The Global South as a Wasteland for Global North’s Fast Fashion: Ghana in Focus

Fast fashion has transformed the way we buy clothing from an occasional thing to an everyday routine, especially in the Global North, in the last two decades. Thanks to technological innovations, such as online shopping and home delivery, people can now buy inexpensive and low-quality clothing produced in mass quantities and moved to stores to meet the growing consumer demand. The insatiable consumer demand for new clothing has caused production to soar with infiltration of imitation and poor-quality clothing. But the more people buy clothing the faster the rate at which they reject the older ones. These often-poor-quality cast-offs, which are collected under the guise of charity by non-profit organizations, find their way in Global South, where they wind up as waste. Using Ghana as a case study, this paper aimed to systematically review how the fast fashion craze of the Global North is compounding the already distressed waste situation in Global South. The study adopted narrative and analytical approach to investigate previously published literature shortlisted following a thematic and chronological arrangement. While fast fashion may be heralded in Global North as a good business model, the findings of this review indicate that 40% of every bale of secondhand clothing (equivalent to 4 to 6 million pieces of garment per week) that land in Global South are thrown away as wastes, resulting in an environmental injustice situation in which those who are not directly responsible for fast fashion are disproportionately bearing the environmental burden associated with it. The basis upon which reforms, such as a return to slow fashion and other sustainable measures suggested in this study are urgently required.