‘Tag Ur It’: The Fashion Brands Behind Ghana’s Textile Waste Crisis

While the figure has been contested by certain trade groups, Ricketts estimates that roughly 40 percent of the 15 million T-shirts, tops, pants and dresses that enter Kantamanto’s ecosystem from the United States, Europe and Australia every week exits as trash that’s unfit to be resold. The Or Foundation has expanded its efforts to divert what is known colloquially as obroni wawu—or “dead white man’s clothes”—to a controlled dump site so it doesn’t wind up sailing off in Accra’s ditches, drains and rivers into the sea, where it’s churned up by the waves and then regurgitated along the coast. Garments are also burned in informal bonfires that can cloak the sky in smoke for days. So far the organization has shifted 125 truckfuls, even though there’s always more where that came from.

“I mean, we can’t collect everything, but now that we’re able to ramp up those efforts to stop more clothing from entering the environment, while also doing our clean-ups and material research, we’re getting a better picture of what the extent of the harm is,” Ricketts said.

Having a method to the madness has helped The Or Foundation identify the labels whose wares have inundated Accra with the most frequency. In its first roundup of the biggest offenders during the year between last June and this past May—derisively dubbed “Tag Ur It”—the nonprofit was able to flag the 11 biggest polluters in order of ubiquity: Marks & Spencer; Next; Adidas; Nike; Gap and Primark, which tied; George by Asda; F&F by Tesco; H&M; Boohoo; and Tu by Sainsbury. Documenting the scope of the problem has given The Or Foundation the receipts it needs to counter disbelieving brands, many of whom have refuted claims that their clothing is literally garbage. This includes H&M, whose then-CEO Helena Helmersson told a Swedish talk show in 2023 that none of its products end up in landfill but are instead recycled or reused “where there is a demand.” Helmersson now chairs the board at Circulose, the textile-to-textile innovator formerly known as Renewcell.

A spokesperson from Asda also questioned if Rickett’s team found tags with its brand. The person, in an involved back-and-forth, said that neither a journalist nor The Or Foundation had provided evidence that its label—and not, say, George at Walmart, which involves a different supply chain—was showing up, until the organization sent over a photograph and video. (The Or Foundation snaps every tag it finds.) In the end, Asda supplied a statement that said it has “a number” of recycling schemes available to its customers, including clothing banks in more than 400 locations, at take-back boxes at all click-and-collect locations and through its grocery home shopping scheme, helping “minimize the risk of these being discarded in landfill.”

H&M said that it has an “ongoing dialogue with” The Or Foundation and values its work and perspective on the industry. A representative said that it acknowledges the “complexity and industry challenges of used textile flows that are currently linear” and will continue to improve its strategy for end-of-life textiles, which is a challenge that goes beyond the retailer and “needs to be resolved at the industry level.”

Boohoo declined to comment but provided information about its donation program with the British Heart Foundation, partnership with the resale platform Thrift+ and work with Yellow Octopus and Robert’s Recycling. Adidas said that it ensures that waste is “disposed of properly” throughout the company and is collaborating with partners such as the Infinited Fiber Company to pursue textile-to-textile recycling, such as with the recently concluded New Cotton Project, which resulted in capsule collection comprising at least 60 percent recycled cotton clothing and 40 percent organic cotton in 2022. Primark said it was unable to respond “at this time” while the other brands didn’t answer emails seeking comment.

The silence and side-stepping didn’t come as a surprise to Ricketts. Many are the same companies that have equivocated over “Speak Volumes,” a year-old campaign by The Or Foundation to coax fashion’s biggest names to publicly declare their production quantities. Of the 11 tagged brands, only Adidas is what the organization’s #StopWasteColonialism website calls “Committed, Loud & Proud” with a stated 328 million units of apparel in 2023, down from 482 million the year before. The Or Foundation can’t take credit for this, however; the sportswear giant’s tallying preceded its urging to do so.

Besides H&M, which despite the furor at the time of Helmersson’s remarks, has since engaged “very productively” and is interested in finding solutions to what it acknowledges as its responsibility, Ricketts said, other brands have been more reluctant to change behaviors. Marks & Spencer and Next, Tag Ur It’s No. 1 and No. 2 offenders, respectively, were the only ones that “kind of said no” to participating, she added.

“I don’t believe that any brands can be serious about their circularity commitments if they have not set a cap on new production or set a reduction or a displacement target because, otherwise, you’re pretending that you can have circularity and a linear growth trajectory at the same time when those two things do not make sense to get there,” Ricketts said on why disclosing quantities is so important. “From my perspective, until brands are willing to publicly disclose the production volumes as they stand now, it means that they aren’t really serious about building that infrastructure and the partnerships and the trust that’s necessary to build an entirely new economy.”

That goes for companies, like Zara owner Inditex, that divulge production by weight, as well. There’s no standard conversion rate for garments, which makes the figure difficult to parse. The circular economy is also about individual garments, not their heft, Ricketts said.

“And then from a policy perspective, we believe that EPR fees should be eco-modulated in a way that considers production volumes,” she said, using an acronym for extended producer responsibility, an increasingly popular regulatory instrument that subscribes to the “producer pays” doctrine. “If you’re producing X amount of products per year and you’re inherently oversupplying the market, then waste is built into your business model and therefore it is not circular.”

Despite the controversy that erupted almost immediately when Shein announced a volunteer $50 million EPR-like fund that would benefit The Or Foundation, among others, in 2022, no other marquee name has come forward with a similar proposition to clean up the mess it helped create. Instead, Ricketts said, the top 20 brands are paying into mandatory EPR schemes, like the one in France, that subsidize the exportation of castoffs to the global South rather than supporting the domestic secondhand clothing economy or funneling resources to the people who are receiving the stuff no one knows what to do with. Even as the quantity of clothing continues to skyrocket, its quality is becoming progressively worse. Sometimes garments arrive stained, soiled or with broken or missing hardware.

“So from our perspective, all of these brands that are at the top are going to be paying significantly more money now that EPR is going to be required across the EU and in California, and perhaps soon in New York,” she said. “I hope that they will all be paying much more attention to how their financial resources are being used, and hopefully will want to support the communities that are actually managing this material.”

For Ricketts, this includes taking a more intentional approach to engaging with fashion overall. On Black Friday, The Or Foundation teamed with pre-owned luxury platform Vestiaire Collective to offer upcycled bags, pants, jackets and more using materials gleaned from Kantamanto. The same day, The Or Foundation’s fashion “zombie”—in reality, British artist Jeremy Hutchison camouflaged under a pile of clothing—stalked the Marks & Spencer store on London’s Oxford Street as a “silent, living” demonstration against overproduction, a true picture of which has been difficult to pin down in the absence of production disclosures, though it’s thought to be between 80 billion and 150 billion garments a year.

Since Ghana is the world’s largest importer of used clothing, much of that ends up on the heads of the female porters known as kayayei, “the women who carry the burden,” as they carve their way through Kantamanto’s warren of stalls, where up to 30,000 people ply their trade at any one time. The poorly paid job is neck- and back-breaking—often literally.

Ricketts acknowledges that much of what she does appears to be a Sisyphean task. No matter how much textile pollution The Or Foundation hauls off, more takes its place. The industry needs to “take a pause” because it’s only dumping more and more material into an infrastructure that is ill-equipped to handle it. And therein lies the challenge: Ricketts, and those like her, are up against a decades-long legacy of unregulated overproduction, one that blames consumers for constantly craving what is new and novel rather than the companies spending billions convincing them that a pair of celebrity-endorsed sneakers or a bedazzled miniskirt will solve their problems—at least, for the moment.

“The waste is replenished, right?” she said. “So we have to acknowledge that regardless of how much effort we are putting in, the fact that the brands continue to oversupply the market diminishes all of that effort, and it makes all of the investments, all of the innovation, all of the technology that’s being developed for a circular economy less effective.”