Fast-fashion giant Shein pledges $15m for textile waste workers in Ghana

theguardian.com:

Chinese fashion behemoth Shein might be the organisation least expected to win applause at an international conference on fashion sustainability, but that’s what happened at this week’s global fashion summit in Copenhagen.

The industry’s largest forum for sustainable progress saw the ultra-fast fashion brand praised for making a donation of $15m (£12m) over three years to a charity working at Kantamanto in Accra, the world’s largest secondhand clothing market. Liz Ricketts, director of the Or Foundation, a Ghana- and US-based not-for-profit working with Accra’s textile waste workers, announced the fund, tearfully telling the audience that the workers are doing “backbreaking” work.

“They are economic migrants from north Ghana, and are often women and children, some as young as six. They’re carrying clothing bales on their heads which weigh 55kg, being paid a dollar a trip, and coming home to sleep on concrete floors. “Some carry their babies on their back. Sometimes they fall backwards because of the weight of the bales, and their children are killed [underneath them].” Ricketts said that 15m secondhand garments arrive in Ghana every week, 40% of them waste. “Ghana doesn’t have landfill or incinerators,” she said. “The clothing enters the environment; some of it goes into the oceans – there are millions of garments on the ocean floor, and the currents push the garments on to the beach. “There’s a narrative in sustainable fashion that says: ‘There is no ‘away’’. This is the ‘away’.”

Not everyone was convinced by the gesture. “This was public greenwashing,” said one attendee who asked to remain anonymous but echoed the sentiment of several at the summit who believe reduced production of fast fashion is the answer. “This is too