Business
What Fast Fashion Costs the World By Ryan Lenora Brown Some version of this scene plays out daily in dozens of countries across Africa. In Ghana, imported secondhand clothes are called obroni wawu, dead white man’s clothes. In Malawi, they are kaunjika — literally “clothes sold in a heap.” In Mozambique, they are known as calamidade, calamity, for their historical association with disaster relief aid. If you live in the West, chances are at some Bales of secondhand clothing await distribution at a warehouse in Senegal. point you have stuffed your used clothes into a garbage bag and hauled THE BALES ARRIVE by the truckload at the them off to a Goodwill or the Salvation Army. market in Johannesburg at dawn, squat white Maybe you stood over your clothes and asked bricks weighing upwards of 600 pounds, each one them pointedly if they brought you joy, à la Marie as big and unwieldy as a dishwasher. Inside are Kondo. Maybe two years of pandemic living made thousands of pieces of secondhand clothing that owning anything but sweatpants feel superfluous. have been pressed and shrink-wrapped into cubes Either way, if you’re like me, donating your used by textile recyclers in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. clothing was probably the end of the story. For most Every morning, the dozens of traders who work of my life, I assumed that the clothes I gave to thrift a stretch of three downtown blocks known as stores were sold at those thrift stores, and that I KwaDunusa — a Zulu word that translates was simply a benevolent donor — giving my more or less to “the place of bending over and low-rise bootcut jeans a second life, and helping a sticking your backside out” — slice the thick charity raise funds in the process. plastic coverings from these bales and spread In fact, what happens to clothing after it’s their wrinkled contents into double-bed-sized bins. donated is a deeply complicated, dizzyingly Depending on the item and its quality, they pick global story about the unseen consequences a price from 3 rand (about 20 cents) to 60 rand of fast fashion, the opacity of charity, and ($4). And then, as morning light slants through the effects on the people who end up on the the surrounding art deco high-rises, they begin receiving end of our well-meaning donations. shouting. And now, many of those people are calling for “Cheapcheapcheapcheap!” they call to passing Western companies and their customers to change commuters, plunging their hands into piles of their ways, both by consuming less and by taking polyester and Lycra and flipping the contents more responsibility for what they do. Given that the of their bins again and again to catch the eye of fashion industry is responsible for one-tenth of the possible customers. world’s carbon emissions, according to the U.N.
24
March-April 2022
DAWN
www.africabusinessassociation.org
