Fast Fashion’s Recycling Myth Buries Developing World in Waste

Tangled coils of waterlogged clothes roll like carcasses in the waves along the coast of Ghana, one of the world’s biggest importers of used clothing. The castoffs arriving by the bale are known here as obroni wawu, or dead White people’s clothes, a phrase in the local Twi language that seeks to assign a reason to the inexplicable flood of garments from overseas. Surely their owners wouldn’t choose to throw away so much clothing?

At Chorkor beach, near the capital Accra, layer upon layer of rich-country detritus forms a wall more than 6 feet high, like geological strata ...