Where the Bale Goes

Put a bag of clothes in a donation bank and the most common assumption is that it will be given to somebody who needs it.

What usually happens is that it is sorted, graded, compressed into a bale and sold. Charities and commercial collectors sell textiles by weight, because that is how a bag of mixed clothing becomes money. The bale is exported. Somebody at the far end buys it.

A great deal of it reaches Kantamanto, in central Accra, one of the largest secondhand clothing markets in the world. Tens of thousands of people work there, most of them women, with tailors, menders, dyers and resellers around the stalls. It is not a dump. It is an industry, and for a very large number of people it is where affordable clothes come from.

The Ghanaian term for the trade is *obroni wawu*: dead white man's clothes. The name comes from an early assumption that nobody would give away clothing this good while still alive, which tells you something about what used to arrive in the bales and something about what arrives now.

Here is the mechanism, and the mechanism is the point.

A trader buys a bale without seeing inside it, usually on credit. The bale has been graded by a sorter thousands of miles away who is paid for speed, and the labelling is frequently optimistic. The trader opens it and finds out what they have bought.

Estimates from organisations working with the traders put the unsellable share of a typical bale at around two fifths. Those garments are stained, torn, unsuited to the climate, or simply worn out. The trader has already paid for them. They become waste in a city whose disposal system was never funded to absorb imported textiles, and some of it ends up in drains, on beaches and in open burning.

Now follow the money upstream and notice where the risk sits.

The donor feels generous and incurs no cost at all. The charity converts a bulk commodity into cash before anybody knows the contents. The sorter is paid per tonne for grading quickly, which means grading carefully is a cost to be avoided. The exporter is paid on shipment. The importer is paid on sale of the bale.

Every single participant is paid before the bale is opened. The only person exposed to what is inside is the trader at the end, who has the least capital of anyone in the chain.

That is not a moral failing on anybody's part. It is a structure, and it allocates risk precisely inversely to the ability to bear it.

And it is getting worse for a reason that has nothing to do with Accra. As garments get cheaper and are built from thinner fabric and bonded trims, the share of any donated bale that is still wearable after one owner falls. The unsellable fraction is a downstream reading of upstream quality, which means the number is set in a design meeting in Europe and paid for by a trader in Ghana.

A market fire destroyed a large part of Kantamanto at the start of 2025, which is a reminder that the people absorbing the industry's waste are also absorbing its risk with none of its capital.