Currently taking place in Berlin Fashion Week instead of. Away from the runways and showrooms, the fashion week in the German capital started with a protest by the environmental organization Greenpeace.
The activists took advantage of the attention focused on Fashion Week and started a large protest in front of the Brandenburg Gate on Monday. This went hand in hand with the publication of new Greenpeace research on second-hand textiles in Ghana.
In October 2023, activists from Greenpeace Africa and Germany on the Katamanto market in Ghana discarded clothing items were collected that would otherwise have ended up in the city’s garbage dumps or been banished. The 20-hectare market in the city of Accra sells mostly used clothing and shoes from other corners of the world – mostly fast fashion from Europe, China and Canada. Anything that cannot be sold ends up in the trash. In 2019, Ghana’s only landfill exploded, and since then the city’s beaches have been flooded with textile waste.
“The retailers complain that instead of usable textiles, there is more and more disposable clothing from the fast fashion industry. More and more often they have to pay more for a bale of textiles than they ultimately earn. Second hand has become a gamble. When opening a bale, a trader revealed that over half of the clothing was not fit for the market in Ghana,” said Viola Wohlgemuth, resource conservation expert at Greenpeace, who was in Ghana for Greenpeace Germany.
Textile waste in front of the Brandenburg Gate
The items of clothing that the activists from the environmental organization collected were shipped to Hamburg in a container and analyzed. For the Fashion Week protest, Greenpeace piled up the textile waste into a three and a half meter high and twelve meter wide mountain in front of the landmark in the heart of Berlin. The mountain of clothes is intended to address the environmental impact of fast fashion and the consequences of used clothing exports draw attention to the disposal of textile waste in countries in the Global South.
In total, Greenpeace activists in Ghana collected around 19,000 items of clothing, around four and a half tons. A randomized sample size of 1,432 kilograms was used for the analysis. “The mass of textiles analyzed still contained 78 kilograms of textile waste, the rest were wearable textiles,” says the research. Infrared analysis showed that a majority of the textile samples contained one or more types of plastic fibers. Of the 608 randomly selected samples, 584 contained fibers such as acrylic, polyester, viscose, elastane and polyamide. This corresponds to a share of 96 percent. Around 87 percent of the samples consisted of plastic fibers in mixed fabrics that are difficult or impossible to recycle.
Since the old clothes that are exported as second-hand clothing to Ghana and other African countries consist of over 96 percent synthetic fibers, they massively increase the plastic waste in these countries. “With the mountains of clothing, the mountains of garbage are growing and the landfills are overloaded,” says the report. “Smoke keeps rising and the cheap clothes are often simply burned – in the open air due to the lack of modern incineration systems that would filter out the resulting toxins.”
With the protest action and research, the environmental organization is calling for a rethink and is addressing a petition for a change in the law to Steffi Lemke, the Federal Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection: “That is why we are calling on Environment Minister Steffi Lemke to support one to implement effective extended producer responsibility for textiles,” says the petition on the Greenpeace website. For the environmental organization, an effective law includes the so-called ‘polluter pays principle’, a ban on the export of textile waste and clothing without synthetic fibers.