Piles of second-hand clothes for sale at a roadside stall in Nairobi. The United Nations Development Program found that some African countries have seen as much as an 80-per-cent reduction in textile production over the past 30 years.Sayyid Abdul Azim/The Associated Press
David Cassels is a Toronto-based magazine fact-checker and freelance writer.
I was in the second grade when my parents decided to uproot their lives in Southern Ontario and move to a small town in northern Uganda. The last thing we expected, on one of our very first weekends living there, was a reminder of our Canadian lives, walking past us on a small dirt road: a young man, wearing a University of Guelph Gryphons hockey jersey.
My mom was amazed. That team practised in the same building in which she had worked for years. What were the odds of finding this shirt about 11,000 kilometres from Guelph? She asked to take a photo with the man, who was relatively uninterested in her glee, and then excitedly sent the image back to her friends in Canada.
But what was initially a thrill quickly became a routine sighting: A Tim Hortons employee uniform; a Toronto Maple Leafs jersey; an “I Heart Vancouver” T-shirt; half a dozen sweaters from different summer camps in Muskoka, Ont. As it turns out, there was a lot of Canadian memorabilia in East Africa – and I learned that it was because more than 70 per cent of all apparel sold in the region is second-hand and imported from outside the continent.
This time of year, as many Canadians take stock of how their shiny gifts fit in with their old standbys, the impulse to donate – to make one man’s trash another man’s treasure – is high. Clothing is among the most common gifts given every holiday season, but our homes are only so big, and we need to find space for our new sweaters and socks somewhere. The popular ethos of “new year, new me” also drives a postholiday desire for reinvention – and in the spirit of the season, why not donate these items to others, in an attempt to recycle?
Unfortunately, this decluttering and discarding has consequences. A recent study out of Seneca College estimated that Ontarians generate 500-million kilograms of textile waste every year – a number that’s even more astounding when you consider that less than 5 per cent of clothing sold in Canada is manufactured domestically. And even when you’re donating to big second-hand retailers such as Savers Value Village, those items aren’t guaranteed to find a second home, because the inflow of clothing is too high. And so the items that don’t sell, as the Toronto Star reported in 2019, get sold in bulk to middlemen, who then ship them to second-hand markets in places such as Uganda, where a man might buy a Gryphons jersey for pennies on the dollar.
These kinds of donations are often viewed as a type of philanthropy. There is an assumed need for clothing in Africa; therefore, the logic goes, it must be good to give our clothing, when it goes to the underprivileged who live there. This is the perspective adopted by Savers Value Village, which boasts about selling remaindered items to small business owners across six continents and 34 countries, “allowing them to supply their local communities with gently used, affordable items like clothing, housewares, toys, and shoes.” However, this framing comes with its share of issues, including the fact that the company turns your non-profit action into a profit for the company, reselling donations – albeit at a reduced price – to some of the poorest communities in the world. While a pair of jeans in Kampala’s Owino market may cost Ugandans a fraction of what the pants would have cost here, African consumers are still paying more than the thrift-store corporations ever did – all while Savers Value Village made US$84.7-million in net profit last year.
But African countries are pushing back. For years, a trade bloc consisting of Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda has opposed the imports of used apparel, after a U.S. Agency for International Development report found that the six East African countries imported US$274-million worth of used clothing in 2015, comprising 12.5 per cent of the global market that year. Rwanda went further, enacting a de facto ban through huge tariffs on the importation of used clothing, prompting retaliation from Washington two years later. And this past August, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni enacted a full ban on used clothing imports. While many Western publications picked up on one idiosyncratic part of Mr. Museveni’s statement – “[the clothes] are from dead people,” he said, adding that “when a white person dies, they gather their clothes and send them to Africa” – the bans there and in Rwanda were largely driven by the fact that the used clothing we send away is swamping local economies and gutting domestic textile industries.
Africa as a whole is a massive player in the production of raw textile materials. Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, Tanzania, Cameroon, Sudan and Côte d’Ivoire all rank within the top 20 cotton producers in the world. And yet, the vast majority of this cotton is leaving the continent. African consumers purchase very little clothing produced from locally sourced materials, because they struggle to afford it; climate change has made it more difficult to source the raw materials needed to produce traditional textiles, prompting surging international demand and skyrocketing prices that make local garments less affordable for everyday people. The United Nations Development Programme found that some African countries have seen as much as an 80-per-cent reduction in textile production over the past three decades. Meanwhile, the US$30-billion worth of second-hand clothing being shipped to the continent every year is discouraging foreign investment in local African businesses. Second-hand clothing markets offer too much competition to local manufacturers, gouging the local economy.
The final and rarely discussed part of this equation is the environmental impact of second-hand markets. It is easy to view purchasing donated clothing as an environmentally conscious practice, and in some ways it is: It keeps things out of our landfills, and because the majority of apparel-industry pollution occurs during the production and shipping phases, it is generally more sustainable to purchase second-hand clothing than brand-new garments. However, traditional African fabrics, such as kikoy, kente or Maasai shuka, are among the most sustainably produced textiles anywhere in the world. When Africans manufacture textiles from locally sourced materials, it is definitively more sustainable than when we sell them clothing we’ve shipped across the Atlantic, mostly by cargo ships that use bunker fuel, a cheap, low-grade and high-emission crude-oil derivative.
This is, in short, an example of toxic colonialism: the environmentally unjust practice of dumping contaminated and hazardous materials in poorer countries so that they can dispose of our waste. And while second-hand clothing is not typically considered toxic waste, it really should be. Western companies sell donated clothing for a profit to some of the world’s poorest communities, damaging local textile industries and the environment in the process. What happens to these garments years down the line once the waistbands lose their stretch and holes appear in T-shirts’ seams? While some bits of fabric can be salvaged and repurposed, it is likelier that they will end up in a landfill anyway, just on another continent – but what is likelier still, given the lack of enforceable disposal regulations, is that these clothes will end up in garbage pits in Africa, where they’ll be lit on fire and scorched to oblivion. All that shipping fuel is burned to send the clothes such long distances, just for polyester to be turned to vapour and suffocate the atmosphere elsewhere.
It shouldn’t be so common to see reminders of Canada in Africa. But this year, Canadians should resolve to make our mark in a different way: by being more conscientious of what we buy and where we donate, and providing real support to East African communities through grassroots charities that work to recycle textiles. Nothing will be solved without systemic overhauls, but in the meantime, the greatest gift would be supporting those who are fighting for a cleaner, more prosperous Africa.
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