I: The complaint

There’s a truth we all ignore. A kind of collective delusion we agree to call “throwing something away” (as if things simply vanish into a non-place).

But matter has to go somewhere (physics, unlike our laws, is notoriously inflexible).

And for a substantial portion of the world’s discarded clothing, that somewhere is often a specific, sprawling market in Accra called Kantamanto.

This is where the ghost of last season’s global wardrobe comes to rest.

A final, tangled stop for what distant continents have decided they no longer want to see.

Walking through Kantamanto is to witness a system operating on a scale that defies easy description.

It’s a place of breathtaking resilience, sure, but also of a quiet, backbreaking labor that makes the whole engine run (the kind we conveniently forget when we drop a bag off at the charity bin).

Look past the vibrant commerce, and the scene sharpens into something else entirely.

This market is the endpoint of a global supply chain that has morphed (right under our noses) into a disposal chute.

The primary tool here is a bale of clothes, wrapped in the neat legal fiction of “second-hand goods,” and the impact is felt across an entire city.

The real complainants in this case don’t file paperwork.

You see them in the strained posture of the kayayoo, the head porters who carry the weight (literally and figuratively) of this system on their heads.

You see them in the weary eyes of the trader, gambling their day’s income on the contents of a sealed plastic-wrapped cube.

You hear them in the cough of a resident living downwind from the burning piles of unsellable fabric.

They are all bearing witness to a broken premise: that one region’s catharsis should not become another’s existential burden.

The law, for its part, has yet to find a jurisdiction for this irony.

II: The evidence

Let’s follow the money and see where it leads (any Hamilton fans?). It’s a straight line from a charity bin in Europe to a smoldering pile in Accra.

First, the scale: every week, an estimated 15 million garments land here.

That’s the population of Ghana in the 90s, in shirts and trousers. Every week.

This flood is legally classified as “second-hand goods”, a conveniently elastic category that stretches to include the (depending on who you ask) approximated 6 million items (that is 40% mind you) that are trash upon arrival.

We’re not talking about slightly worn t-shirts here, but clothing so degraded by poor manufacturing, stains, or damage that it can’t be sold even in a market as resourceful as Kantamanto (the Or Foundation's field reports make for grim reading on this point).

This is where the legal fiction becomes tangible harm.

The system operates on a gamble, and the trader holds the losing ticket.

They purchase the bale blind, investing capital in what amounts to a plastic-wrapped mystery.

When opened, they find nearly half the contents are worthless.

The loss is immediate and absolute, but don’t dare forget, the waste itself remains.

(And here is the clever, cruel part), the liability simply transfers down the chain to its very last link, the person with no leverage to send it back.

The trader is left holding the literal bag, filled with someone else’s problem that was mislabeled as a product.

The system, in its design, ensures the economic and environmental consequences are borne by those who didn’t create them (the most efficient supply chains, it seems, are the ones for distributing risk to the vulnerable).

III: The mechanism of harm

The failed gamble of the bale resolves itself through a trifecta of brutal physics, each path a testament to a system’s collapse.

Some of the waste becomes new topography. Synthetic hills rising where green land used to be (hyperbole, yes, but the piles are large enough to feel like new terrain).

More of it becomes a problem of hydrology, clogging already overwhelmed gutters burdened by plastic waste and structural neglect.

During rains, streets don’t just flood with water, but with a sodden pulp of fashion, turning neighborhoods into shallow (and sometimes waist deep), polluted rivers.

But the most complete, and damning transformation is by fire. That cute polyester top from a high-street brand?

It’s even plastic!

Patience Ozokwor probably didn’t know it, but she told no lies.

Burning it, along with acrylics, nylon, and other synthetic fibers, doesn’t just create smoke.

It operates as a low-temperature, unregulated chemical incinerator (the kind that would be illegal if it were institutional).

The process releases a documented cocktail of carcinogens and toxicants, volatile organic compounds including benzene and formaldehyde.

Plus, the notoriously persistent poisons known as dioxins, directly into the air of the informal settlements that border these disposal sites.

The right to breathe clean air, a principle so fundamental it feels like it should be a universal, self-executing law, is being negotiated away daily in the smoke from a pile of dead fashion.

This isn’t an accidental byproduct; it is the logical, physical conclusion of a system built on externalising its true costs.

You would think the supply chain ends at the market (egg on your face); it ends in the human lung (a destination not listed on any shipping manifest).

IV: The charge

There is nothing broken about this system. It is working exactly as designed.

The charge is a two-part indictment: Environmental Racism and Waste Colonialism, enabled by deliberate legal failures.

The former describes the disproportionate impact; the latter describes the economic system that makes it possible (two sides of the same soiled coin).

At its heart, this case is about a perversion. Kantamanto was never meant to be a grave; it was a brilliant, homegrown example of a circular economy (a term the Global North now loves to lecture about).

It was a system built on reuse and repair, taking what was genuinely usable and giving it a second life.

But that circularity has been weaponised.

The system is now flooded with materials that are circular in name only (the ultimate greenwashing), effectively turning the marketplace into a designated dumping ground for waste.

The circle has been broken, and we are left with the line’s toxic endpoint.

This is enabled by two key legal fictions:

1. The Fiction of the Product: Under international law (the Basel Convention, the main global treaty governing hazardous waste, specifically), you can’t ship hazardous waste.

But you can ship “second-hand goods.” This classification is the legal magic trick (a loophole you could drive a container ship through).

The moment a bale of trash gets that label, liability vanishes (and the problem becomes that of the Global South).

This is the machinery of waste colonialism, using legal loopholes to treat another nation’s environment as a sink (our sovereignty, it seems, stops at the water’s edge).

2. The Absence of Producer Responsibility: Brands face zero legal obligation for their products’ end-of-life (a stunning case of planned irresponsibility).

There is no robust “Extended Producer Responsibility” (EPR) law holding them accountable for the fallout of their fast-fashion model.

The entire biological cost: the clogged drains, the toxic smoke is offshored.

To us. This is environmental racism, the systemic offloading of risk onto communities that lack the political and economic power to refuse it (the simple kayayoo can’t lobby Brussels, so she will inhale its waste).

The benefits (profit and trendy outfits) are concentrated there.

The consequences, however, are concentrated (well, I’ll let you guess).

That, I tell you, is no coincidence. Rather a fabulous feature (so long as you’re not the one left holding the burning bale).

V: The ruling

This file will not close with a verdict.

There will be no gavel, no dramatic sentencing.

The accused is a system, a set of convenient loopholes and wilful blindness.

But the evidence is undeniable. Every bale that contains unwearable trash is a lie that becomes a physical burden.

Every shipment that passes through customs as “goods” (ironic name right?) is a fiction that becomes our reality.

This case will only conclude when the Extended Producer Responsibility stops being an academic theory and starts chasing brands from the design table to the dumping ground (a pipe dream? Perhaps).

But then again, so was prosecuting a corporation for environmental crimes not long ago.

Until that shift comes, the judgment of history is being recorded in the air and water of this city.

The proof continues to mount, and the world, for what it’s worth, is watching. Many of us have walked past those bales.

We can’t unknow what we’ve seen.

The record will show we saw it coming and that the harm was an allowed outcome.