By Tanushri Shukla
Earlier this month, we were invited to conduct a session during Catalysing Change Week organized by Catalyst 2030, a global movement of social entrepreneurs and social innovators working towards the SDGs.
In our session entitled “The Global Flows of Textile Waste”, we screened our film “Going to Waste” and discussed it with three social entrepreneurs working on the issue of textile waste in the Global South.
Elizabeth Ricketts, founder of The OR Foundation works with second-hand clothing sellers in Ghana; Wilma Rodrigues, founder of Saahas Zero Waste works with informal waste workers in India; and Ann Runnel, founder of Reverse Resources works with garment manufacturers in Bangladesh. Three very different countries but one shared problem — bearing the burden of solving the Global North and indeed the entire globe’s supply of pre-and post-consumer textile waste through informal and unregulated waste workers.
Our key takeaways from this discussion:
- Data and digitization are two key levers not being utilized enough to document the state of the issue, trace material flows, and enable connecting stakeholders across the supply chain
- It is more critical than ever to combine a business and commercial case for social justice — one without the other will always result in gaps and white spaces that are not being addressed
- The “circular economy” is just a complex-sounding term to describe the interdependency of every single actor in the textile, apparel, and waste management sectors (manufacturers, brands, retailers, NGOs, waste handlers, and indeed customers and everyone else in between) and the challenge, therefore, needs to be addressed in a holistic way
- The textile waste supply chain is an entirely different and separate supply chain that runs alongside the linear supply chain and needs to be seen, addressed, and designed as such
- In Ghana, Kantamanto is the largest second-hand clothing market in West Africa and, perhaps, the world. It receives 15 million garments a week and sells 25 million garments a week, more than any retail platform in the Global North — 40% of this is wasted due to brands intentionally over-producing
- Informal systems like the Kantamanto market in Ghana or the textile recycling industry in India are in fact highly sustainable models that international brands aspire to be like and therefore should be not only imitated but included when designing circular systems.
Watch the entire Catalyst session here:
To know more, please check Circular Apparel Innovation Factory.