Trashion, the stealth export of waste plastic clothes to Kenya – Wealthy countries’ fashion addiction is impacting the Global South through the used clothes trade
Over 900 million used clothing items were exported to Kenya in 2021. Among these, 458 million were textile waste and up to 307 million synthetic-based clothing items. These estimates are from the report Trashion, the stealth export of waste plastic clothes to Kenya, published in February 2023, which highlights the scale and impact of the exports of low-grade, synthetic used clothing from the Global North to Kenya.
Clean Up Kenya – the investigation
The London, England-based, Changing Markets Foundation, carried out the research for this report. The non-profit investigative cooperative Wildlight and the Kenyan non-profit environmental organisation Clean Up Kenya performed the fieldwork.
Said fieldwork occurred in Kenya’s capital city, Nairobi, and the south-eastern Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa, critical hubs in the used clothing trade.
The investigation’s goals were to establish what happens to the used clothes exported from Europe to Kenya, how much gets injected into the upcycling and recycling sectors, and how much ends up in the waste stream and the environment.
The afterlife of the Global North’s used clothing
Fast fashion has changed how people see and interact with fashion, fueling unsustainable production and consumption patterns. According to the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, between 2000 and 2014, the number of clothing items acquired pro capita rose by around sixty percent, and clothing production doubled, with clothing prices rising at a slower pace than other consumer goods.
The affordability and overproduction of clothes have led to a textile waste issue. When this waste is not taken to a landfill, dumped, or incinerated, it enters the global second-hand clothing trade.
Through it, the Global North offloads the issue of waste clothing abroad by shipping it to the Global South, with seventy-point-five percent of the resold garments getting shipped to nations other than that of collection.
The total value of used clothes exports from Europe to Kenya
According to the report, the European Union and the United Kingdom exported 5,019,451 tons of used textiles in 2019 and 2020. Of these, twenty-seven-point-nine gets shipped to countries in the African continent. The used clothes trade is a lucrative business for the companies involved. The total value of used clothes exports from Europe to Kenya amounted to almost twenty-five million Euros in 2021.
Most second-hand clothing imported to Kenya comes through Mombasa’s freight port, with numerous containers shipped directly to the capital. The containers are opened in godowns, and the bales are sold to and opened by the traders in warehouses near larger mitumba markets. These traders cannot assess the quality of the bales they buy before purchasing and can’t ask for a refund.
Fifty percent of the clothing in the bales is unsellable
From the interviews with traders conducted during the fieldwork for the report, it has emerged that between twenty and fifty percent of the clothing in the bales is unsellable due to its unsuitability to the local climate or its damaged or soiled state. Fagia sellers try to sell this lower-grade used clothing, but most remain unsold and get burned for fuel, dumped, or turned into rags.
«We went to the Ground Zero of the fast fashion world to unmask an ugly truth – that the trade of used clothing from Europe is, to a large and growing extent, a trade in hidden waste. This is known as waste colonialism and it is supposed to be illegal. A large proportion of clothing donated to charity by well-meaning people ends up this way. Why? Because the backbone of the fast fashion industry is plastic, and plastic clothing is essentially junk. Countries like Kenya are fast fashion’s escape valve. Traders buy bundled clothing blind and understandably dump the growing percentage that turns out to be useless. In truth, our addiction to fast fashion is saddling poorer countries like Kenya with polluted soil, air and water». In a statement, said the founder and patron of Clean Up Kenya, Betterman Simidi Musasia.
What does textile waste have to do with plastic waste? – the ubiquitousness of polyester
On the surface, textile waste does not constitute a typology of plastic waste. The association becomes clear once one looks at the composition of the clothes produced and tossed in recent years.
According to the 2022 edition of the Preferred Fiber & Materials Market Report created by the Texan non-profit organization Textile Exchange, between 2000 and 2021, the global production of fiber grew from fifty-eight million tonnes in a year to 113 million tonnes.
Polyester, an ethylene-based fossil-fuel-derived material, is the most common fiber on the market, making up fifty-four percent of the 2021 global total fiber production.
While estimates of the size of synthetic textile’s contribution to the phenomenon of microplastics vary, with estimations going from about thirty-five percent (Boucher, Friot, 2017) to around sixteen percent (UNEP, 2018), synthetic fibers are understood to be a chief source of microplastics.
Despite the environmental impact of synthetic textiles, polyester production volume rose from 2020 to 2021, increasing from fifty-seven million tonnes to sixty-one million tonnes.
The limitations of the Basel Convention and the EU rules on plastic waste shipments
The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal is a treaty whose goal is to restrict the movement of hazardous waste between nations, in particular from wealthier to poorer countries.
This international treaty adopted by the Conference of Plenipotentiaries in Basel, Switzerland, on 22 March 1989, covers a variety of wastes, from clinical wastes to wastes from glues production, formulation, and use.
In 2019, the Conference of the Parties to the Basel Convention amended the convention to add plastic waste to the typologies of waste under its scope. The convention doesn’t cover plastic fibers waste, nor do the EU rules on importing and exporting plastic waste.
The environmental impact of the used-clothing trade in Kenya
Kenya’s used clothing industry is vast, with about five hundred plus importers active in the East African country, according to the 2021 customs data of European imports. Still, the nation cannot absorb such an amount of textile waste, which impacts the local environment and people.
The team that conducted the fieldwork for the report “Trashion, the stealth export of waste plastic clothes to Kenya” witnessed the burning for fuel of lower-grade used clothing and has reported that a sizable part of the used clothes that reach Kenya ends up in dumpsites and landfills and that synthetic clothing constitutes a substantial part of this textile waste.
The Nairobi River, flowing through the capital city, passes by the Gikomba Market, the largest in Nairobi. This closeness has meant pollution for this river, whose banks in this area have been transformed by the presence of textile waste. In addition, the microplastics from these used synthetic clothing could be bringing further pollution to the river.
Which European countries are exporting these used textiles to Kenya?
According to the report, ninety-five percent of the used clothes exports from Europe to Kenya come from Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom, Hungary, Italy, Belgium, Lithuania, Estonia, France, and Ireland.
With a share of forty-one-point-twenty-seven percent, Germany is the leading European exporter of used clothing to Kenya, followed by Poland and the United Kingdom.
Findings shared in the report highlight how not all used clothes exported from the UK and EU could be coming to Kenya through direct shipping. Pakistan, one of the chief importers of second-hand clothing from the European continent, could function as a transit hub.
Which solutions does the report suggest?
The report spotlighted plastic taxes and Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) fees, eco-design criteria, living wages all across the supply chain, sorting processes that ensure that no textile waste and plastic waste reaches the importing countries, and the involvement of the communities in the countries of destination in the used clothes trade as steps to reform the export of second-hand clothing.
«Unless the fashion industry is changed, what we have seen in Kenya and around the world will be just the beginning. The solution is not to shut down the used clothing trade, but to reform it. We can’t recycle our way out of this problem. Instead, this hedonistic industry needs boundaries and rules. As such, we welcome the vision proposed by the EU. This should be comprehensive and include strict recycling and reuse targets, as well as plastic taxes to shift fashion towards more high quality, sustainable fabrics. Recycling companies can not be allowed to hide behind their empty promises and should be banned from exporting junk clothing». Said George Harding-Rolls, Campaign Manager at the Changing Markets Foundation, in a statement.
No policy brief on synthetic textiles
The UN Environment Africa Office has released a statement following Clean Up Kenya’s request to issue one as to whether the UK and the EU breached the Basel Convention. The agency stated that it has no policy brief on synthetic textiles and has not carried out specific research on textile plastic waste.
«We thank the agency for providing this statement and further encourage UN Environment to come up with a policy brief on synthetic textile waste and invest more in research on this problem and further advice governments appropriately on the same. This is urgent given there are ongoing negotiations for a legally binding global treaty for plastics. The discussions on synthetic textiles waste which is really the end of the runway for fossil fashion must not be missed». Said Betterman Simidi Musasia in a statement following the agency’s one.
Clean Up Kenya
National project founded by Betterman Simidi Musasia in 2015 which advocates for sustainable public sanitation.
