
“Waste colonialism is when a group of people uses waste and pollution to dominate another group of people in their homeland,” The Or Foundation said. The waste not only overruns Accra’s coastlines, creating tangled masses up to 30 meters long that locals call “tentacles,” but it also impacts communities financially by increasing the risk of asthma, cholera, malaria and other diseases. Ultimately, it said, the waste is used to displace people.
“‘Development’ initiatives often blame the communities closest to the disposal sites for the waste and use the pollution generated by the global North to bulldoze the homes of some of the…most vulnerable people…to ‘develop’ the land, often for the benefit of foreign people and foreign companies,” it said.
The Or Foundation said that “globally accountable” extended producer responsibility (EPR) schemes are urgently needed, with a fee shared by the communities most affected by the “outsourcing” of waste. France, the only country to establish such a program for textiles, it noted, falls short because none of the money collected flows to the countries that deal with the waste. The nonprofit made an EPR-like arrangement, somewhat controversially, with Shein last year, to deliver reparations and uncover solutions. Policymakers, industry leaders and producer responsibility organizations alike must now employ a similar, if not even more robust, mechanism to shell out for the damage that the fashion production system has wreaked on poorer nations, it said.
“Eco-modulated” fees starting at 50 cents per newly produced garment should be the floor rate for EPR programs, The OR Foundation said. If a product is designed with no safe and effective end-of-life management in mind, the cost should go up to at least $2.50 to “financially shift companies and their customers away from such products and in order to pay for the socio-ecological cost of their waste management.”
The European Union is considering a bloc-wide EPR scheme as part of its Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles. Last week, California introduced a bill to create a “first of its kind” EPR program that would require producers that manufacture or sell textiles, including apparel, in the state to fund and implement an end-to-end system to “optimize” their repair or recycling.Harding-Rolls from the Changing Markets Foundation said they’re not asking for the secondhand clothing trade to be banned. “Kenya treats clothing [in a] much more circular than the way that we treat clothing in the global North,” he said. “Clothing is resized, it’s repaired, it’s cleaned and then when there’s no more use for that, it’s turned into rags.
”The fact that there’s such a preponderance of waste, however, means that the “status quo cannot continue,” Harding-Rolls said. Regulation, such as that suggested by the EU’s Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles, could help. This could include rolling out an EPR program and instituting a tax on virgin plastic in the short term and addressing premature obsolescence—specifically the rapid-fire rate at which clothes become “out of fashion”—in the long.
There’s a need to address overproduction and overconsumption, too, said Emily Macintosh, policy officer for textiles at the European Environmental Bureau, a network of environmental citizens’ organizations across Europe. Speaking at the briefing, she said that legislators, in their quest to make products more “sustainable,” risk ignoring the volume of products being pumped out every year.
“It’s not the need to replace poor-quality products that’s driving growing demand,” she said. “It’s the availability of so much product at cheap prices.”