What happens to clothing when it is thrown away?

This screenshot from an edition of the KBS program “Environment Special,” which aired on July 1, shows cattle feeding on discarded clothes in Accra, Ghana. Courtesy of KBS

By Yoon Ja-young

When we throw away clothes that we don't need into the clothing donation bin, we believe we are helping someone in need. Those clothes, however, are more likely to end up contaminating the land and water of developing countries across the ocean, a documentary TV program showed.

According to KBS's “Environment Special” that aired on July 1, 100 billion pieces of clothing are produced each year worldwide. Among them, 33 percent are thrown away in the very same year that they are produced.

The documentary shocked viewers by showing a mountain of used clothes in Accra, the capital of Ghana. Fifteen million pieces of used clothing are imported each week into this African country, which has a population of 30 million. Some of them are traded at a used goods market, but the rest are simply dumped, piling up to make a mountain and blocking rivers.

In an interview with the Hankook Ilbo, sister paper of The Korea Times, Kim Ga-ram, who produced this documentary, said that she got curious about where all those clothes go while she was decluttering her home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

She said that she was surprised to find out that most of the clothes are exported. Only 5 percent of the clothes collected are consumed within Korea, and the rest are sent to developing countries including Ghana. Korea is the world's fifth-largest used clothes exporter following the United States, Britain, Germany and China, despite ranking 28th in terms of its total population.

Kim points out that people often think Northern European countries are clean because the people there are more environmentally conscious. The inconvenient fact, however, is that rich countries are mostly cleaner because they have moved not only their factories but also much of their waste to developing nations in order to avoid pollution, she said.

The program shows that overproduction and overconsumption are the fundamental causes of the thrown-away clothes. It also criticizes the fashion industry for promoting “eco-friendly fashion,” inducing consumers to believe that T-shirts made from plastic bottles are “sustainable,” when they are not doing any good for the Earth, according to Kim ― they are just doing something less bad. The documentary shows that, to produce one white cotton T-shirt, 2,700 liters of water are consumed. That is equivalent to the amount a human drinks over three years.

The documentary warned viewers that the clothes we throw away return to us as microplastics, since more than half of these clothes are made with polyester, which comes from plastic, just like plastic bottles. It emphasizes that discarded clothes cause more environmental problems than plastic bottles, many of which are recycled.