Kantamanto Market
Located on the south coast of Ghana, sitting atop the Atlantic Ocean’s glimmering Gulf of Guinea, lies the bustling city of Accra. Accra, the capital and largest city of Ghana, is home to over 280,000 people, vibrant bazaars, and destination beaches.
Accra is also home to Kantamanto Market – one of the largest second-hand clothing markets in the world.
Thousands of stalls line Kantamanto Market’s aisles, and reportedly over 30,000 people rely on the market as a source of income. According to CNN, over 15 million garments arrive at Kantamanto every week. Primarily, these items come from a collection of countries in the northern hemisphere that generate a disproportionate amount of the world’s waste. The top five countries shipping secondhand clothing abroad – the United States, China, the United Kingdom, South Korea, and Germany – are responsible for half of all global exports.
When people in the Global North give their clothes to charity organizations such as Goodwill, only around 20% are sold in-store. The rest are sold to for-profit clothing aggregators, which package the clothes in bales for export. Ghana, and specifically Kantamanto Market, is one of the major recipients of these clothes in Africa, importing around 4% of the world’s used garments. Given the journey these garments have taken to reach their country, locals refer to them as obroni wawu, which translates to “dead white man’s clothes”.
Vendors at Kantamanto Market buy bales of clothing from these for-profit aggregators without seeing what’s inside them. This renders quality inspection impossible. Many vendors report receiving stained, tattered, or otherwise unsellable clothing. Some also receive items other than what they paid for – socks in bags of pants, underwear thrown in with bales labeled “women’s blouses.”
Due in part to the deceptive or lazy practices of for-profit second-hand clothing aggregators, approximately 40% of garments leave Kantamanto Market as waste. That’s around 6 million garments each week piling up in the streets of Accra.
As we’ve discussed before, when piles of unused garments are left to decompose on their own, they pose massive public health and environmental concerns. Decomposing textiles release toxic chemicals, dyes, microplastics, and finishing agents used in the manufacturing process, which can seep into soil and groundwater and contaminate the surrounding ecosystem. Kantamanto is no exception to this: The massive scale of textile waste has contributed to the environmental deterioration of the Korle Lagoon in Accra – one of the most polluted bodies of water in the world.
With the growing spectre of textile waste hanging over Ghana, activists are working to face these issues head on. The Or Foundation, a non-profit that works at the intersection of environmental activism and fashion development, has teamed up with local activists in Accra to come up with creative means of giving new life to wasted garments.
Kennie MacCarthy, Product Development Coordinator at the Or Foundation, has been instrumental in this effort. She’s leading a team in Accra to buy otherwise unsellable clothes from vendors and upcycle them into mops, lamp shades, and other products that can extend the life cycle of the clothing. Kennie and the Or Foundation keep their production methodology for these products simple and publicly available in the hopes that they’ll inspire other groups to start their own upcycling initiatives.
That’s part of why Kennie says Kantamanto Market, a place where she’s been shopping her whole life, still gives her hope. “Kantamanto gives me hope because, when I walk here now, I don’t just see the people who sell clothes, and I don’t just come here to buy clothes: I see the creativity in Kantamanto.”
Kennie and the Or Foundation are doing incredible work, and we couldn’t agree more with Kennie’s message: Finding creativity and hope in challenging situations is what we’re all about here at Doo Dah Apparel.
We’re wishing you all a happy holiday season, and here’s to finding creativity and hope in the new year!
Alec Matulka
Doo Dah Apparel LLC
