation in various research groups, and is a proposal for an improved EPR scheme for Textiles based on the framework of:

Internalizing Cost of Waste Management with eco-modulated fees starting at US $0.50 per newly produced garment.
Making EPR globally accountable by supporting every stage of the reverse supply chain, including global reuse markets where final sorting and preparation for reuse determine the fate of each individual garment.
Disclosing production volumes to drive Circularity toward a reduction of new production by 40%.

We call on policy makers to design EPR Policies that Prioritize Our Reality and Our Understanding Of Waste. We call on institutions to endorse our position paper as an allied organization. We call on brands & retailers to disclose their production volumes. We call on citizens to sign our petition and demand that brands speak volumes. We are actively meeting with members of the EU Commission and continuing to engage decision makers in France and in the US. In November 2022 & May 2023 we traveled to Europe with a delegation of tailors and retailers from Kantamanto Market to advocate for a Globally Accountable EPR scheme for Textile.

Learn more about our campaign on StopWasteColonialism.org.

2023 - Present | Active

As a key element of our Stop Waste Colonialism campaign, Speak Volumes is a call for transparency & accountability on the one datapoint that impacts everyone along the value chain – production volumes. The Or Foundation has organized a call across the industry to make the publication of production volumes an industry standard.

2020 - Present | Active

Building on our roots in peer education, Collectofus 2.0 uses social media connections to engage emerging designers in a peer-based, object-exchange curriculum focused on removing marketing from the designer-to-consumer relationship, rethinking sustainability rhetoric and researching the accessibility of bespoke tailoring services. Designers are offered micro-grants to make a bespoke garment for a stranger on the internet using garment co-construction as a vehicle for sustainable relationships, learning and financial literacy.

2023 | Inactive

Imagine a future where the beach is clean and the waters clear, where fishing nets catch fish, and not trash, where the Korle Lagoon is swimmable again. With the stage set by decades of Waste Colonialism and centuries of exploitative global trade, we launched a 40-day swimming expedition of the Volta River System, which gives life to millions of people in Ghana and throughout West Africa, in order to will this future into existence one stroke at a time through a public campaign, scientific research and environmental storytelling along the way.

2021 - 2022 | Inactive

While women working as Kayayei (female head carriers) are currently vital to the flow of goods in Kantamanto Market, the conditions that most women and girls working as head carriers face within Accra’s markets can make their job deadly. We examined the causes, conditions and effects of the Kayayei trade and working with an Accra-based chiropractor to study the physiological impact of headcarrying in order to develop remedies across policy frameworks, infrastructure design and cultural appeals.

In conjunction with our chiropractic partner, Dr. Naa Asheley Dordor of Nova Wellness Center, we are coordinating an extensive study on head carrying, with 100 women who work as Kayayei in Kantamanto market receiving extensive evaluations, X-rays and health screenings. We are also supporting our chiropractic partner, Dr. Dordor, and the study participants, to continue with chiropractic care if so desired. The results of this study will be contextualized academically and published both domestically and internationally in publicly accessible formats. We are working to place the majority of study participants into apprenticeships, enabling them to leave the Kayayei trade for safer and more dignified jobs. In addition to providing treatment and alternative employment pathways we are engaging a broad range of stakeholders in our advocacy efforts. Since November 2021 we have been working with Kantamanto leadership, retailers and tailors to secure their support for ending the headcarrying of bales. From January to March 2022 we are engaging Accra-based media and traveling to Northern Ghana to engage elders within the communities from which many of the girls migrate. Beginning in March we will launch an international advocacy campaign that will continue along with our local advocacy until 2023 as we build on the research to develop the necessary policy and infrastructural changes.

2020 - 2022 | Inactive

With an array of partners, we conduct 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 to break the exploitative patterns of the colonial legacy embedded within the secondhand trade. As key elements of this work our Beach Monitoring Team tracks ocean textiles along Accra’s coast and we coordinate with waste pickers at area dumpsites to platform voices from the frontlines of circularity.

2016 - 2022 | Inactive

An immersive, multimedia research project into Accra, Ghana's Kantamanto Secondhand Clothing Market as both a global model for circularity and a manifestation of global injustice. Conducted to inform individual actions and policy frameworks, and to serve as a platform for community organizing.

Although nearly everyone dealing in secondhand clothes today knows that most of the clothing is originally given away by people who are still alive, the Twi phrase Obruni Wawu is still employed to describe secondhand clothing in Ghana. This phrase translates to Dead White Man’s Clothes and for us it speaks to the absurdity of the waste that we, as a society, create as a byproduct of our exploitative overconsumption and overproduction. Abundance and excess are not the same thing. Overconsumption is not a burden carried entirely by the consumer. Overproduction is not a burden carried entirely by the producer. These phenomena are interconnected and affect all of us, regardless of our role or our position in the global North or South. Kantamanto Market and the dumpsites surrounding Accra are specific areas where the impacts of this cycle are greatly evident, but so too are the malls of America and the High Streets of Europe.

Our research based on hundreds of surveys and interviews and thousands of hours of observation and garments sorted since 2016 has shown that roughly 40% of the millions of items that pass through Kantamanto Market every week leave the market as waste. These hundreds of thousands of garments on a daily basis represent one of the largest consolidated sources of waste in the city of Accra. And they are just the tip of the iceberg in relation to the global crisis of fashion’s waste. As an organization we have played a leading role in documenting many of the widespread impacts of this waste.

Just as the amount of waste is staggering, so too is the effort to recirculate clothing. Kantamanto is the world’s largest reuse hub. 30,000 people work to add value to garments through sorting and merchandising, remanufacturing, tailoring, screen printing, washing, ironing and dying, among the nearly countless tasks of transformation that are performed to recirculate roughly 25 million garments a month, far more than any dedicated digital clothing resale platform in the Global North. The many lessons of craft of use that are found throughout Kantamanto are the very lessons that we, as a society, must learn if we are to end fashion’s waste crisis.

To consider the impacts of the secondhand clothing trade within Kantamanto Market and across Ghana and West Africa more broadly calls for the consideration of global supply chains and socioeconomic systems, systems indeed spawned by the White Man.

Today Kantamanto Market, located in the center of the city of Accra, operates with high speed internet in the pocket of nearly every trader and with an increasing number of malls reminiscent of suburban USA offering new shopping experiences around the sprawling city and suburbs of Accra. These new technologies and developments are changing the decades-old secondhand clothing trade. Entrepreneurs scout out the best items from various market traders in order to sell at a markup on Instagram. Younger and wealthier customers spend time in the air conditioned malls. Whether or not they spend their money in the malls, the market scene of organized chaos that dominates Kantamanto Market is no longer the only place to buy European style clothes or to do business. How Accra as a society comes to balance the various tensions behind this evolving landscape is an important indicator of the city’s future both ecologically and economically and is a focus of our current work.

2018 - 2022 | Inactive

In partnership with the University of Cincinnati’s School of Design, SFI represents a coalition of students and professionals working to develop a hyper-localized circular economy and to educate on sustainability and social inequality. SFI has reduced the textile waste from UC’s fashion design program by 70%, and is assisting local businesses to do the same. SFI hosts clothing swaps, mending circles, panels and workshops. SFI has published extensive research on unpaid internships and has supported the development of an anti-racism curriculum.

2016 - 2019 | Inactive

Fashion’s impact can be difficult to understand, let alone measure. At the same time we put clothing on our bodies every single day. What can we learn from tracking our daily usage of clothing? What questions arise when we gather information from our own closets? AllSix is a platform and app that invites users to begin every day with an acknowledgment of their garments history and their patterns as a wearer.

2017 | Inactive

Inspired by the words of Rana Plaza survivor Reba Sikder, For Their Memory is a music video and fundraising project honoring the 1,138 people who died in the tragic collapse of the Rana Plaza fashion factory and the other countless lives lost to the violence of overproduction and overconsumption.

2011 - 2016 | Inactive

An object-based exchange initiative that disrupts common notions of globalized trade. Grounded in the tangible experience of making & receiving an item of clothing from their peers abroad, students compare this method of connection with the dominant model of trade. Collectofus culminates in student-led design justice projects that have included dye gardens, redesigning school apparel and building solar charging stations. Collectofus has engaged over 20 partner institutions and 1,500+ students.

2012 - 2015 | Inactive

Students engage with the realities of their local thrift store and donation system. Tasked with taking garments that were donated in undignified condition and transforming them into clothing that bring joy to the wearer, students learn to sew, dye and construct clothing with purpose while also thinking critically about the dominant narrative surrounding clothing poverty. Hundreds of students across the USA have participated in Minimakers.

2015 | Inactive

Fostering a social guidebook and resilient community support systems through sport, this project updated an innovative community game in Mabatlane, or Vaalwater, Limpopo, South Africa through the Waterberg Welfare Society.

2011 - 2016 | Inactive

A year-long interdisciplinary curriculum for K-12 students exploring colonization and globalization through the lens of the fashion industry – past, present and speculative. Grounded in the study of their own closets, the curriculum teaches students how to “read objects” as part of a larger mission to “read the world” – a mission inspired by Paulo Freire’s decolonizing pedagogy. This curriculum has been incorporated into over 20 educational institutions across the USA, Ghana and South Africa.

2011 - 2012 | Inactive

Students are invited to recycle their single-use tees, and other garments, into backpacks in collaboration with Ghanaian seamstresses and tailors. The backpacks were priced by students to reflect their valorization matrix and sold to benefit an organization of their choice.

2011 | Inactive

Produced in Partnership with Manhattan’s Textile Arts Center, the NYC Fair Trade Coalition and EcoSalon, the first ever (Sustainable) Fashion’s Night Out and LookBook featured fair trade, upcycled and slowly crafted garments, and asked the evening's guests to engage beyond the price tag.