Fleur Britten’s excellent article highlights the damage done to Ghana’s environment by our supposedly generous dumping on it of our discarded clothing (Where does the UK’s fast fashion end up? I found out on a beach clean in Ghana, 24 September). However, she misses out another form of damage: the undercutting of the indigenous clothing industry.
Ghana can and does make clothes for local sale – cheap by our standards, but less so for the locals. Unless working in a public-facing environment, why should any Ghanaian, say in manual work, pay relatively high prices for new clothes when they can go down to the nearest market or “bend-down boutique” (where secondhand clothes are laid out flat on a vacant piece of land – usually by the side of a road), and get a perfectly serviceable shirt or pair of shorts for a tenth of the price?
I have bought, in a shop, some excellent, locally-made T-shirts that I still use in the summer, and it is possible that a Ghanaian office worker might afford something similar, but the temptation to look for something cheaper, if only for wear at home, must always be there. This damage to the Ghanaian economy – and those of other developing countries – needs to be included in the reckoning.
Tim Gossling
Cambridge
• Having read Fleur Britten’s excellent article about the devastating impact of single-use and throwaway clothing, I’d love to encourage and promote the idea of clothes swaps. These can be easily organised by a community, school, village or any group of friends/colleagues concerned about clothes waste. The concept is ridiculously simple, bringing both a positive and immediate impact. You bring and donate unwanted clothing, and exchange it for another item.
As a zero-waste shop in rural Hampshire, we organise regular clothes swaps for our customers and the community, and they’re becoming increasingly popular. Each event, only three hours long, saves at least 800 pieces of unwanted clothing from landfill. Customers love to come and find new wearable treasure and it’s a creative way to pass on unwanted, preloved clothing. We encourage them to take as many items as they like, allowing people to take only what they need.
It’s easy to organise and a great way for people to engage with the clothing crisis. I recommend it: it is great fun and can become a significant step in dealing with the problem of unwanted clothing, before it ever leaves the UK.
Jess Dugdale
Owner, Lemon & Jinja, Romsey, Hampshire
• I read Fleur Britten’s piece and found myself nodding all the way through. Yes, fast fashion and indulgent overconsumption are scourges of modern times. A couple of years ago, I too visited the second-hand clothes market near Nador in Morocco and was also bowled over by the sheer mass of bales of clothing piled up to the ceilings.
But fashion (and synthetic clothing in general) has one massive achilles heel that we seem to repeatedly forget: the fact that 35% of all ocean microplastic (invisible and toxic) is made up of fluff washed out of garments during regular washing. So the visible mess on the beaches is, unfortunately, only the tip of the iceberg, with the far more insidious problem being the fact that sea organisms are busy ingesting microplastic fluff washed out of both cheap and expensive clothing. Then, of course, those particles find their way through the food chain into our bodies.
So the answer is not to simply stop fast fashion but rather to switch from short-lived synthetic fabric to tougher natural fibres in all clothing.
Alan Mitcham
Cologne, Germany
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