On the coast of West Africa, the ships arrive day after day with an unrelenting cargo. In Ghana, they call them obroni wawu, or the clothes of dead white men. Take this bear from Australia. They're the charity shop cast-offs from the Western world.
Dirty. It's sweat. It's here, rubbish.
It's like salt. 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. This place is serving as a dumping ground for textile waste in the name of second-hand clothing.
The world's unwanted fashion ends its journey here. We call them tentacles. When they first wash up on sea, they're very long. It's creating an environmental catastrophe of unthinkable proportions.
In Accra, the working day begins long before dawn. As thousands of Ghanaians make their daily migration into the centre of this West African capital. From old Fatima, Accra's biggest slum, Aisha Idrisu and her 18-month-old son Sharif join the throng working in the second-hand clothes trade. I was born in the north. Asare Asamoah starts his day early too.
He's a successful importer of used clothing. I was following my brother as we are doing in the business and unfortunately my brother passed away so he handed everything to me. I always think about him because he made me who I am. Today Today new bales arrive and Asari is checking on his order. How's it in here?
It's in here. Yeah. Better?
Yeah, I'm not really feeling this bad time, so it's better. Nice, nice bale. Yeah, big bale with quality. I hope you get a good one. Yeah, yeah.
These bales are being dispatched to almost every corner of Accra's commercial heart. The sprawling Cantamanto Market. It's a bustling labyrinth where almost everything is for sale. 25 25 25 25 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.
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. They're old friends, but this morning there's lots at stake.
So for the next few moments, they're also... No! Hey!
Aisha is on her way to collect a bale of clothes from Asari, the importer. I'm 54. I'm going to start my first animal. Ghana's Kaye women are usually displaced from their villages in the north of the country by conflict or unemployment.
Agu, agu. But even in Accra, Aisha is lucky to earn $5 a day. The bale of clothing she's carrying weighs more than 50 kilograms.
It's tough and dangerous work. Everyone's sad with me. The trade in 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 something, then you cut, you'll not get what you want, then you lose your money. Asare imports as many as three million items of used clothing every year, most of it from the United Kingdom. When he finds 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, then you get your profit. If you don't know that this goose is nice, you just bought anything, then you lose your money.
Asari also sells his newly imported items to other retailers in Cantamanto 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 mass production. Asare lives a few hours from the city centre. In a good year, importers can turn over $140,000.
The money I get, I don't chop off. I just save some. So I just save it. Asari Asamoah 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 clothes I sell, that one is somebody's culture. Like a white man used to wear it when going into office.
But this one is our own culture. Today is 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%. Every evening with the market's customers heading home, a clean-up operation begins. Alleys full of unsaleable clothing are swept up and bundled into sacks ready for tomorrow's collection.
The next morning, the sheer volume of waste is staggering. But before it's even been driven away... Another load of used clothing appears and is put up for sale.
Solomon Noy 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% of whatever shipments that are coming on a daily basis ends up to be complete chaff of no value. Every day this truck is full to overflowing. There's roughly six million garments every week that leave Cantamanto 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.
Pressure from the used clothing industry is relentless. The city of Accra now has to find somewhere to dispose of more than 160 tonnes of textile waste. Black, black, we don't like it again.
In Ghana, we don't like black. Christiana Manko is a retailer who sells her stock outside the city. Five days ago, I was in the forest. It's a hand-to-mouth existence for the single mother of three who travels for hours between Cantamanto Market and outlying villages.
She says she fell into the trade after her brother used juju, or sorcery, to force her off the family farm. I went to the hospital and they told me that I was pregnant. My mother told me that I was pregnant.
She told me that I was pregnant. She told me that I was pregnant. She told me that I was pregnant. I was pregnant.
Yeah, I had you on my name. I'm not coming. She goes from village to village selling her clothes. These two dollar dresses are something of a luxury item.
Christiana's arrival is a But it's a precarious enterprise, because many of her customers insist on being granted credit. Cristiana 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 condition. You have to be a good person.
It's monsoon season in Ghana and when these fierce rains come, the unwanted clothing washes into the city's open sewers and chokes its waterways. You know we are in the tropics, so we have very high precipitation in the form of rainfall. So any heavy downfall of rain will gather all these uncollected waste into the storm drains, which are not covered in any way, and then it gets into the ocean. It means all these layers of textile waste that are stockpiling at the ocean bed.
And that is what will choke the aquatic life in. This is like dug into the ground so when we've done cleanups here you can dig like 15 feet and still find tangles of clothing. Liz Ricketts has spent the past decade documenting the impact of clothing waste on people. Ghana.
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 fishermen's boats and wraps around their motors. The textiles which wash back on shore become so tangled in the sand they're almost impossible to dig out. The tangled masses of clothing, we call them tentacles.
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, they're very long. You know, they can be eight feet to 30 feet and sometimes three feet wide. These tentacles have their origins at Cantomanto Market.
Emmanuel, hello, hey, Linton Besser ABC. Wow, I'm Emmanuel. Nice to meet you.
Thank you. Emmanuel Ajab is another importer. We are going to take...
Take this bear. This one. Yeah.
This one is from Australia. We want to see what is inside. And it's a lady's summer jacket. He's one of the few to import used clothing from Australia.
Here I am going to open. We'll short them into groups. Until they open their bales, importers have no idea whether they contain trash or treasure.
It's nice, cool. So this one is going like this, top quality. OK. Here we can weld this one.
So is that going to be rubbish? Yeah, this is rubbish. And this one too. We call it second.
Second, OK. You can't wear it. This one is going to rubbish.
And also, look, it's got a stain here. And it's no good. It's no good.
It's no good. 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? It's dirty. From here all of this. It's sweat.
You should not put it in the bed. It's like an insult. It's an insult? It is an insult. In Europe and UK and Australia, America, they think Africa here, we are not like a woman being.
Sorry to say, to use this, because what they are giving to us is It's like, even if somebody knock your door and you want help, you cannot just give in, picking something from your dustbin and give to the person. So in this case, it's like they are doing this to us. This bail cost Emmanuel $92. Throw it away too.
These ones are the ones you can sell. After sorting the whole bale, he can see he's going to make a significant loss on these Australian clothes. Five, six, seven. Seven pieces in the bale.
And how many altogether in a bale? This one, there are 180 to 200 pieces in the bale. 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.
This massive, carefully engineered landfill was meant to be the solution to Accra's waste crisis. It should have provided enough capacity for 15 years, but once it started accepting clothing waste from Cantamanto Market, it was filled to overflowing within just five. Now the city's only alternative is a growing network of informal, unregulated dumps. 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 Fadima, the city's biggest slum. 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 fetid shadow over these neighbourhoods for generations to 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 waste 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 overproducing. 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? At least three weeks ago. Much of the unwanted clothing is simply burned.
It's not unusual for Akraz sky to blacken with smoke for days at a time. But for many who live in old Fadama, including Aisha Idrisu, the flow of second-hand clothing into Ghana has been a lifeline. Aisha lives in this small windowless room with four other women and all their worldly belongings.
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 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.