The Illusion of Recycling Fashion – East Africa’s Battle with Clothing Waste

by Elsa Kylén

Every year, the National Football League (NFL) prints various merchandise – shirts, caps, sweatshirts and more – celebrating the Super Bowl winner. What fans may not realize is that merchandise for both teams is pre-printed before the game, with the losing team’s items never hitting the shelves. To handle the unwanted clothes, the NFL is cooperating with charity organizations that distribute them to countries in the Global South, often in Africa. This seemingly charitable act is a small part of a much larger, problematic system of overproduction and waste that spans the globe. The abundance of unwanted, used clothing is damaging to countries in Africa as the overflow of garbage pollutes the air and water, and releases microplastics ending up in ecosystems and in our bodies.

Africa’s clothing waste problem 

There is a massive market for used clothing in parts of Africa, enough so that many languages have adopted specific words for this type of clothing. In Uganda, up to 81% of garments sold were second-hand clothing in 2015. The clothes are commonly called mitumba, a Swahili word meaning “bundles” . In Lagos, Nigeria, second-hand clothing is called kafa ulaya, “the clothes of the dead whites” . In Zambia these types of clothing are called salaula, a Bemba word meaning “selecting from a pile in the manner of rummaging” .

The clothes are bought from wholesale buyers, who in turn sell to vendors on the local market. The clothes have to be sorted before being sold, as most of the clothes are unsellable. Much of the donated clothes are full of stains or holes, and many Africans view this as a kind of mockery. This view stems from the fact that white people believe Africans will wear anything and be grateful for scraps due to their perceived lower socioeconomic status. As the clothes are of such poor quality, most of them end up in landfills or as waste, sometimes washed away by rainfalls into the sea. Hence, the Global North’s “donations” are to some extent useless. The clothing ends up in garbage across Africa instead of in their own country. This causes an even greater strain on the environment as many of the countries receiving the shipments of used clothing do not have the infrastructure necessary to disperse the garbage in a responsible way. 

Womam shopping for mitumba in Kenya. Nasirumbi, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Environmental impact of clothes in nature

When looking at the environmental impact of the over consumption of clothes, there are two important points. Firstly, most clothes are made with polyester, a fiber partially derived from petroleum, and secondly, polyester clothing shed microplastics which are detrimental to the environment. Polyester is the dominating fiber in the clothing industry, reaching 54% of all produced clothing in 2022, according to Good on You, a leading source for rating fashion and beauty brands and their environmental impact. Being partially made from petroleum, clothing production is contributing to the world’s largest pollutant, oil manufacturing. Some brands pride themselves of using recycled PET plastic (recycled plastic bottles) to produce polyester fibers. However, the plastic used to make clothes are being taken from an already functional circular system. PET plastic bottles that can be recycled again and again, are instead used for clothes that have a high risk of ending up on the shores of Africa. 

One item of polyester clothing can shed up to 4, 500 fibers per gram per wash, according to the Plastic Soup Foundation. Microplastics can easily fit through sewage systems, and therefore most of them end up in the ocean. There, they bind to molecules from other harmful chemicals found in sewage, travel through the food chain, from plankton, to fish and other sea creatures, until they ultimately come back to us through the food we consume. For example, shellfish lovers in Belgium had 11, 000 microplastics in their bodies after regularly eating mussels for only one year’s time, according to an article in National Geographic in 2023. 

The scientific world is divided regarding the health consequences to humans having microplastics in our bodies. Most studies, including a 2021 study by the American Chemical Society, a 2022 study published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials, and numerous studies at the Dutch National Organization for Health Research and Development, show no clear evidence that plastic has a direct negative effect on health. Some health issues, like infertility, lung diseases, asthma and cancer, can be linked to microplastics but cannot be generalized to the population. Other studies, promoted by the Plastic Soup Foundation and the Plastic Health Council, show that microplastics can speed up the spreading of cancer. Despite the divide on whether microplastics can be linked to negative health effects, most scientists still determine that having microplastic in our blood and embedded in the fibers of our lungs, pose serious health risks. 2, 400 chemicals found in the 10, 000 chemicals used in plastic are shown to be potentially harmful to humans.

How Fast Fashion fuels the global flow of unwanted clothing 

The overflow of unwanted clothing in Africa illustrates a world driven by excess. The true problem lies in the unsustainable consumption patterns in the Global North, where relentless demand for new fashion fuels this destructive cycle. Fashion and trends have always existed, as they serve both practical and cultural purposes; however, with social media and micro trends, we consume new clothing faster than ever before. Social pressure dictates our consumption behavior, deeming still wearable clothing outdated. This craving for newness puts an enormous strain on the environment as clothes are purchased to only be worn a few times.

As a consequence of these trends, up to 70 percent of the clothes in our wardrobes are not being used regularly, or even at all. The British charity organization Oxfam has had slogans applying to this excess of clothes by using slogans like “Save lives. Declutter yours” . The “decluttering” of past trends could be seen following Barbiecore summer in 2023 as many second-hand shops displayed the pink aesthetic already in the fall of the same year. While some clothes are of course re-sold, contributing to a circular system, many clothes from micro trends risk being shipped to Africa. 

But how come the clothes reaching Africa are of such bad quality if the Global North rarely wears them? The answer is simply that the quality is bad to begin with. Historically, clothing was expensive, and most people only had a few garments that they used. The quality of clothes rapidly decreased with the rise of fast fashion, a term that was first coined in the 1990s. Products are intentionally designed with short lifespans, creating a vicious circular system of replacing bad quality clothing with new, bad quality clothing. The focus of the manufacturers is not that an item is good quality and can be worn multiple times, but instead to produce it as fast as possible to keep up with the current micro trends, so that consumers can swap out their closet as often as possible. The disposed clothing then finds its way across the globe to Africa where it pollutes the air, destroys ecosystems and local economies. 

The NFL’s unused Super Bowl merchandise is merely a small-scale representation of the broader issue led by fast fashion: producing more than is needed is somehow justified when the offloading of the excess is portrayed as charity. However, dumping the excess into vulnerable regions does not solve the problem. The fast fashion industry and bad quality clothing drives the cycle of overproduction and overconsumption. The Global North’s clothing consumption is built on a belief that we aren’t responsible for what happens after we have discarded our unwanted clothing.