Green Peace Alarmed Ghana Has Become Europe’s Fashion Waste Dumping Hotspot
In a recent report, it said it is concerned that 15 million second-hand items of clothing were arriving in Ghana every week.
The report titled “Fast Fashion, Slow Poison”, Green Peace highlights that every week up to 500,000 items of clothing waste from Ghana’s Kantamanto Market end up in open spaces and informal dumpsites.
Mountains of unusable clothing are dumped in informal dumpsites (Accra has run out of landfills) and can be seen piling up on the edges of lagoons and beside beaches.
Infrared testing Green Peace carried out revealed that 89% of clothing waste in Ghana’s dumpsites contains synthetic fibres, leading to widespread microplastic contamination.
“We also found that clothes are burnt in open fires to heat water in public washhouses leading to levels of benzene exceeding European indoor air guide values by almost 200 times”.
In an earlier petition it sent to Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo, Green Peace has sought the input of the global audience to demand an end to the importation of textile “dead waste” immediately.
The petition seeks for mechanisms to make polluters and clothes companies pay for the environmental and health damage they cause and the implementation of effective Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) schemes to hold companies accountable for the full lifecycle of their products.
The petition also demand the presentation of a clear plan “to invest effectively in local solutions and slow circular systems for the clothing and fashion sectors that will highlight makers and upcyclers of clothes and fashion which are crucial in alleviating the fashion waste problem in Ghana”.
So far, 8,800 of the 15,000 have signed the petition.
It firmly suggested that “instead of importing the Global North’s fast-fashion waste problem, let’s put African solutions first” Green Peace concluded.