on the coast of West Africa ships arrive day after day with an unrelenting Cargo [Music] in Ghana they call them a Brawny wow all the clothes of dead white men dig this beer from Austria yeah the charity Shop cast offs from the Western World too many of them arrive in unwearable condition while the trade in used clothes has created thousands of jobs it's also turning parts of Ghana into a toxic landfill it is blizzy serving as a Dumping Ground for textile waste in the name of a secondhand clothing the world's unwanted fashion ends its Journey here we call them Pentacles when they first wash up on sea they're very long creating an environmental catastrophe of Unthinkable proportions [Music] [Music] in Accra the working day begins long before Dawn [Music] as thousands of ghanaians make their daily migration into the center of this West African capital from old Fatima accra's biggest slum Aisha idrisu and her 18 month old son Sharif joined the throng working in the second hand clothes trade okay [Music] one of each money yeah [Music] yeah now this one you said they are very young man but watch myself [Music] come on asari asamoa starts his day early too he's a successful importer of used clothing I was follow my brother for us we are doing in the business and unfortunately my brother passed away so he handled everything to me or am I always think about him because he made me who I am today new Bales arrive and asari is checking on his order yeah yeah [Music] with quality I hope you get a good one these bails are being dispatched to almost every corner of accra's commercial heart the sprawling cantonmento Market [Music] it's a bustling Labyrinth where almost everything is for sale 35. these markets are one of the biggest in West Africa if not the world and they're a central hub for second-hand clothing from here they get shipped all over Africa [Music] for the past two decades the resale of Western cast offs has boomed here it's created tens of thousands of jobs these men and women are retailers eager to seize the best clothes from a prized new Bale and they're old friends but this morning there's lots at stake they're also Arch competitors if they don't grab the best clothes they don't make money [Music] foreign on her way to collect a bale of clothes from asari the Importer okay and now we'll follow now right yeah well right so we uh okay all right izakayo or headquarter foreign women are usually displaced from their villages in the north of the country by conflict or unemployment [Music] five dollars a day foreign she's carrying weighs more than 50 kilograms it's tough and dangerous work this is Saturday [Music] the trade and used clothing is also risky for importers they pay up front as much as 95 000 for a container with no guarantee if the clothes inside it are any good it's not easy sometimes if you don't have money to do business this business it's not easy for you sometimes you go and buy bought something then you cut you'll not get what you want then you lose your money asari Imports as many as 3 million items of used clothing every year most of it from the United Kingdom foreign Western exporters with good quality clothes profits are there for the taking we're okay so if you know inside that this goose is fine that one you are going to buy it then you get your profit if you don't know that this goose is nicer you just bought anything then you lose your money asari also sells his newly imported items to other retailers in cantonmento Market it looks like chaos but there's a method to this madness these retailers are picking the finest clothes that have come in from the Bale in order to be ready for Market Day foreign lives a few hours from the city center in a good year importers can turn over a hundred and forty thousand dollars so the money I get I don't chop off I just save some so I just save it asari asamoa attributes his family's success to divine intervention and God has blessed what I'm doing and God grace living in this house it's very big conflict between Sunday and my job the crew time sir that one is somebody culture like a white man used to wear it when going into office by this one is our own culture now it's Sunday and in this deeply religious country it's a day for traditional clothing Western cast offs are so cheap that local textile makers can't compete since the 1980s their output has fallen by as much as 75 percent [Music] traditional African clothing has now become two intuitive for everyday wear Hallelujah [Music] [Applause] [Music] every evening with the markets customers heading home a cleanup operation begins foreign clothing are swept up and bundled into sacks ready for tomorrow's collection [Music] the next morning the sheer volume of waste is staggering [Music] but before it's even been driven away another load of used clothing appears and is put up for sale [Music] [Applause] solomonoy is the city's waste manager this place is serving as a Dumping Ground for textile waste in the name of second-hand clothing close to 40 percent of whatever shipment that they are coming on a daily basis ends up to be complete chaff of no value [Applause] every day this truck is full to overflowing [Music] [Music] there's roughly 6 million garments every week that leave cantonmento Market as waste and a huge proportion of all of that clothing is trucked two hours north of Accra and ends up being dumped as landfill foreign the pressure from the used clothing industry is Relentless the city of Accra now has to find somewhere to dispose of more than 160 tons of textile waste every single day is a retailer who sells her stock outside the city yeah um it's a hand-to-mouth existence for the single mother of three who travels for hours between candamanto market and outlying villages [Music] she says she fell into the trade after her brother used Juju from sorcery to force her off the family farm [Music] dinner is [Music] production s yeah [Music] she goes from Village to Village selling her clothes these two dollar dresses are something of a luxury item I like food christiana's arrival is a highlight of the week so to me yeah but it's a precarious Enterprise because many of her customers insist on being granted credit foreign [Music] works hard to care for her family but it's becoming harder because the bales of clothing being imported into Ghana are arriving in worse and worse conditions foreign [Music] [Music] season in Ghana and when these Fierce rains come The Unwanted clothing washes into the city's open sewers and chokes its waterways [Applause] you know you're in the tropics so we have very high precipitation that form of rainfall so any heavy downfall of rain will gather all these uncollected with into the storm drains which are not covered anyway and then it gets into the ocean it means all these layers of textile without a stockpiling at the ocean bed and that is what will choke The Aquatic Life in there yeah this is like dug into the ground so when we've done cleanups here you can dig like 15 feet and still signs Tangles of clothing Liz Ricketts has spent the past decade documenting the impact of clothing waste on Ghana so it also becomes really dangerous for people when they're swimming because they're like rolling back and forth and it'll hit them and then also hits the fisherman's boats and wraps around their Motors the textiles which wash back onshore become so tangled in the sand they're almost impossible to dig out [Music] so this you know is all tangled up and it's a little bit harder for you to see but when they first wash up there very long you know they can be eight feet to 30 feeds and sometimes three feet wide these tentacles have their Origins at candamanto Market [Music] [Applause] Emmanuel yeah hello hey wow Linton better ABC yeah wow nice to meet you thank you Emmanuel ajab is another importer we are going to take this beer this one yeah this one from Austria we want to see what is inside and it's a ladies summer jacket he's one of the few to import used clothing from Australia yeah I'm going to open will shut them into groups okay until they open their Bales importers have no idea whether they contain trash or treasure so this one's going like this top quality okay here we can't wear this one so is that going to be rubbish yeah this is rubbish and this one too we'll call it the second second okay you can't wear it yeah this one is going to look it's got it it's got a stain here Emmanuel and his colleagues despair at the growing number of low quality clothes arriving in Ghana what do you think of this one see how it is from here or ladies it's sweat you should not put it in the bed it's lucky so it's an insults in Europe and UK and Australia American they think Africa here we are we are not like a human being sorry to say that you use this because what they are giving to us is like even if somebody knock your door and he won't help you you cannot just giving picking something from your Dustbin and give to the person so in this case it's like they are doing this to us this pile cost Emmanuel 92 dollars this ones are the ones you can sell okay after sorting the whole Bale he can see he's going to make a significant loss on these Australian clothes five six seven foreign and how many all together in a bail this one the uh 180 to 200 pieces in the Bell and you'll find seven pieces very bad so at the end of today where will you put that we are going to throw them away the problem is there's no room anywhere in Accra left to throw them [Music] this massive carefully engineered landfill was meant to be the solution to acura's waste crisis it should have provided enough capacity for 15 years but once it started accepting clothing waste from cantonmento Market was filled to overflowing within just five [Music] now the city's only alternative is a growing network of informal unregulated dumps [Music] so a lot of the waste is brought here by informal collectors who pick it up at the end of the day like this one on the edge of old Fatima the city's biggest slum [Music] it doesn't look like there's anything wrong with them at all synthetic textiles can take hundreds of years to decompose this mountain of waste May cast its fettered shadow over these neighborhoods for generations to come [Music] I think unfortunately what happens is that the waste they are blamed for the waste the people of old Fatima are not responsible for this problem but they are forced to live with it then this waste ends up in places like this where it's used to further disenfranchise people who are already living in poverty to blame them for ways that they did not create while all consumers bear some responsibility for this waste crisis Liz Ricketts lays much of the blame at the door of the world's big fashion houses really it's Brands it's brands that are over producing waste is a part of the business model of fashion a lot of Brands overproduce by up to 40 percent so when did they start burning this uh at least three weeks ago much of The Unwanted clothing is simply burned [Music] It's Not Unusual for accra's Sky to Blacken with smoke for days at a time [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] for many who live in Old Fatima including Aisha idrisu the flow of second-hand clothing into Ghana has been a lifeline [Music] there are other problems which are simply more pressing foreign [Music] with four other women and all their worldly belongings today so perhaps it's for the West instead to think more carefully about the quality of what we donate I'm not sure they've ever been conscious to ask where is the final destination of that thing they are discarding but if they come here like you've come and see the practicality for yourself then they will know that no we better take care of this thing within our country and not to ship the problem to other peoples thank you