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Microfibres that clothes shed into the environment are a global problem, but communities in the Global South, who live with a disproportionate amount of the world’s clothing waste, may also be living with a disproportionate share of its microfibre pollution.
That’s the hypothesis that The Or Foundation, a non-profit based in Accra, Ghana, is working with researchers to test. They are collecting and evaluating local air and water samples to determine the extent of microfibre pollution in the region — and what communities can do about it if levels do prove to be high.
“There are very few sites where there are millions of garments piled up on the side of the river in the way that they are here in Kantamanto or in Kenya, for instance, or in other places in the Global South — and those are the places that have not traditionally had the resources to do this work,” says Branson Skinner, co-founder of The Or Foundation. “In order to fill this research gap, at the core of our mission we are working to make this research available locally and to be guided by the local context.”
Using funds from a series of private donations and grants as well as support from both the Biomimicry Institute and from Shein, the Chinese ultra fast fashion retailer that last June pledged $15 million over three years as part of an ‘EPR Fund Agreement’, The Or Foundation has spent the last year expanding its focus to understand the specific environmental and health impacts of the clothing waste it has been drawing attention to since its founding. The visual impact of these clothes is obvious, The Or says, but there may be more profound impacts on people’s health and local ecosystems that are much less visible.
Since last August, the organisation has been collecting weekly water samples from two locations, a beach site and at Korle Lagoon, and processing them to measure the level of microfibres present in the water. Plastic microfibres, the tiny fragments shed by synthetic fabrics when clothes get washed and over time as they wear down, are thought to be one of the biggest sources of plastic in the oceans, with textiles estimated to be responsible for between 16 and 35 per cent of ocean microplastic pollution, according to the European Environment Agency.
The aim of this new research is to “quantify the environmental pollution caused by the dumping of secondhand clothing into Ghana”, the organisation says. Final results are still a ways off, but so far the research seems to support the hypothesis that microfibre pollution in and around Accra is quite high, says Joe Ayesu, ecological research manager at The Or Foundation, who is overseeing the project.
It only makes sense from a scientific perspective, says Lisa Erdle, director of science and innovation at the 5 Gyres Institute, based on what we know about how clothes break down and release of microfibres. “Textiles shed microfibres, and once they’re in the environment, they’re nearly impossible to clean up,” she says.
As the body of research on microfibre pollution has grown — it’s still a new area of study, relatively speaking, in the scientific world — so have the number and gravity of concerns that experts have about its effects. Marine organisms ingest microplastics, with detrimental effects on feeding behaviour, reproductive health and other outcomes; microfibres become a vehicle for spreading other pollutants already present in the water, from heavy metals to “forever” chemicals; and the tiny plastic fragments accumulate in the human body, with more questions than answers about what that does to our health.
The fashion industry, consistently implicated as a key source of the microfibre problem, has started to respond. Brands including Adidas, H&M, Bestseller, Gap and Uniqlo parent Fast Retailing have signed onto The Microfibre Consortium’s 2030 Commitment, for instance, and organisations such as the Ellen MacArthur Foundation have integrated the issue into their industry-wide sustainability efforts. Some brands, most prominently Patagonia, have also been active in supporting dedicated research on microfibres and funding the development of strategies for mitigating their release.
However, these efforts pale in comparison to the scope of the problem — and true solutions, ones that solve the problem rather than reduce its impacts or shift them elsewhere, remain elusive. Policymakers in some countries, and most recently in California, have moved to require new washing machines to be manufactured with microfibre filters. It’s a prevention strategy that is seen as positive and necessary, but it only addresses one aspect of the problem — the escape of microfibres from home washing machines — and does not mitigate the fact that so much of the world’s clothing is made with fabrics that break down, some sooner and some later, into potentially harmful substances. Nor does it address the flow of clothes — intact, before they break down — into markets including Ghana, where the issue is not the lack of filters on washing machines but the lack of space or capacity, let alone the interest or desire, to deal with the quantity of clothes that get sent their way.
Ripple effects
The Or’s hypothesis is that microfibre pollution is not only elevated in Ghana — and other areas where garment waste is accumulating heavily — but is also causing a series of ripple effects.
Microfibres have been shown to attach to harmful chemicals, heavy metals and other pollutants that are also in the water — if they are present in elevated levels in Ghana, that could mean the pollutants they attract are also ingested at elevated levels by people, through their drinking water, as well as by plants and animals — many of which are also subsequently eaten by people.
In a campaign called the Agbetsi Living Water Swim that The Or Foundation launched in early March, a swimming and research expedition team are navigating 450km of the Volta River to “document and report upon the condition of the water bodies in Ghana as a consequence of textile overproduction and pollution”. Athlete, entrepreneur and board member for The Or Foundation Yvette Tetteh swims several hours per day, and the research boat is collecting hundreds of water and air samples along the journey for analysing at multiple labs, including on the boat and in Accra.
Along with the water sampling and microfibre counting, the team has been monitoring the beaches of Accra on a weekly basis to document the quantity of garments and “textile tentacles” — tangled webs of clothing that mix with the sand or clump into ropes in the ocean — found as well as brand tags identified; conducting microbial analysis of water bodies to determine what microbes are breaking down textile pollutants and what microbes may present health risks; analysing air samples for microfibre pollution; testing for heavy metals and other compounds in the water; and documenting weather conditions to understand how the weather impacts the movement of textiles and microfibres.
The Or Foundation has also set another goal for the expedition — to make Korle Lagoon, said to be “one of the most polluted water bodies on earth”, swimmable again within five years.
Speaking by phone at the end of one of her swimming days last week, Tetteh explains that they haven’t seen as much clothing waste in the first part of the journey as they expect to see toward the end because they began in a remote region to the north and will end in greater Accra, where textile waste is everywhere. So, while they’re also expecting to see levels of microfibre pollution increase as they travel south, one goal of the research is to understand if and to what extent it’s a problem in the rest of the country as well. “If there is a problem of microfibre pollution, we’ll be able to see it,” she says. “There may be a much larger issue in different parts of the country that we don’t know about. If there isn’t, that’s actually great. But, if there is, perhaps we can start paying attention to it.”
An assessment trip they did last year produced some ominous signs, she says. “On an island in the middle of Lake Volta, we were finding abandoned T-shirts and whatever else. There is a movement of clothing up and down and around the country. We have an idea that it’s coming from Accra because it’s not made-in-Ghana clothing. It’s clothing with brand names from the Global North,” says Tetteh. “Part of what we’re doing is to demonstrate that this is the direction water bodies will go in if we do not mitigate certain consumption practices.”
There’s a metaphorical component to the expedition as well. Large, monumental challenges can seem impossible, but if you break them down into manageable steps, the challenge can become not only more feasible, explains Tetteh, but also less scary.
The research will continue for at least another year, along with other cleanup and remediation work. The guiding principle behind all of it, say Skinner and co-founder Liz Ricketts, is that it is driven by local communities, in both the planning and the implementation.
“If you’re closest to the problem, you’re making noise about it, you're finding out viable things that we can do. For us, the research is informing remediation strategy,” says Skinner. “I’ve seen people so excited about taking ownership in laying the pathway toward action. If not them, then who?”
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