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Liz Ricketts: I still remember it was 2015 or 2016. I saw this pair of jeans like surfing the waves like spread eagle.
It's the first time Liz Ricketts has seen textile waste on the coast of Ghana since she began visiting the West African country in 2011.
Liz Ricketts: And then you fast forward to today and there are piles of textile waste taller than me.
Tentacles. That's what Liz and others call. The piles of tangled clothes that appear along the shore.
Liz Ricketts: You know, when you put too much clothing in the washing machine and it wraps around itself. So by the time clothing makes its way to the ocean, it wraps around itself like that. And these can be up to 10 meters. Long these clothing tentacles and they eventually sink to the bottom of the sea floor. So it's not only an environmental crisis here, but it is a public health crisis.
Microplastics from synthetic fibers are polluting our waterways, our soil and even finding their way into the food we eat. The reach of our clothing stretches further than we imagine, its tentacles smothering natural habitats. Local fishermen haul in their Nets, not brimming with fish but tangled with tattered textiles. Liz is from the US and was a designer and stylist, but she set up the Or foundation after witnessing the fashion industry's throwaway culture first-hand. One thing the nonprofit does is organize clean ups of a small stretch of beach in Ghana, where they pick up about 20 tons of textile waste each week. About 150 people take part in the colossal effort.
Liz Ricketts: It is not your standard clean up. It is truly an athletic feat.
But they're fighting a losing battle. Each week they go back and tackle new piles of clothing, nearly all of which are shipped in from places like Europe and the US.
Liz Ricketts: This has all happened in less than a decade, and this is the result of the fast fashion business model.
This week on Living Planet, we're taking a deep dive into the fashion industry because making clothes turns out to be a pretty polluting business. Somewhere between 2 and 10% of all greenhouse gases produced comes from getting and processing the fibers we need for our attire. That's more than emissions from all the planes and ships sailing around the world, not to mention the huge water consumption and contamination that comes from making and dying. Textiles. So can we really clean up fashion? Some proposed fixes like buying vintage or second hand may not be as green as they seem, sometimes fueling more consumption instead of less. We'll explore why that happens. The psychology that keeps us buying and how the jeans you donate in the US can end up in a fisherman's net. Off the coast of Ghana.
OK, I'm not gonna lie. I hate shopping. Nothing against new clothes. It's just the whole hassle of navigating crowded stores, endless racks and queuing outside changing rooms. I just haven't got the patience for that anymore. I know that some people enjoy the hunt for new and trendy clothes, but not me. So usually every few years. And I need new clothes. I just buy everything online in one fell swoop and be done with it. It's that time again. I need some new shirts and maybe a pair of trousers. Only this time I'm doing something different. I'm trying second-hand clothes online. OK, so when I enter second-hand clothes online shopping on Google here. Couple of sites that pop up. The first one is Sellpy then there's Odoo – not sure I pronounced that correctly Momos fashion. Vestiaire, Depop Vinted. Yeah, let's click onto vintage. I've heard that before. OK, so here's a sweater for €230. I’ll be giving that a miss.
It turns out second hand is growing two to three times faster than the new apparel market. Bricks and mortar vintage stores are popping up everywhere. You might be familiar with a few in your own city or town, but digital is growing the fastest. In 2024, online transactions made-up 88% of money spent in US resale, which is another word for the pre-loved market.
Neil Saunders: It has been surprising to understand and see how fast the market has grown because really a lot of consumers have adopted second hand as a way of consuming. It's become a really established habit for a lot of people and I think back in 2016 we expected it to be successful. But I don't think we expected it to grow. Quite as strongly as it has done, especially over the past few years.
That's Neil Saunders. He's managing director and retail analyst at Global Data Retail. He's been analyzing the second-hand retail market since 2016 and in 2024 his company found it was worth $227 billion.
Neil Saunders: It's slightly lower than apples product sales, so. It's a, you know, it's a really big number.
And I have to say, it really is a far cry from the kind of second-hand shopping I remember from back in the day when you'd go into a kind of chaotic, musty shop run by a nonprofit like Oxfam. And trawl through massive rails of clothes to find a T-shirt there for a pound or so.
Neil Saunders: Second hand isn't about low income consumers anymore. It isn't about the lowest possible price. It's actually attracting people from across the income spectrum.
And it seems a lot of different factors are driving the sector too.
Neil Saunders: It's now a sector where people go for fun. It's a creative sector. People love going there. Finding unique things, putting them together in their own style, mixing them with. Other products that they've got. And actually, a lot of the younger consumers, Gen Z and Millennials have driven some of these new reasons for shopping.
And my namesake, Neil, says another big reason is shoppers being more conscious of the environmental impact of their clothes. And that's something brands are aware of too. Zara, H&M and The North Face, just to name a few, are now selling second-hand clothes online.
Neil Saunders: And the retailers really wanted to get in on the act. They wanted a piece. Of this growth.
So I took my search over there. OK, so I'm here on Sellpy now and I need a couple of button down shots. OK so. Let's see. OK, now they don't just sell own brand. It's interesting. And I can look for shirts here. Also according to size. It's a nice plain one. It's just €15, OK. That's seems like a bargain. And oh this is interesting. This website also tells me I'll be saving 2.69 kilograms of CO2 if I buy this one this shirt instead of something. According to the website, that's enough to produce 3 kilos of strawberries. The CO2 that is kind of interesting. Very random, but yeah, and it also saves 2250 liters of water. OK, well, just shopping here. Is making me feel great doing my bit for the planet. Some retailers are even offering repair services, which all sounds good because some 10 to 30% of clothes produced are never worn or sold. We are getting better at recycling our garments, but the rates just can't keep up with the sheer amount the fashion sector is pumping out, especially with the rise of fast fashion. Instead of a few autumn winter and spring summer collections each year, new trends are being pumped out weekly. But reselling and repairing what we already have could lower emissions by 16%. We'll be right back after this short message.
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So big brands getting in on the resale action has to be good, right? Well, the problem is that some of these resale platforms are closely linked to the brand's main cash cow or core business, which is new clothing. For example, I can trade in my own stuff at brands like The North Face if it's one of their products. If I do that, I can get in store credit, so $5 for a shirt or $25 for a jacket. But there is a caveat. I can only use that credit to buy new clothes. So that boosts their first-hand business.
Sascha Raithel: In some platforms it's even already integrated, so you don't. You wouldn't spot a difference. The new fashion and the second-hand fashion so that you can buy them on the very same platform and partially even integrate it on the same page.
That's Sascha Raithel, a professor who researches sale mechanisms for the free university in the German capital, Berlin. So, as another example, if I scroll through the offerings on the online platform, Zalando Pre-owned sponsored posts for new shirts and trousers slip into my feed. Let's see. It's going to add this. To the basket the shopping basket.
When DW asked Zalando about this, they said they wanted to create a seamless shopping experience. They also said, and this is a quote, over 40% of pre-owned customer orders combine items with new fashion. Sascha says shoppers scanning pre-loved fashions online might recognize some of the same psychological tools used to drive sales from the first-hand market, like over here on Zalando Pre-owned. See that if I spend more than €30 I get free delivery and returns. Right, that's Zalando renewed. Now. Just hopping over to cell again and here, I can see there's a last chance to buy bar on one side of the screen and yeah, I mean this definitely gives me the sense that I might regret not buying this product.
Sascha Raithel: So that's a general selling technique that applies to any kind of product. And the idea behind these kind of limited offers is to create a kind of urgency. And to make the product more scarce. So in a sense like you're your consumer, you're exposed to these kind of limited offers only today for you, for €4 you have to buy it today. If you don't do it tomorrow. You won't get this good offer.
But these aren't the only techniques aimed at tempting me to continue shopping. There are AI assisted style chats prompting me with questions like how do I put together a capsule wardrobe for all? In fairness, this is probably the kind of help I do. Need some brands like selfie work with influencers you like, the oversized olive cardigan and blue jeans combo the guys wearing in the post? Well, why not check out a bunch of similar items from the site suggested for you? And handily, those influencers sometimes come with discount codes.
Sascha Raithel: So in general these kind of. Uh tools fuel among the consumers the need to buy more. Right. That's part of the business model of these fashion retailers, for example, because if you not shop just one item like AT shirt, like trousers, whatever it is, but the whole style, by definition, you have to buy more because you have to buy the whole style, right? So that everything fits together. And this way you create like. The need among the consumers or I need to buy more to really fit this ideal picture of I'm a stylish person.
We asked the companies about their resale techniques. Selfie got back, saying that they. Vote. Understand the concern that these incentives could mimic patterns of overconsumption. However, the core difference lies in what's being consumed. Each item sold through Sellpy is already in circulation. But does it really matter if I over consume second-hand clothes? It's surely better than buying first-hand? One study by researchers in the Netherlands compared different types of shoppers and their emissions, and it turns out the answer to that is a bit complicated. The researchers took three typical shoppers who have just bought a shirt. Let's call them Billy, Robin and Kim. Billy is an attached consumer, and he wears his shirt 80 times. Robin is an average consumer, so he holds onto his shirt for 40 years. Kim, the fashionable consumer, wears hers 10 times before tossing it and moving on to the next trend. So Kim will need 8 times more shirts than Billy.
Basically, the study found that fashionable second-hand consumers like Kim create more emissions than attached first-hand shoppers like Billy. That's because the environmental cost of making and discarding a shirt stays with it throughout its life cycle, no matter how many owners it has. So a new shirt is better than a quickly discarded second hand one if you hold on to it for a long time and wear it loads. The answer to the “What's better - Second hand or new?” changes slightly for a dress, though, because dresses are heavier and need more material, making them produce more emissions. Dresses also tend to be worn less frequently. So it's better to buy a dress second-hand and give it a longer life.
But wait, there's more. Now we get to the question of whether your second-hand purchase is actually replacing something you would have bought new. This is called the displacement rate and is a measure of how effective circular business models are in replacing the use of new resources with recycled ones. It's kind of hard to know what overall displacement rates are, but one survey by British NGO rap that looked at peer-to-peer platforms such as eBay and Depop found a displacement rate of around 65% on pre-loved purchases in the UK. So out of every five items bought second hand three of them. Are replacing new IT. That's good, but needs to happen on a much larger scale, otherwise we end up increasing consumption overall, says Liz Ricketts from the Or Foundation.
Liz Ricketts: I don't think that consuming secondhand is always conscious. I think that there's a lot of ways to consume anything that's cheap in a very unconscious way. That doesn't necessarily change fundamentally change our behaviors.
So what else would help and what has all this got to do with your jeans ending up in a fisherman's net in Ghana? One of Liz Ricketts favorite places in the world is.
Liz Ricketts: The largest second-hand clothing market in the world, the market is called Kantomanto.
Kantomanto is in Ghana's capital, Accra. The country receives about 15,000,000 pieces of used clothing, largely from the West. Each week, traders and tailors at the huge market sought through bags of the deliveries looking for bargains they then sell at stalls covered with brightly colored parasols.
Liz Ricketts: This is an incredibly creative environment where people for over 50 years have been reselling, repairing, upcycling things, upcycling things at scale like one off very, you know, hip outfits, but also making taking men's shirts and turning them into boxers and exporting them around the region. Really industrial scale stuff.
When the market first started, the story goes that locals couldn't believe anyone would give away so much stuff that was in such good condition and of such high quality. Quality and they assumed the previous owners of said items must have died, so a common term for second-hand apparel in Ghana is obroni wawu or “dead white man's clothes”. But now when the traders sift through bags of old garments to dig out bargains, what they actually find is cheap, fast fashion of such bad quality. That about 40% of the products now end up discarded.
Liz Ricketts: The quality of the clothing is being produced now, especially over the last decade is so low that people can no longer not only can they no longer make a high quality product when they're upcycling it, but they can also no longer sell it for enough value to make their money back. So people are starting to go into debt. And because they're going into debt and they don't have money to repair and upcycle everything, more of the clothing is leaving the market as waste and ending up in places like the beach.
One thing producers can do is actually make clothes that last stuff that doesn't tear, lose its shape or fade after a few washes, because if it doesn't, there's no chance to resell it, remake it, or recycle it. Instead, it ends up burned or on a landfill in the US or Europe. Sometimes in a fisherman's net off the coast of Ghana. The key is moving away from the fast fashion cycle, where clothes are basically disposable from day one. So is second-hand part of the solution. Liz says yes, but only if we don't end up fast fashioning the resale market.
Liz Ricketts: There's no shortage of moving in circulation, so I would still very much like for people to patronize these companies and choose second hand over choosing new and I also do think that we need marketing dollars behind sustainability efforts. So I think it's good if companies are marketing resale and being smart about it using the tools that that we use to market new clothes to market second-hand clothes, I think it's just we also need to couple that with the fundamental reeducation on how clothing is made and get people more involved in that process.
It's all a step in the right direction, but Liz and other experts also want fashion companies to be transparent about how much they are producing in the first place.
Liz Ricketts: So what we really need to see from the brands, if they're serious about resale and upcycling and repair programs, is they need to publish their production volumes and then set displacement targets. So for instance, they could say by 2027 we want to displace 10% of the product that we're currently creating new with. Transactions that represent resale so used clothing instead of new, right?
Otherwise, it's hard to say whether resale is actually stopping retailers from producing more. It's also hard to know how many items of clothing are being produced each year because of that lack of transparency. Some estimates put the figure at 100 billion, which is kind of crazy when you think there are only 8 billion of us on the planet, and that right there is the crux of the problem.
Liz Ricketts: The reality is, is that all of those solutions are being buried under an endless or infinite amount of stuff that is being produced. And so it should be a reminder to us, but also to the industry that we cannot solve this fashion race crisis if we do not get serious about the root cause, which is overproduction, and how many garments are being produced every year.
So, thinking about it and looking at everything in my online shopping basket now – secondhand though it maybe – I might hold onto what's already in my wardrobe for a little bit longer.
And that wraps up this episode of Living Planet. It was put together by Jennifer Collins based on research and interviews conducted by Katharina Schantz. It was edited and presented by me Neil King. Our sound engineer was Gerd Georgii. Thanks for listening.