Waste Colonialism and Dead White Man’s Clothes with Liz Ricketts

Are you unwittingly contributing to waste colonialism via your wardrobe choices? What happens to our unwanted clothes when we donate them? Overproducing and underusing clothes has far-reaching consequences, as this week's guest Liz Ricketts of The Or Foundation explains.

Each week, around 15 million pieces of secondhand clothing arrive in the Kantamanto second-hand clothing market in Accra, Ghana - and 40% goes to waste.

This is the story of how your old shirt or dress or pants might end up clogging drains in Accra. Or form part of a heavy rope of textiles in the ocean, or lurking under the sand like some dystopian synthetic sea monster. Or smouldering on a waste mountain in an informal dump that’s been on fire months.

It doesn’t have to be this way - maybe your old clothes will get fixed up and sold on to live another life. It’s complicated, as are the solutions.

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