What is Waste Colonialism?

Definition

Waste colonialism is when a group of people uses waste and pollution to dominate another group of people in their homeland. The term was first recorded in 1989 at the United Nations Environmental Programme Basel Convention when African nations expressed concern about the dumping of hazardous waste by high GDP countries into low GDP countries.

Waste Colonialism is typically used to describe the domination of land for the use of disposal, also referred to as a “sink” and this is quite visible in the context of Accra’s Kantamanto Market, the largest secondhand market in the world.

Kantamanto Today

1. Kantamanto sees 15 million garments every week and 40% of the average bale leaves Kantamanto as waste, causing a public health crisis and destroying livelihoods and the environment.
2. Girls as young as nine years old perform backbreaking and sometimes fatal work of head-carrying 55kg bales throughout the market, laboring in modern day slavery.
3. The Kantamanto community spends $325M USD on bales every year, $182M of which was paid to the Global North exporters in 2020.
4. The secondhand clothing trade began under colonialism and while 1957 marks the Independence of Ghana, the colonial power dynamics remain with the Global North as the “sender” and the Global South as the “receiver” of secondhand garments.
5. The secondhand clothing trade has decimated Ghana’s textile sector, declining from a high of 25,000 jobs in 1975 to 5,000 jobs in 2000, and taught local citizens that clothing is disposable.
6. Kantamanto market occupies over 20 acres of real estate in the center of Accra on land that was owned by indigenous people before being “re-assigned” by the colonial government, leaving conflicting claims to the property, claims which make it difficult for members of the market to securely occupy the spaces that they pay for or to improve the market. These 20 acres of space are occupied by foreign material that disproportionately benefits the Global North.

These 20 acres of space are occupied by foreign material that disproportionately benefits the Global North.

We estimate that the Kantamanto community spends $325Million USD on bales every year, $182M of which was paid to the Global North exporters in 2020. The average retailer makes little profit because they must use their resources to repair, wash and upcycle the clothing they receive while also paying sanitation fees to help cover the cost of waste management.

Roughly 40% of the average bale leaves Kantamanto as waste.

This material also dominates settlements like Old Fadama and overruns Accra’s coastline.

This waste impacts communities financially, increases the risk of asthma, cholera, malaria and other diseases, changes the relationship that people have with the ecosystem around them,and ultimately this waste is used to displace people, blaming communities closest to the disposal sites for the waste.

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.

Historical Context

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.

Global North vs. Global South

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.