The unsold clothing washes out to beaches when it rains

See the horrifying place where your old fast fashion clothes go to die

A landfill in Ghana is the final place for our fast fashion purchases

The rise of fast fashion in the United States is supporting an invisible “salvage market” that sees American clothes waste shipped to faraway countries where it fills marketplaces, clogs up beaches, and overwhelms dumps.

There has been a five-fold increase in the amount of clothing Americans buy over the last three decades, but each item is worn only an average of seven times, according to reports. This has resulted in more discarded clothing than ever.

Many Americans donate their used clothing to charities when they are finished with it, under the assumption that it will be reused. But with the increasing number of items being discarded, and the poorer quality of fast fashion, less and less can be resold, and millions of garments are put into bales and shipped abroad every year.

At Ghana’s Kamanto market located in Accra, around 15 million items of used clothing from Western countries arrive every week. The entire population of Ghana is only 30 million.

With a shrinking inventory of quality secondhand clothing and a growing inventory of disposable clothing, Ghanaians are forced into doing exactly what we’re led to believe won’t happen when we donate our undesirables. They travel thousands of miles only to get thrown in the trash, never even glimpsing their promised second life.

What’s more, the disposal systems in Ghana and much of the developing world are less developed than in the United States, which results in more pollution and climate impact than if it had just been thrown out in the developed world, to say nothing of the environmental cost of transporting all that waste.

Trash is as integral to the hubbub of Kantamanto as fashion. For every three garments sold at Kantamanto, two get trashed. Let me pause here a moment. More than half of our clothing that is sent to Accra goes to the landfill.

This turnover has made Kantamanto the most consolidated point of waste pickup in all of Accra, and possibly the whole country. Still, only about 25% of Kantamanto’s total waste is sent to a landfill. Another 15% is picked up by private, informal collectors who may illegally dump it in waterways, bury it on beaches, burn it in open lots, or simply leave it along the side of the road. This unregulated dumping was behind the 2014 cholera outbreak, which killed 243 people.

The director of waste management for the Accra Metropolitan Assembly, Solomon Noi, delivered a message to the U.S.: “Deal with it.” “Do not hide under the guise of donations of secondhand clothing, and then you ship them over to us just to cause problems to us,” he said.

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