Textile Exchange: Patagonia, Or Foundation Ghana on the Push for Circularity
The fashion industry claims to be on a mission to promote a circular economy, or one where garments and materials are kept in use longer—perhaps by changing hands through resale, or being upcycled or recycled into new products.
But are these well-intentioned plans having their desired effect? Or are circularity schemes just creating more diverse streams for brands to hide their waste?
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During the opening panel for Textile Exchange in Pasadena this week, experts from the Or Foundation Ghana and Patagonia spoke to the fact that overproduction is still alive and well in the textile and apparel sector. What’s more, the astronomically high volume of fashion discards are having adverse effects on communities across the globe, well beyond their “end markets.”
Or Foundation co-founder and executive director Liz Ricketts said the Accra-based non-profit has been working with the secondhand sales economy in Ghana to find solutions for the waves of waste that threaten to suffocate local industry.
Ricketts described the foundation’s work with Kantamanto Market, the largest secondhand clothing market in the world. “Before describing the situation and what we’re experiencing there, it’s important to also set the context of where the crisis starts, which is here in the global North and in the United States,” she said.
“We know that the industry is overproducing. We produce more than we can consume, we consume more than we could use, and we have waste as a result of that,” she explained. “We don’t know how many garments are being produced every year. The numbers are between 80 billion and 150 billion, which is a pretty embarrassing data gap on production volumes—but we know that it’s too much, and ultimately there needs to be an outlet for that product, and that outlet has become either the landfill and incinerator or the global secondhand state.”
What the average consumer probably doesn’t know is that when they donate clothes, drop them a take-back bin or mail them to an organization in a prepaid bag or envelope, only between 10 percent and 20 percent of that volume will be deemed re-sellable locally. The rest of it will enter the global “rag trade,” and will be exported to places like Ghana, Ricketts said.
Even though the clothing has been deemed value-less by Western resellers, it doesn’t come cheap to Ghanaian retailers and microenterprises. The standard price for a 120-pound bale of mystery clothing is about $200—and what’s inside can’t be assessed until the transaction has been made.
Resellers in Ghana are now facing a crisis due to the devolving quality of the products they’re receiving. “First selection” apparel—which is in good shape and ready to be merchandised—is in shorter and shorter supply, currently making up less than 20 percent of the average bale, while fast fashion refuse and clothes that need extensive repairs make up the remainder of the volume.
“What’s happened over the last 10 years is that, whereas previously, retailers would achieve a profit off of selling just the first selection alone, and then use that money to reinvest in rehabilitating the lower quality items, she no longer has that profit to reinvest,” Ricketts said. At some point, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. “If her cost of operations is higher than the value of the product that’s sitting in her stall, she has to let it go as waste.”
Kantamanto takes in about 15 million items a week, and about 40 percent of the average bale leaves the market not on the back of a new consumer, but as waste to be incinerated in one of the burn piles scattered around Accra or swept into open gutters where it floats out to sea.
The growing volume of apparel waste on coastlines and in the ocean has imperiled public health, as well as the area’s marine life and the industries that depend on it. “It increases the risk of cholera and malaria when you have this level of waste, turtles can no longer lay their eggs on across beaches because they can’t dig through the tentacles of the waste,” Ricketts said. “Fishermen no longer have fish to fish, and when they’re out, sometimes their nets get caught on these clothing tentacles, which pull down the nets and sometimes causes them to capsize.”
Increasingly, clothing resellers too are losing profits, going into debt and even risking their physical health to continue in the resale business. Female head porters, who carry these massive bales of products on their heads, are literally bearing the burden of the industry’s insistence on making too much junk, Ricketts said, noting that “This amount of weight can literally be crushing.”
“This is a form of labor that should not be necessary, but it is because everyone is being squeezed along this value chain, because we are not making clothing with enough embedded value,” she added. “If a consumer in America doesn’t think that their clothing is worth repairing a button on, then how is that garment going to subsidize the collection, the sorting, the resale…the upcycling and then maybe the recycling?”
“We are trying to build an entire new circular economy, or an entire new second half of a value chain with clothing that is cheaper than a cup of coffee, and it’s just not going to work,” Ricketts said. “And ultimately, it’s communities like Kantamanto that face the impact and carry the burden of that.”
“The reality of what’s going on on the planet, on behalf of us as an apparel company and everybody in between, is truly sobering,” Matthew Dwyer, global head of product footprint at Patagonia, said.
Even an outdoor company known within the industry as one of the stalwarts of sustainability is not moving fast enough to adopt circular practices, replace bad with good, or address its issues with waste, he admitted.
Dwyer recalled Patagonia’s first recycled polyester fleece, released to the public two decades ago. Made from green plastic bottles, the product retained the hue of its feedstock, he said. “It was a really great place to start as far as proving that you can add value to waste and turn it into a more valuable good,” he said. “But we have a habit of doing things like that and then taking our sweet time to follow up.”
When Dwyer joined the company’s materials development team 11 years ago, Patagonia hadn’t yet completed a fiber measurement assessment to reveal exactly how much of its polyester usage came from recycled sources. When it did, “we realized that only 20 or so percent of our polyester usage was recycled,” despite years of touting recycled content.
“That was one moment where we say, gosh, we thought we were doing better than this,” Dwyer said. But it served as the impetus for the development of Patagonia’s first set of sustainability goals. The company resolved to accelerate the adoption of preferred materials and make a play for 100 percent by 2025, to scale its Fair Trade program, to promote living wages across its supply chain and to address issues with chemistry.
“It’s our fall ‘24 sales season, and getting into 2025, 97 percent of our materials, by volume, by cost, however you want to slice it, are a preferred material with some level of certification,” he said.
But a single brand hitting targets shouldn’t be taken as a triumph over the industry’s waste problem, he said. “Along the way, we learned that this work is hard…Problems will require complicated solutions. They’re not going to be sound bites. They’re not going to happen quickly. They will take all of your time and energy to do,” he added.
And still—“fossil fuels are being burned on our behalf in far off places that are backyards for the people who work there,” Dwyer said. “We share a supply chain with just about every other apparel company in this room listening or elsewhere out there…we have the same waste profile as many of these folks, our product line is not yet circular.”
Patagonia doesn’t yet have all the answers, and nor do its contemporaries and competitors in the space. But the only way out of the conundrum is collaboration, he believes, and an agreement to push, together, for better.
“I can give you a list…of all the different things that we don’t quite have figured out yet, and that’s the reason that I’m excited to talk to all of you,” he told the audience. “Collective action is the answer.”
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