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

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

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

Gesture announced at Copenhagen sustainability summit earns praise – and some cries of ‘greenwashing’

Fleur Britten
Wed 8 Jun 2022 07.15 BST
Last modified on Wed 8 Jun 2022 07.16 BST

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.

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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.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/jun/08/fast-fashion-giant-shein-pledges-15m-for-textile-waste-workers-in-ghana

[leftieNanner]

1. Solution

Don't buy that crap!

And it truly is crap.

[Jerryatric]

2. It is definitely greenwashing. I just saw a video last night

about how people are finding cries for help on the labels in their clothes that were put there by the people forced to make them. They manufacture over double the amount of clothing as their nearest competitor and they can only do it by figuring out ways of exploiting the workers more than the rest do.