When it comes to the global secondhand clothing trade, the flow of material and the space that this material ultimately occupies clearly follows colonial power dynamics with the Global North as the “sender” and the Global South as the “receiver” of secondhand garments. In addition to the domination of land, we see waste colonialism as the systematic erasure of the Global South and of Kantamanto’s self-image, meaning that Kantamanto is only allowed to exist so far as its purpose can be placed within the context of the dominating culture. This is as true today as it was in 1957 when Ghana became an independent nation, after being a British colony.

Under colonial rule, local citizens were required to conform to school, church, and professional dress codes as defined by the British, swapping their local dress for a suit and tie if they wanted to enter certain buildings or to get certain jobs. This created an artificial demand for western style clothing.

At first, access to western clothing was restricted. This changed in the 1950s when the rise of mass produced fashion across the Global North collided to transform clothing from a durable product to a consumable commodity. The secondhand clothing trade was introduced to the Glocal North consumer, marketed as charity, allowing Global North citizens to consume more clothing guilt free because there was now an outlet for their excess stuff.

Between 1960 and today, it became difficult for Ghanaian textile manufacturers and designers to compete with the cheap imports of secondhand goods. The Global North has continued to exert dominance by setting new western fashion trends through media and Ghanaian citizens have subsequently become more dependent on secondhand clothing as a cheap way to subscribe to those trends. Ghana was forced to privatize their textile industry and employment within Ghana’s textile sector declined from a high of 25,000 jobs in 1975 to 5,000 jobs in 2000, the number of large manufacturers declining from sixteen to three. More secondhand clothing began flooding into Ghana because locally made textiles and garments were no longer running at capacity and many of the people who were employed in the local textile industry became secondhand clothing sellers.

If this is all news to you, we are not surprised. Most people living in the Global North have a skewed perception of what life is like in Ghana and across the African continent in part because a legacy of colonialism makes it difficult for people from the Global South to represent themselves and their reality. There are more seamstresses per capita in Ghana than anywhere in the Global North, all busy sewing custom, made-to-measure, clothing. This clashes with the poverty narrative that the Global North has been fed.

The ignorance of the Global North is aided by the fact that the language around clothing donation and recycling is often misleading. Respected charities claim that no garment donated to them will end up in a landfill. Municipal bins have recycling symbols on them and brand-managed take-back programs and clean-out kits claim to be part of a recycling program when much of the clothing that enters these programs will be sold on to the global secondhand market.

From our perspective, waste colonialism is becoming more pronounced. The great acceleration of fast fashion in the 2000’s has only intensified the Global North’s reliance on Kantamanto as an outlet for excess clothing and in turn the lowering quality of fast fashion leaves Kantamanto retailers dependent on a system where they have to sell higher quantities of a cheaper product to stay out of debt, creating a vicious cycle.

Globally Accountable EPR policies are key to breaking this cycle.

The way that the responsibility of waste management is shifted onto the producer can be physical and/or financial. Physical responsibility might look like a producer being required to tangibly take-back, sort and treat their products once consumers are done with them. Financial responsibility is where producers provide the financial resources required to safely and effectively manage the end-of-life of their products. They can provide these funds individually or collectively through a third party called a Producer Responsibility Organization (PRO).

Most EPR Programs are managed by PROs. Oftentimes there is more than one PRO accessible to a company, creating a competitive market, which has both advantages and disadvantages. Refashion, a non-profit, is the sole PRO responsible for administering the French EPR Policy.

The EPR fee, or “eco-contribution”, paid by producers is determined by the PRO but the PRO sets fees according to the budget and goals set by government directives. In the case of Refashion, their budget, methods of implementation and the objectives are determined by the French Ministry of Ecological Transition.

EPR fees have largely been set with the intention of internalizing the cost of safely and effectively managing the end-of-life of products, often with the focus of funding cost-effective and efficient recycling systems. This “management” may include accounting for the cost of collection, sorting, transport and/or recycling as well as the administration of these activities.

Increasingly, EPR fees are being used to incentivize producers to improve the overall environmental performance of their products. This goal is typically pursued by using a bonus / malus system of eco-modulation, a system that rewards (bonus) producers for doing things like increasing the recycled content in their products, utilizing lighter-weight materials, eliminating complex chemistries in favor of monomaterial products and designing for improved durability, repairability and recyclability.

This is great in theory, but if producers do not feel the burden of waste management then there is little incentive to change entrenched systems, especially that of the overproduction causing Waste in the first place. In addition, eco-modulation has proven to work best, within sectors like packaging, when fees are modulated according to diverse, advanced science-driven criteria that takes into account recyclability within different contexts. Given the universal lack of recycling infrastructure for post-consumer textiles, we believe that eco-modulation is meaningless without clear reduction targets.