Americans’ clothing donations often merely export environmental hazards to the Global South.
Every year, millions of Americans drop bags of unwanted clothing into donation bins or hand them to charity thrift stores with a quiet sense of satisfaction. The assumption underlying these actions is reasonable: Someone else will wear what you no longer need, and the planet is a little better off. The reality, however, is different. A significant portion of what Americans donate does not find a second life in a local thrift store. Instead, it gets bundled into compressed bales, loaded onto shipping containers, and exported to countries in the Global South. In the markets of Accra, Ghana, these garments have a name: “obroni w’awu”—“dead white man’s clothes” in the Akan language. The phrase carries more truth than irony. It is born from the idea that a person would have to die to give up so much because the concept of excess on that scale was once simply foreign to Ghanaian society.
The United States exports the most secondhand clothing by value, accounting for nearly 18 percent of global secondhand clothing exports by value and about 700,000 metric tons of used clothing each year. The industry often heralds this as environmental progress because these exports give clothes a second life through a circular economy. But the reality is different. Nearly 4 million metric tons of used clothing are traded globally each year, with much of this clothing winding up in countries that lack the infrastructure, regulatory frameworks, and waste management systems needed to handle it safely.
Nowhere is this more visible than Ghana. Accra’s Kantamanto market, the largest secondhand clothing market in West Africa, receives an estimated 15 million garments every week. Roughly 40 percent of every bale imported into Kantamanto becomes waste, meaning that approximately six million garments per week are immediately discarded. They are not recycled. They are not composted. They are dumped in landfills, burned in open air, washed into stormwater drains, and carried by floodwaters into waterways and out to sea.
The environmental consequences are serious and measurable. Research by the Or Foundation has found microplastic concentrations around Kantamanto market 10 times greater than urban averages in the European Union. Synthetic fibers from discarded fast fashion garments are entering the food chain through aquatic ecosystems. Local fishermen have reported that their nets are entangled with clothing waste and that fish populations are declining in affected waterways. The Accra Metropolitan Assembly spends approximately $500,000 annually on textile waste collection and disposal from Kantamanto alone, with capacity to manage only about 70 percent of the market’s output. A significant volume of textile waste is illegally disposed of in protected wetland areas.
Fast fashion is the engine driving this environmental injustice. Fashion brands such as Shein, Zara, and H&M produce thousands of new styles each week at prices low enough to be treated as disposables, meaning that Americans are buying more clothes than they need. When donated clothing exceeds what local thrift stores can sell, the overflow is exported. Ghana is not receiving the best of American wardrobes. It often receives stained, torn, and unsellable garments mixed with wearable items and shipped in bulk.
The human cost became impossible to ignore in January 2025, when a massive fire destroyed about 80 percent of Kantamanto Market, affecting more than 2,000 business and the livelihoods of tens of thousands of traders. The cause of the fire remains under investigation, but the large volume of tightly packed clothing in a market not built to handle it made the damage far worse. The people of Kantamanto did not produce this crisis. They are absorbing it.
The United States has no federal regulation governing what quality of clothing can be exported as secondhand clothing. Exporters are not required to verify that donated clothing is wearable before shipping it overseas, and there is no accountability mechanism when donated clothing becomes environmental waste abroad. This is a governance gap. California took a step forward in 2024 with the Responsible Textile Recovery Act, which establishes an extended producer responsibility framework requiring fashion brands to fund textile collection and recycling programs. But the law does not address what happens after clothing leaves the country.
Two things need to happen. First, federal regulators should establish minimum quality standards for secondhand clothing exports, similar to the standards that exist for other streams. If secondhand clothing is not wearable, it should be ineligible for export. Exporting worthless clothing to countries with weaker waste management infrastructure is not a waste-eliminating practice. It is waste transfer. Second, extended producer responsibility frameworks under development at the state level should explicitly account for the global destination of exported textiles. Brands whose overproduction drives the export of unsellable garments to the Global South should bear some financial responsibility for the environmental remediation costs that their supply chains generate.
Regulation alone will not solve this problem. American consumers have a role to play. Donating clothing is not virtuous if the clothing is unwearable. A better place to start is slow fashion— buying less and buying quality that lasts longer. After all, the fast fashion business model depends on consumers treating clothing as disposable. Every purchase of a $5 garment designed to last three wears is a vote for a system that eventually deposits its waste on a beach in Accra or a landfill in Nairobi. The environmental consequences of American consumption patterns do not end at the donation bin or the recycling bag. They end up somewhere. Right now, that somewhere is overwhelmingly in countries that have done the least to create the problem and have the least capacity to manage it.
Ghana is not a dumping ground. Neither is Bangladesh, Pakistan, Kenya, or any of the other Global South countries absorbing the overflow of the Global North’s fast fashion habit. The United States leads the world in secondhand clothing exports. It should also lead in ensuring that what it exports is actually useful and that what is not useful stays home, where the infrastructure and the regulatory frameworks to manage it responsibly actually exist.
