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It’s the collaboration the fashion industry didn’t know it needed.
Forged in the heat of not one but two cataclysmic fires, seven days and 7,600 miles apart, the partnership between The Or Foundation in Ghana and Suay Sew Shop in Los Angeles seeks to address what the organizations describe as the “disaster after the disasters”: the inundation of castoff clothing from well-meaning donors that so overwhelmed California’s aid centers that they spilled into the streets, and the destruction of critical infrastructure in Accra’s Kantamanto Market that has backed up a major pipeline for the global North’s unwanted garments, leaving them with few other places to go.
While Liz Ricketts, executive director of The Or Foundation and Lindsay Rose Medoff, CEO of Suay, have known each other for years—“pre-Covid,” Ricketts offered—their extended distance and busy schedules made it challenging for their teams to physically connect. When the fires happened, throwing into the sharpest of relief their shared reality of too much textile waste and not enough outlets to manage it responsibly, they realized this had to get together. And quickly.
On Sunday, the two organizations came together in Suay’s downtown Los Angeles retail shop and production facility to announce “100,000 Bags for Climate Change,” complete with an installation of the snarled clothing “tentacles” that have become an indelible part of Accra’s coastlines. The initiative is both a way to tackle 120,000 pounds of so-called “disaster relief” clothing that Medoff and her crew have picked up over the past three months and a call to action to fund what she and Ricketts say must be a “systems change” in textile recirculation based on community-centered solutions. The climate change part is self-evident: Fashion overproduction is part of the reason rising temperatures are powering extreme weather events that increase the risk of wildfires.
“Most people were surprised to see the tentacles in person, realizing that fast fashion’s harm isn’t just what’s visible it’s also what’s invisible: the chemicals, harmful dyes, polyester and the long-term damage to our bodies,” said Nutifafa Mensah, peer education lead at The Or Foundation, who flew to Los Angeles for the event. “I hope people now see that this isn’t just Ghana’s problem. Fast fashion is a global health hazard that affects all of us before it even reaches Kantamanto. No one is isolated from it.”
Money remains tight for The Or Foundation, which has distributed $1.5 million in emergency relief to the nearly 10,000 vendors who saw their livelihoods burned to ashes at the start of the new year. But it’s still struggling to raise cash to rebuild Kantamanto with essential fire safety measures while continuing to fund programs involving textile waste diversion, skills training and financial education, beach monitoring and cleanups and chiropractic services for the female head porters known as kayayei.
So far, only Vestiaire Collective, Debrand, Puma and eBay along with a collective of Belgian brands that include Bel & Bo, Claes Retail Group, e5 Fashion, Noterman Fashion, Pluto, Torfs and Xandre, have contributed, in stark contrast to the outpouring of generosity—many times over the $5 million Ricketts estimates will resurrect the marketplace—from the likes of Nike, Gap Inc., the Walt Disney Co. and Target for restoring burned-out neighborhoods in the Altadena, Pacific Palisades and Pasadena areas.
That’s where Suay hopes to come in. Sponsoring a 20-pound bag for its “Suay It Forward” textile-recycling platform costs $20; 100,000 of these bags would help it raise $2 million, split evenly between Suay and The Or Foundation to wrestle with the problem of textile overflow on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The two organizations will also be collaborating to create a “Textiles aren’t Trash” capsule collection, pieced together from the donation surplus that Suay has absorbed, as well as conducting clothing “sort-a-thons,” where they’ll invite members of the community to tally which brands are showing up most often in Los Angeles’ clothing waste, similar to the “Tag Ur It” audits that The Or Foundation has been conducting in Ghana.
“It’s important for organizations like Suay in L.A. to show solidarity with Kantamanto because the two communities may be thousands of miles apart geographically but the systemic monster that is overproduction and overconsumption we fight against knows no bounds,” said Sammy Oteng, senior community engagement manager at The Or Foundation. “This is why Suay has hundreds of thousands of pounds of clothes nobody wants sitting in storage, and on the other hand, the Kantamanto community continue to fall deeper in debt working to recirculate the global North’s excess while Accra beaches are being taken over by clothing tentacles.”
For Medoff, watching Los Angeles relate to clothing in the wake of the fires has been an education in and of itself.
“It was interesting to see the conversation continue to develop from, ‘We need a bunch of textiles’ to ‘These textiles aren’t right; there’s too much’ or ‘They’re not good enough,’” she said. “And this is the conversation that is happening daily in Ghana and other places where they’re getting bombarded by textile waste.”
For months, Suay’s phone was ringing off its hook. There’s an intrinsic impulse for people to empty their closets when disaster strikes, even though it might be more prudent—and expedient, human labor-wise—to fork out cash.
“People were calling us with, like, semi-trucks: ‘I’m coming from Texas, I’m coming from Reno, I have a truck full of clothes to drop off,’” Medoff said. “And so you see humanity like rising to the occasion and feeling overwhelmed by wanting to help, but also we have no organized disaster relief when it comes to clothing. And it is a disaster, in terms of clothing and textile waste, which is what Liz and her team deals with on a daily basis.”
With the passing of California’s extended producer responsibility bill for textiles, there’s a shot at doing things differently, Ricketts said. But that will also depend on whether the Golden State follows the French model of “essentially subsidizing sorting for export” or if it’s going to build the infrastructure necessary to ensure that organizations like Suay have the support to recirculate textiles locally.
“So hopefully this partnership then provides a model, a case study, that we can speak to to say, ‘This is why money should be going to repair,’” she said. “Money should be going to upcycling. Money should be going to taking clothing that we know has very low value and turning it into something of higher value. Otherwise, it’s always going to be a mass amount of low-value products and the only outlet is going to be to export it. You can’t just be putting money into sorting; you have to be putting money into added-value services here in California and elsewhere. And it’s not going to happen overnight.”
