This article is part of our ‘(Re)Made in Ghana’ series, which explores what one of the world’s largest circular fashion ecosystems – Kantamanto Market – can teach us about the future of fashion. Read our series on ‘Made in Italy’ here, ‘Made in India’ here, and ‘Made in the UK’ here.
In some parts of the world, secondhand fashion is booming. Peer-to-peer marketplace Vinted is now the largest retailer in France by sales volume, according to the French Fashion Institute (IFM). Ebay is a regular fixture on the fashion month calendar, generating over 2.3 billion listings in 2024 across 1.3 million active buyers. And The RealReal reported an adjusted EBITDA of $9.3 million for full-year 2024, having become profitable for the first time in the fourth quarter of 2023. In the US, 33% of all clothing and apparel purchases in the past year were secondhand, bringing the market value to an estimated $56 billion, per deal-finding platform Capital One Shopping.
For many who believe in the virtues of a circular fashion system, this is what progress looks like — or is it?
Many of these secondhand platforms say their ultimate aim is to keep clothing in circulation for longer, thus saving it from landfill, either at home or abroad. It’s a noble goal, and one that consumers increasingly resonate with, as global awareness of textile waste grows. On social media, increasingly harrowing images of textile waste motivate sustainability-conscious consumers to shop secondhand: in Ghana’s capital city, Accra, waste clogs the beaches and waterways; in Egypt, the Manshiyat Naser neighborhood is drowning in waste to the extent that it has been nicknamed “Garbage City”; in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the mountain of waste is so big it’s visible from space.
But the secondhand retailers that populate these circular fashion hotspots in the Global South say the resale boom in the Global North has an unintended consequence: all high-quality secondhand clothing is siphoned off earlier, so the unsold pieces that trickle down through charity shops arrive as good as waste, undermining the potential for recirculation and accelerating the waste crisis at an unprecedented rate.
“In blunt terms, the Global South is a dumping ground for the Global North,” says Andrew Rough, chief executive of Scottish circular fashion hub ACS, which handles reverse logistics and recirculation for more than 30 fashion brands, spanning mass market to luxury. Last summer, Rough visited Kantamanto Market in Ghana, one of the world’s largest circular fashion ecosystems, which receives around 15 million items of used clothing from the Global North each week. He saw firsthand the environmental and social devastation caused by secondhand clothing imports.
These trade routes have ferried pre-loved clothing around the world for decades, but the resale boom, coupled with the advent of fast fashion — and now ultra-fast fashion — have pushed countries on both the sending and receiving ends to breaking point. The market has been flooded with high volumes of low-quality clothing, increasing competition for the best-quality secondhand pieces and causing crises at various points in the chain. In fact, so-called textile recycling associations in the Global North — which operate more as collectors, sorters and exporters, as opposed to physically recycling — have been sounding the alarm about the newfound difficulty of gleaning secondhand profits for around 18 months, with several larger players entering administration or bucking under the weight of high-volume, low-value clothing clogging up their warehouses with no clear use.
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The knock-on effect is that secondhand retailers in places like Kantamanto Market are now trapped in cycles of debt, looking to make ends meet while grappling with the environmental and health ramifications of living among textile waste they have no use for. “It makes sense that communities like Kantamanto would experience this crisis first; but now, collectors, sorters and exporters in the Global North are experiencing it,” says Liz Ricketts, co-founder of The Or Foundation, a Ghanaian American non-profit operating in and around Kantamanto Market.
Global solidarity, and a global view of the secondhand clothing trade, is the only way forward, she adds. “It’s frustrating. Why couldn’t they see that Kantamanto was a red flag for a much larger collapse and work with us? We could have advanced so much further by now.”
Sorting without local expertise
Secondhand clothing collected in the Global North tends to be funneled through charities or thrift shops first, but anything that can’t be sold through these channels (which is the majority of donations) is offloaded onto textile recycling companies. These garments tend to be exported based on condition, with the “first selection” or “crème de la crème” sent to eastern Europe and the remainder — controversially considered “exotique” or “Africa grade” — sent to the Global South.
In May 2025, The Or Foundation hosted an event with British outdoor brand Finisterre in London to highlight the injustice and inefficiency of the process. Attendees, myself included, were split into groups and asked to grade secondhand clothing, which The Or Foundation had brought over from Ghana in a “baby bale” designed to represent the genuine 55 kilogram bales exported from the Global North each day.
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We were given four possible categories, each with clear criteria, developed by The Or Foundation over years of working with secondhand retailers. On-trend clothing in a like-new condition and a relevant size for the Ghanaian market would be dubbed “first selection”, if it also had durable seams, no stains or tears, and was made from a preferred material like cotton. Clothing in a relevant style and size with clear signs of wear, but not damaged beyond repair, would be deemed “second selection”. “Third selection” was for heavily worn clothing that required investment (washing, ironing, repairing, dying, resizing or remanufacturing) to be considered sellable, and garments made from materials that weren’t suitable for the local temperature (which regularly tops 32°C). And “fourth selection” (asei) was essentially waste: clothing stained, torn or damaged beyond repair.
Once we sorted the clothing into categories, retailers from Kantamanto Market — who had traveled with The Or Foundation to raise awareness about the textile waste crisis — pointed out the flaws in our clumsy attempts at grading. Almost every item needed to move down at least one category, sometimes two. And where we had taken almost half an hour to pore over our decisions, the retailers were able to assess each item in a matter of seconds. In reality, just 18% of each bale that arrives in Ghana is considered first selection, despite many retailers paying over the odds (up to $700 per bale) to guarantee top quality. The majority is either second selection (30%) or third selection (46%), while 6% is asei, according to The Or Foundation.
These figures have been hotly contested by the sorting, export and import associations trading bales around the world, who say the proportion of waste is lower, but The Or Foundation believes it’s all contextual. It’s not an exact science, but the exact figures are almost beside the point. The demonstration showed the importance of local expertise in sorting and grading secondhand clothing. Had their expertise been deployed from the start, these clothes may never have been shipped to a country that has no use for them, nor the infrastructure to deal with the high quantities considered waste. Yet, this is exactly how the global secondhand clothing industry operates: textiles are sorted in the Global North by people with limited knowledge of what will be sellable or desirable in the Global South countries they are sold to.
“People in Kantamanto Market can only buy what people in the Global North donate or discard. It’s not like retailers can go online and choose what they want to buy based on what their customer will like. They don’t even get to see what’s inside the bale before they buy it,” explains Ricketts, who’s been bringing delegations of retailers to the Global North for years, hoping to foster closer collaboration with sorters and exporters.
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“[Creating more opportunities for global solidarity and collaboration] could open up a new level of conversation, where the retailers from Kantamanto can advise the sorters on what they really want. The sorter can explain how they operate, their working conditions, and why they might sometimes miss a stain or a rip. It would be a more human conversation.”
The fight for first selection
The sorting model was already flawed, but the rise of fast fashion — and the brands tilting more toward fast fashion in terms of quality and business model — has magnified existing challenges, and prompted a global fight for first selection that is quickly coming to a head. “There’s just less high-quality clothing to go around,” says Ricketts. By her estimations, only 10% of the new clothing produced is of high enough quality that secondhand retailers could make a profit from recirculating it. This means good-quality fabrics, preferably natural materials, strong seams, durable construction and design choices that stand the test of time. “With so many secondhand platforms popping up in the Global North, that 10% has to be shared across more parties.”
The amount of good-quality secondhand is quickly diminishing, agrees Dounia Wone, chief impact officer at luxury resale site Vestiaire Collective. Where people used to donate quality clothing to charities, they are now much more likely to try and sell it, even for a very small amount.
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As a result, charities are overloaded with low-value items that cost more to recirculate than what they can be sold for, and denied access to high-quality goods they could actually make money from. Communities like Kantamanto Market feel this even more acutely due to their position at the very end of the linear value chain. “So many of us feel good about ourselves when we donate clothing to charity, but we have no idea that the charity shops can’t cope with our waste,” says Rough. “Actually seeing clothing in Ghana, which had charity shop swing tags and prices on from the UK, was really striking for me. We think we’re doing a good thing, but we’re not.”
It’s hard enough for secondhand platforms in the Global North to make secondhand profitable, Rough continues, thanks to the heavy costs of running online resale businesses. For brands that want to get into the secondhand category, there are similar barriers to entry.
The recirculation service ACS offers varies between brands, but can include anything from cleaning to repairing to remanufacturing. “That comes at a cost,” says Rough. “Our team has to sort through boxes, grade the clothing based on condition, clean and repair each garment, photograph it, store it, pack it and post it. There are lots of steps involved, and it’s all quite manual still.” In general, clothing can be resold for around half its original retail price, explains Rough. Given all the work involved in recirculation, the absolute minimum retail price required to make the unit economics of resale viable would be around £40. But this is “really scraping the barrel”. If ACS wants to turn a decent profit on an item, the retail price should ideally be closer to £100 or more, ruling out the bulk of fast fashion.
Meanwhile, in Kantamanto Market, retailers are expected to operate on much tighter margins, despite offering a similar service. Following the devastating fire that razed most of Kantamanto Market to the ground in January 2025, The Or Foundation completed a census, the results of which will be published soon. One of the early findings, says Ricketts, is that the price of bales has increased since the fire, indicating that most retailers buying bales from the Global North would need to charge at least $3 per item to break even. But increasingly, the percentage of first selection items is so low — even when retailers pay a premium for higher quality bales — that most sellers need to price each first selection item closer to $5 to make up the shortfall. This is a huge stretch in one of Africa’s most expensive cities, where the minimum wage is as low as $2 per day.
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“That obviously presents huge challenges for retailers, and it’s why we’re asking charities and resale platforms in the Global North to disclose their operating cost per garment,” she adds. Ricketts’s hope is that opening up a global conversation around operating costs in the secondhand market will foster solidarity, and show the value that ecosystems like Kantamanto add to secondhand clothing in their bid to recirculate as much as possible. So far, responses have been limited, and those that have disclosed have done so off-record.
What next?
There’s no easy solution to this — as Wone says, the question of redressing global imbalances of power in post-colonial trade routes is “far beyond” the remit of most fashion companies, and it’s not as simple as stopping the flow of secondhand goods, because these ecosystems rely on imports for business.
Some Kantamanto Market sellers say the best solution would be for people in the Global North intent on decluttering to send their low-quality goods straight to local landfill, rather than cascading the problem to the Global South, while donating higher quality goods instead of selling them, so businesses further down the chain have a chance to get first selection. Others suggest that incoming extended producer responsibility (EPR) legislation be amended, so the money collected from producers can be redistributed to the countries actually dealing with fashion’s waste crisis, but this is a long way off.
“It’s going to take significant investment in infrastructure, and finding alternative ways for retailers to sell their product onto recyclers, or finding new markets for upcycled products, for them to be able to make a living,” says Ricketts. “Whatever the solution looks like, we need solidarity between the Global North and the Global South. We need companies in the Global North not to be operating from a place of fear, and instead to accept the realities everyone in this business is facing: high volumes of low-quality clothing.”
