The Kantamanto market in Ghana's capital, Accra, is a hub for used Western clothing in West Africa. Every day, traders rush through piles of clothes in search of the best deal. However, there are often more rags than riches.

Deliveries from the West have recently become increasingly focused on so-called fast fashion items. These clothes usually wear out in a matter of weeks. The "goods that are coming now are really affecting our business," a trader said, emphasizing that such low-cost items cannot be resold in the local market.

Environmental catastrophe in the making

These secondhand clothes coming from industrialized countries have mostly now become an environmental hazard in Ghana and elsewhere.

According to the OR Foundation, a non-profit organization based in the United States, approximately 15 million individual items of used clothing arrive in Ghana each week, with 40 percent being discarded due to poor quality. With no use for them, discarded clothing items end up in landfills before making their way into the ocean.

Environmental activists reported that this is a major disaster in the making; organizations such as the Ghana Water and Sanitation Journalists Network (GWJN) are working to raise awareness about this underreported issue.

"Because it is secondhand clothing, some of them wear out very quickly, and then they get thrown all over the place. You get to (the) refuse dump, and you find a lot of them dumped over there," Justice Adoboe, the national coordinator of the organization, said.

"You go even near water bodies, you realize that as rainfalls and erosion happen, (they carry) a lot of these second-hand clothing wastes towards our water bodies," Adoboe added, highlighting that because some of the items include toxic dyes, "those who drink from these bodies (of water) downstream might not be drinking just water but chemicals."

Furthermore, discarded clothing washes up on the country's beaches after being flushed into the sea.

For UN Goodwill Ambassador Roberta Annan, this is a disaster in the making for marine life: "You can't take it out. You have to dig. It's buried. It's stuck. Some of these clothes are polyester and, I would say, synthetic fabrics that also go into the waterway and choke the fish and marine life in there."