When Europeans tire of their clothes or even just the same pair of jeans, rather than throwing them in the trash, many donate them to charity or put them in a recycling bin. Assuming now that they will be passed on to people who need them, but what if nobody else wants those clothes people are throwing away? Let us take a look at the secondhand clothes that are harming the environment and what is being done to mitigate the effects.
In Nairobi, Kenya, tons of secondhand clothes come in every month. Some of the shipment enters the country through charitable donations, but not all that arrives is given to the needy. They are sold at a market for cash. Secondhand clothes in Kenya are of good quality, cheaper and more reasonably priced. However, the entry of these clothes is also accused of driving the local textile industry out of business and some advocate for secondhand clothes selling ban.
For now, it seems that the removal of secondhand clothing may affect those on a budget, but ultimately, textile mills will step up to produce not only textiles for the upper middle class, but also affordable textiles. They will also improve in terms of design.
In Kenya, secondhand clothes are called "dead white people's clothes". In Mozambique they are called "clothes of calamity". These are nicknames for the used and unwanted clothes from the West that so often end up in Africa. Kenya imports more than one hundred thousand tons of secondhand clothing each year. Of this, an estimated 35,000 tons are thrown away each year.
About 50% of the clothes that come in are not necessarily the clothes people want to wear. You might find a nice pair of jeans or shorts, but half of the rest are clothes you cannot even wear. What happens next? These clothes end up in the dump. However, in Africa, we don't have recycling capacity yet, so it ends up being thrown everywhere.
In Kibera, one of the largest slums in Africa, where about a million people live, a lot of the imported clothes do not end up in closets but in rivers and wastelands. Rivers are filled with garbage, leaving residents to suffer the consequences of inadequate drainage systems and a lack of waste collection services.
Sources: The New York Times, Voice of America, The Conversation, The African Growth and Opportunity Act
An initiative by
Funding provided by
AmCham sponsors
Disclaimer:
This website was funded by a grant from the United States Department of State. The opinions, findings and conclusions stated herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the United States Department of State.
