EarthGives

On a beach in West Africa the fishermen now haul in more clothes than fish, and the clothes have your charity shop's label on them. The beach is in Accra, the capital of Ghana. A mile inland is Kantamanto, the biggest second-hand clothes market on earth. Every week about 15 million garments arrive there in bales, from Britain, Canada, China and America. Most of what you drop in a clothing bank ends up on its way to a place like this. The locals have a name for the trade. Obroni Wawu. It means dead white man's clothes, because nobody could imagine a living person giving away so much. The traders open the bales and sort them. 40 years ago nearly everything sold. Now about 40% of every bale is rubbish before it leaves the market, because the garments were built to be worn 5 times. That is 6 million pieces of clothing a week with nowhere to go. The city collects what it can. The rest goes into the gutters, the lagoon and the sea. Then it comes back. The waves roll the clothes together into ropes of knotted polyester as long as a boat, and the beach monitors who count them have a word for those too. Tentacles. They logged 2,344 of them along 4 miles of shore in one year. Fishermen's nets come up full of trousers. Propellers foul on them. Men have had their canoes capsized by somebody's old leggings. A fishing community cannot fish, because of what the rest of the world was too virtuous to throw in its own bin. When those clothes were wool and cotton they would have rotted on that beach in a season. Instead they are becoming the coastline.