Heaps of discarded clothing from the U.K. have been dumped in protected wetlands in Ghana, an investigation found.
Items from retailers Marks & Spencer, Primark, H&M, Zara, and Next were found piled up along the Densu River in Ghana and in the Densu Delta wetlands, a nesting site for endangered leatherback and green turtles, according to reporting from Unearthed.
Clothing has also amassed on beaches and in canals in the nearby capital city of Accra. At one resort, staff reportedly spend four hours every day gathering used clothes and plastic bottles from the beach.
With “fast fashion,” retailers are selling a larger volume of cheaper clothing, leading to more waste. U.K. consumers now get rid of 1.5 million tons of clothing yearly, and Ghana is the top destination for their discarded garments.
Every week, hundreds of bales of used clothes are delivered to the Kantamanto secondhand market in Accra, and every day, around 100 tons of unsold garments leave the market as waste, with much of that going to lagoons, wetlands, and the ocean, according to a local waste official.
Traders say that a growing share of imported clothing is unusable. “In the past, we had good clothes to sell to take care of our families, but these days the used clothes we find in the bales are not fit for resale,” Mercy Asantewa, a Kantamanto trader, told Unearthed. “They are poorly made and are already falling apart when we open the bales.”
Marks & Spencer and Primark currently run take-back schemes to address waste. H&M and Zara said they would support a policy that holds labels accountable for the full life of their products. Next did not respond to a request for comment.
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