FINALLY, YOU CAN BREATHE

More space to be filled with newer, better items. Never mind that top from last season, or those shoes that have the separated sole. Donating has nothing to do with giving to someone else, and everything to do with giving more to yourself.

Here’s what happens; half of the items that you donate are shipped overseas. Most commonly they go to Europe and Africa with the purpose of the items being “reused” and sold at the markets. Our clothes are given to the vendors in bales, or “Mitumba”, the Kiswahili term for bundles. In Nairobi, the small urban capital of Kenya, out-skirted by desert and dust and small mud huts, there has been increasing disappointment when the vendors receive Mitumba bales full of broken straps, worn out garments with holes, grease stains, cigarette burns, and any signs of your past life. Half of the contents that are found in the bales are unusable. These items add on to the suffocating growth of our guilty pleasures, swallowing their environment whole.

Nairobi lacks the means to dispose of our disposables, making our once-loved pieces an inescapable nightmare.

Most nights, people are setting open fires of burning shoes that came in the bales to remove the waste, but this does nothing more than create polluted air for the community to breathe. Nairobi River, a vast and beautiful body of water flowing through the city of Kenya, has been invaded by this waste to the extent of overflow. Those jeans you once decided to let go of after they would no longer squeeze around your thighs are left on the banks of the river, being trudged over by locals and drained of their blue color.

The Dandora dumpsite, also referred to as “textile mountain” is the biggest landfill in East Africa. Two thousand tons of waste is dumped there each day and about twenty–two thousand U.S tons are dumped there per year. Children have to walk through this dumpsite on their way to school. Their pathways are outlined with mountains of waste towering over those who walk by. However, it does not stop at textile waste. At the Dandora dumpsite you’ll find all types of waste, from food to chemicals. Oftentimes, the children who take this path will stop and rummage through the mountain to look for “valuables”. Residents who live near the site are prone to respiratory illness because of the fires set to burn the waste. Dandora is an overwhelming problem that has been wrongfully left to the people of Nairobi.