Weaving Voices

Episode 9

Kantamanto Market-- life and livelihood in the throws of fast fashion's waste streams.

[00:00:00] Rebecca Burgess: What happens to our clothing when we donate it to a secondhand market? We often assume our donations end up with someone in our hometown or city. However, this is often not the case. America's clothing leaves our own shores at a rate of approximately 700,000 tons per year. But where does it all go? The vast majority of this clothing is bundled and shipped overseas,

[00:00:27] Rebecca Burgess: including to the Port of Accra, Ghana in Africa, where it is carried by individuals into what has become one of the world's largest secondhand markets known as Kantamanto. However, it's estimated that even the scale of this massive market cannot process what is being deposited on its shores. And due to this beaches are littered with our textile, piles of clothing are burned and mountains of textile stand as monuments of our over consumption.[00:01:00] 

[00:01:07] Rebecca Burgess: This is Weaving Voices, a podcast that stitches textile practice, economic philosophy and climate science into a quilt of understanding, designed to transform our thinking and actions both as citizen and material culture makers and users. I'm Rebecca Burgess, your host of this Whetstone Radio collective series, which aims to explore the nexus of modern day economic design and textile systems.

[00:01:36] Rebecca Burgess: The Or Foundation is an educational nonprofit that works in Ghana, and they've been focused on the establishment of a justice led circular economy in the region. This work, while regional has implications for global supply networks and our own personal clothing consumption habits. Of those who've been dedicating their talent and time to the effort, is fashion designer Sammy [00:02:00] Oteng, who's the foundation's community design lab manager. 

[00:02:05] Sammy Oteng: The governments are so bad that the retailers are not able to sell 40% of them, and most of them is because like they're very bad. Sometimes, it's also an issue of desirability. Cause in the end of the day, even though it's secondhand, it's still fashion.

[00:02:16] Sammy Oteng: And in fashion works with trends, if you like it or not. 

[00:02:20] Rebecca Burgess: The Or Foundation has a, in quotes, no more fast fashion lab. This lab is dedicated to research and design as well as textile waste, recycling and manufacturing that's led by the community itself. It also serves as an office and a community center for local people to gather.

[00:02:40] Rebecca Burgess: The lab is a mere 12 minute walk from the Kantamanto market, which Sammy says may even be the largest secondhand market of its kind in the world. The foundation provides physical space and tools to transform what is on its way to being waste into functional objects. The work is led by the community [00:03:00] members who aim to produce goods that serve their community needs.

[00:03:05] Sammy Oteng: We bought tshirt that was like ultimately going to go into the beaches or in the gutters or just implement some down. We buy them from the retailers and then bring them into the lab and try to see what we can create out of it. So through that, we've been able to come up with things like the fiber boards, s lampshades, tea towels, mops, so many things, because we want to build an incubator project out of the work that we are doing here.

[00:03:35] Sammy Oteng: So pay every product that we are able to come up with from the ways that we've collected from Kantamanto. The ultimate goal is that we are able to set up startups for incubator projects, programs, so that individuals from the community can take on the work and then take it as their own business. So at the end of the day, we are not taking charge of any of the developments or the research that we've done here.

[00:03:55] Sammy Oteng: We're not taking charge of any of the ideas that we've developed here. We are [00:04:00] just gonna turn them back to the community to use it, and then use it as a pathway for themselves to make extra money. 

[00:04:07] Rebecca Burgess: The community spaces also used to help young women who have been traveling from the north of Ghana to the south. Their travel is often instigated by climate change impact, and when they arrive in the south, obviously they're clearly seeking out economic opportunities.

[00:04:22] Rebecca Burgess: So the work they often find themselves in is known as Kayayei. Most of these young women who play the role of Kayayei are in their teens and early twenties, and this work includes carrying bales of clothing through the marketplace, bales that weigh 55 kilograms or more than 120 pounds. The foundation aims to find new pathways for these young women to move through an apprenticeship program and find new work.

[00:04:52] Rebecca Burgess: The name of the program translates in English as "sisterhood." 

[00:04:57] Sammy Oteng: It is just to bring these girls together and find [00:05:00] pathways for them to sort of like leave this modern day slavery that they find themselves in. And through that we have the apprenticeship program here in this space as well. So here in this space we have some of their tailors and upcyclers from Kamtamanto come into the space twice a week to train the girls on how to do upcycling, how to like, you know, basically use all this mixed material to make something new.

[00:05:21] Rebecca Burgess: Now back to Kantamanto and why it matters. Sammy says, the market sees around 15 million garments each week coming in from the global north. So for some context, Ghana as a country, has about 32 million people. Of these 15 million garments that are arriving at the port every week, 40% are not able to be resold into the secondhand clothing market.

[00:05:46] Sammy Oteng: Sometimes the, the garments that end up in the clothing are not, uh, climate friendly in terms of like talking about Ghana. Some of them are just in very, very bad condition. They have stains in it. They have holes in it. Some of them just do not fit into like the [00:06:00] Ghanaian space. And so all of these garments ultimately end up in waste.

[00:06:05] Sammy Oteng: In Kantamanto, they are around 30,000 registered workers, and these are just the registered workers. There are way more people who work within the space who are not even registered yet. And these are people who have created jobs for themselves. Usually when you talk about Kantamanto, it looks like a space where it has been created, where people employ other people to work in there, but it doesn't really function that way.

[00:06:23] Sammy Oteng: It functions like a community where people just come in and find work for themselves. So most of the people that work in Kantamanto are not formally trained tailors or, or tresses. They come there, they find what materials available and try to work their head around it. So we often talk about how big innovation and big technology when it comes to recycling and upcycling, but Kantamanto is able to recycle 25 million garments every month.

[00:06:48] Rebecca Burgess: Most of the up cyclers have only a pair of scissors and a sewing machine at their disposal. They're able to do amazing work at the Kantamanto market within a very confined space. [00:07:00] 

[00:07:01] Sammy Oteng: More and more garments coming through every time, and inequality gets worse and worse by the day. Just about a month ago, we had one of the retailers that we spoke to have an entire bale literally gone to trash. Cause they were sort of like chemical hydraulic stain inside the whole bale. So everything literally couldn't be sold. So if we talk about the truth that is like Kantamanto and its true truth, that is multiple truth is the fact that is one of the largest circular economy that you can find in the world and is the biggest.

[00:07:32] Sammy Oteng: We have like a whole lot of platforms that talk about like circular economy, talk about upcycling and talk about care treating, but none of them is able to recycle 25 million garments within a month. But Kantamanto does that on a monthly basis. 

[00:07:47] Rebecca Burgess: The marketplace is formed around the work of making something of value out of something that's been discarded.

[00:07:52] Rebecca Burgess: This is the ultimate version of what we would call the circular economy. The value making, however, can [00:08:00] only extend so far. You can't make an upcycled product out of a completely filthy or permanently stained and soiled good. So at this point, due to the sheer volume of material that is discarded from the global North, we are noticing that more and more material that the upcyclers are paying for within these bales is irreconcilably damaged.

[00:08:22] Rebecca Burgess: The role of Kayayei is to move these bales from a distribution point further into the Kantamanto market. The alleyways in the market are too narrow for even trolleys to move through, so the market relies on these young women to move the bales into the system. The market is about 28 acres in size, and they have to make as many as seven trips a day.

[00:08:44] Rebecca Burgess: So you can imagine a 12 year old girl carrying a 55 kilogram bale on her head, walking two miles every trip and taking multiple trips per day. This is the reality of Kayayei. The Or Foundation's [00:09:00] program brings chiropractic care and awareness of spinal health to these women. Sammy says this is the first time any such research has been done in Ghana and in the Kayayei space.

[00:09:11] Rebecca Burgess: They've partnered with a chiropractic center to send the women to have their spinal cords evaluated. The results have showed that these young women are suffering from extensive damage. 

[00:09:22] Sammy Oteng: Some of the findings that we found was that most of the girls were damaging, some of the girls as young as 16 were showing a spine health of a 60 year old person.

[00:09:32] Sammy Oteng: So some of them, the way that they carry is too much that it literally wears away their cartilage in their spine. And so the bones end up rubbing on each other and some of them have gotten so bad that their cartilage has gone away and now the bones are literally merging together. They're flattening and then they're merging together as one.

[00:09:53] Sammy Oteng: And there are some instances that the doctor literally just tells us like, you need to take this girl out of this business, or [00:10:00] it's only a matter of time. And then like they'll just die. Only take maybe a wrong turn or maybe just like something as simple as slipping or maybe even stretching, and then they might just wreck their spines and that'll be it for them.

[00:10:14] Sammy Oteng: So the program is supposed to like assess them and analyze them, see how damaging this traits to them or this thing that they're doing. This way carry is to them, and then trying to find pathways for them into new spaces. 

[00:10:27] Rebecca Burgess: Those new pathways include the apprenticeship program where they can learn transferable skills such as hairdressing, textile design, soap making, and photography.

[00:10:36] Rebecca Burgess: Through the program, they seek to find new placement opportunities for the young women. Sammy has mentioned that the quality of the textile has gotten lower and lower, and the volumes have gotten higher and higher due to the trends and the way that fast fashion and the growth economy is designed. So this forces the situation that even in these training programs, they're still having to find [00:11:00] ways of dealing with what is considered textile waste.

[00:11:04] Rebecca Burgess: So they're looking at all creative potentials and trying to support these young women to think through entrepreneurial processes. In terms of the growth economy, I was curious what Sammy would like to see in terms of volumes changing and quality changing. 

[00:11:23] Sammy Oteng: I think there is this idea and then there's always like accepting one truth to like a story, but sometimes they are several truths to one story and then one is that even though Kantamanto exists to recycle it and people have fun, create a job for themselves through secondhand clothing.

[00:11:40] Sammy Oteng: Another thing is that these things, clothing is literally overshadowing the work that these people are doing. It's plunging them into debt and it's literally killing like their self-esteem and dignity that they have in the job. And this is to say, if you have a retailer who is investing their money into this business, the billbalecomes and then [00:12:00] they have no idea the quality of things in the bale.

[00:12:03] Sammy Oteng: They have no clue what is in there. So it's literally like a surprise box. So you buy the bale and some of them literally pray over their bale before they open it, and then there've been times when retailers have opened their bale and they've blacked out. They literally like fainted out because they just saw that everything in there was of no saleable value, and they've significantly lost a huge investment.

[00:12:28] Rebecca Burgess: Sammy says, sometimes people romanticize the work within Kantamanto. So a bit of history, it was built around the time of Ghana's independence from Colonial Rule. So at this time, the ministerial offices, the courtrooms and other corporate offices had certain colonial social standards about what you would wear into those buildings.

[00:12:49] Rebecca Burgess: Many villagers who were coming from the North, South, East were wearing their native dress, so before they could enter these offices, it was seen as [00:13:00] more "socially acceptable" if they were to wear Western garments. The market was providing used Western clothing to those villagers so that they could easily get access to what they needed so they could appear, quote, unquote, more socially acceptable as they entered the halls of government.

[00:13:18] Sammy Oteng: Talking to some older citizens about how Kantamanto was like in their time, one of them tell me that basically people would bring their old wax springs from their wardrobes and then come to trade it for others. Some people would also come and bring their old cloths, bring it into the market, and have tailors make them into new garments.

[00:13:37] Sammy Oteng: So the idea of Kantamanto was really built around being able to recreate, being able to uplift clothing, being able to create businesses within yourself, and not necessarily but secondhand clothing. So even if today, like secondhand clothing should cease to come in anymore, Kantamanto will not necess literally die.

[00:13:54] Sammy Oteng: It will still as it is cause the people in Kantamanto, as I said, work with what comes to them. [00:14:00] 

[00:14:00] Rebecca Burgess: Fast fashion is not a necessary feed stock. As Sammy explains, the fast fashion model was basically built to create waste. It's part of the business model. If you wear the clothes, you have to throw them away. But what we haven't really grasped is where is this waste going?

[00:14:19] Rebecca Burgess: He recalled recently traveling to Amsterdam for a work-related conference and noticing several very small garment collection bins on the streets, and they had big tanks under them. He didn't see any garment or textile waste on the streets at all. 

[00:14:35] Sammy Oteng: What that told me was that if you live and exist in such a space,

[00:14:39] Sammy Oteng: it'll be very difficult for you to be being aware of the problem. Cause even if you watch a documentary of Kantamanto or the S on tv, you walk out over your door or you leave the television and your reality is very different from what you just saw on tv. So it is very easy for one to forget that these things are happening.

[00:14:56] Sammy Oteng: But if you think about it, the people who, who are in Ghana who are [00:15:00] not like in any way purchasing this 15 million garment, are the ones who have to bear like, you know, the struggles and the challenges that comes with all of these clothing. So it is also like being able to connect these two well together is when you get a full understanding of how the problem is.

[00:15:17] Sammy Oteng: Because if you don't see it, it's almost non-existent to you. 

[00:15:22] Rebecca Burgess: This is what Sammy and the Or team's work has done. They've made this situation visible. He's shown the world where these European clothing drop off points actually end up, and as we know, they end up in bales that are creating debt cycles for many of the people who purchase them because most of what's being shipped overseas is low quality, contaminated, unusable, and not resellable.

[00:15:46] Rebecca Burgess: It's creating more of a debt cycle. The Global North is not seeing this, but thanks to Sammy's work we're starting to. As Sammy explained earlier, in a pre fast fashion era, Kantamanto was utilized as a [00:16:00] space for reuse and for people within their native dress to be able to access the ministry offices by trading in for a suit or something that looked European.

[00:16:09] Rebecca Burgess: But what about pre-colonization? Was there a textile culture that existed that was strong and of itself an endemic to the community prior to the influence of colonization? And does this factor into conversations at the Or Foundation? And how does this inform the future? Sammy says, the culture that existed pre-colonization was based in being in touch with the entire value chain.

[00:16:33] Rebecca Burgess: If you wanted a garment made, you would go to a shop and say, this is what I need and this is the color that I would like. From there, you would have access to working with a dress maker or tailor. And you would have your measurements taken and this person would have conversations with you about what you needed the clothing for and what you were looking for and how it was made.

[00:16:53] Sammy Oteng: If you bring it to the modern world right now, we have garments that we are buying from our screen that [00:17:00] we have no connection with. We have no idea where it's made. And sometimes these labels that come in the garments that say it's made here is made of this garment. Some them are untrue. So that already sort of like breaks the intimate relationship that exists between like each and every individual that exists within the value chain of the garment industry.

[00:17:17] Sammy Oteng: And that's what we have come to. And taking it back to precolonial time, people used to have like a pass on idea with garments. So as we go to most families when it comes to like uniforms or certain outfits, they will make it in good quality cause it's tailored and you know where it's coming from. And it can be passed on from like the dad to the son to next to the next, to the next, until it literally can be used anymore.

[00:17:41] Rebecca Burgess: He says, if you think about the indigenous cultural ideologies that existed around clothing in pre-colonial times, there was far more intimacy and more sentimental connection with our clothing. Nowadays, there's the importation of culture. When garments come in, yes, there's material waste, but there is [00:18:00] also a culture, a dominant culture being moved around.

[00:18:04] Rebecca Burgess: Sammy says there was and is a culture of Ghanian young people who are interested in having tailored garments, but it's difficult because now there's Kantamanto where they see garments coming in nonstop. It shifts the idea around clothing and consumption. When you see all this clothing, it's easy to believe that there will always be more and more.

[00:18:27] Sammy Oteng: In the end, you end up having like a growing generation who start losing the very sentimental value that we have around clothing. Cause they have grown up to see the place like Kantamanto to have in all of this clothing coming in all the time. So they will grow up without having any interest in like very cultural ways or very cultural values around garments.

[00:18:47] Sammy Oteng: And it starts shifting towards a fast and non valued relationship with garments. 

[00:18:53] Rebecca Burgess: The same systems that are utilized to promote fast fashion in the global north and the more, more, more mentality [00:19:00] also translates to the secondhand market and the waste economy. So now we have a society constantly focused on more and more.

[00:19:09] Rebecca Burgess: The foundation works on systemic solutions to this very big problem. However, one thing that was very clear to them at the onset was that the retailers and community members were going through immediate and very stark problems, and this required solutions and aid. 

[00:19:26] Sammy Oteng: One of the things that we were able to do from before was the fire relief.

[00:19:32] Sammy Oteng: So there was a fire that happened in Kantamanto. At the end of the previous year, and what was really crazy was that it was very, very unexpected and in the market space have been used to having such disasters happening at random to some of these retailers. Like literally lost all of their investments in this fire.

[00:19:53] Sammy Oteng: But through the funding, we are able to support them in like very little ways. And it is quite interesting. [00:20:00] They didn't get any support from any organization. They didn't get any support from the local government, no support from the central government. And so their only support they literally got, which was just the letter that we could provide, was funds from the Solidarity Fund that we created and also to the Solidarity Fund,

[00:20:14] Sammy Oteng: we able to directly support retailers who are in dire need to pay for loans or to pay for their debt. But some of them go for bank loans to invest into their businesses, and some of those bank loans have interest rates of up to 35%. It's insane. And it's also another way, like people try to exploit people within their informal economy cuz they know they need the money and then they will do anything to get the money to invest into their business.

[00:20:40] Sammy Oteng: And so they try to exploit that by raking up the interest rates. When the fire happened, the fire caught up the very next day we had some bankers coming into the market to demand their payment from the market moment, like a day after the fire. So to the solidarity fund, we able to like support in such instances. [00:21:00] 

[00:21:00] Rebecca Burgess: Through the OR Foundation's research, they found that apart from even the bales that the retailers are purchasing, the individual entrepreneurs in the marketplace are pouring money into their businesses by performing the work of keeping the economy as circular as possible, and this includes paying for bus money to even get to the market.

[00:21:20] Rebecca Burgess: Some retailers live three hours from Kantamanto, so they have to wake up very early in the morning and spend a lot of time just getting there. So besides transportation costs, they also have to pay for electricity, for security, and for storage. 

[00:21:37] Sammy Oteng: The market infrastructure does not, it's just stores. It's just with installs that doesn't come with doors or windows.

[00:21:42] Sammy Oteng: So after every day, they have to unpack every morning, and then the other day they have to pack everything, carry them into their storage station and pay for storage. So this is like a case of literally buying, investing into waste and then having to pay for storage for the waste for about a week or two with hopes of [00:22:00] selling something.

[00:22:01] Rebecca Burgess: Furthermore, some of these retailers are sometimes only a health scare away from their whole business collapsing. The way their business is run, they basically don't see a profit. When Sammy walks around the market and asks many of them how their business is going, and he asks how much profit they're making, they laugh or they don't even give a response because they don't see a profit.

[00:22:23] Rebecca Burgess: Essentially they work, and when money comes in, it has to be reinvested back into the business. Factors like a child's education or healthcare or something unforeseen can break their entire business model. So after the fire, for example, Sammy personally spoke to five different retailers who had to quit because there was just no way they could get back into the business.

[00:22:47] Rebecca Burgess: Everyone is basically hanging on by a thread. These waste management roles are subsidizing the wages of the global North. They're making it easier for fast fashion [00:23:00] and other companies to accumulate more because there is no cost for dumping these garments overseas. In fact, overseas communities are paying to manage our waste, which is so ironic because if you can imagine how we manage waste in the United States and in the global north, we put our garbage bins out in the front of our homes.

[00:23:22] Rebecca Burgess: We put our glass, plastic, and other recyclables in a bin, and we pay a service fee to have those materials taken and recycled. But we have no current textile recycling programs on our curb. So as you can see, there is no monetary exchange for textile waste. At current, it ends up in the system contaminating our own landfills, or being packaged up and going overseas and not supporting economies with any kind of service fee or what the industry would like to call an extended producer responsibility fee.

[00:23:58] Rebecca Burgess: Textile brands who produce [00:24:00] these clothes are not paying for the management of these clothes as they become waste. So E P R, or as we know, extended producer responsibility would become a fee that could help Kantamanto and other places in the world that are managing these materials. We should not have the retailers in Kantamanto paying for our waste.

[00:24:24] Rebecca Burgess: So on that thread of extended producer responsibility and or just general social responsibility, Sammy and I discussed the recent engagement between Shein, a Chinese fast fashion company and the Or Foundation. Shein has provided a large sum of money to the Or Foundation as an immediate aid strategy. Again, it's well known that this money is not going to solve the systemic issues of the amount and the sheer volume of material coming to Kantamanto, but it is a recognition

[00:24:56] Rebecca Burgess: that Shein as a company could be implicated in what is seen on [00:25:00] the shores of Accra, and that Shein knows that it's responsible to this community in some way, shape, or form. Sammy acknowledges that this money is not real extended producer responsibility. Right now, it's just a fund. A fund that will help solve problems for people in immediate need.

[00:25:18] Rebecca Burgess: So at current, as far as formal extended producer responsibility, France is the only country that has this policy in place. They are pushing for other countries in Europe and the US to eventually stick to an extended producer responsibility policy. Again, the funding they got from Shein was literally just an admittance that Shein was inducing some of the issues of waste overwhelm in Kantamanto.

[00:25:45] Rebecca Burgess: So they basically were acknowledging that we are part of this mess and here's some money to help clean up this mess. Sammy says they're very excited about the funding, so when he asks people in the community what they [00:26:00] need or what they're going through, they're always saying, yes, this is what we need.

[00:26:03] Rebecca Burgess: This is what we're going through, help us solve our problems. And now Sammy feels empowered that solving those problems can actually happen. Up to this point, change has felt very slow for the people of Kantamanto. And when we look at the deeper systemic issue, such as when is the global North going to take responsibility for the mess that they've created here, Sammy says, they just never get a clear answer other than to say that it's going to happen soon.

[00:26:33] Sammy Oteng: It goes to a point where sometimes I felt even bad visiting my friends in the market. Cause you go to the market and you're talking with them and one of the questions they'll most definitely ask is, Sammy, when, when is there gonna be change? When are we going to see some change, some visible changes? And so like personally, it became very daunting cuz you go to these people that you love and you want to talk to, and then they're asking you questions that you have no response to at the time.

[00:26:57] Sammy Oteng: So this has been big news for [00:27:00] the community and as within the team, some of the things that we plan to do, like first and foremost is extend our Mabilgu program. So the Mabilgu program is the apprenticeship program that I mentioned earlier. Previously, as I said, we were only able to place a few girls from the chiropractor research after finally giving them the finance.

[00:27:18] Sammy Oteng: So imagine you tell these girls, you pull them out of the market and you tell them that this way that you're carrying is gonna kill you. So you should stop. And then they ask you, okay, you don't want me to stop, so what do I do now? And we don't have the funding to place these girls into any apprentice program or find them any pathways, basically.

[00:27:38] Sammy Oteng: It's sort of like teasing them or letting them know things that could do them bad, but not able to help them in immediate. That was always a bit heartbreaking, not being able to give this person the opportunity that you are talking about, knowing very well that whatever they, what they were in before is possibly going to kill them.[00:28:00] 

[00:28:01] Rebecca Burgess: Through this funding, they were able to place seven young women in apprenticeship programs, and now with this funding, they will be able to place 100 girls into chiropractic support and apprenticeship programs. Another thing they would like to do with this funding is market outfitting. The marketplace right now is very narrow and forces Kayayei community members to move bales through the marketplace on their head, as explained earlier. 

[00:28:30] Rebecca Burgess: The money would allow them to widen the alleyways so that trolleys could be used to move the textiles through the marketplace. This money also would allow for flood prevention, impermeable surfaces to move water down into the aquifer, so when it rains, it doesn't flood everyone's stalls.

[00:28:50] Rebecca Burgess: It would also allow for decentralized energy systems such as solar. It would allow for windows and walls so that people's materials are protected [00:29:00] and also more structurally sound and safe. 

[00:29:03] Sammy Oteng: Another thing is also being able to fix solar panels. So one of the reasons why they've been fired so many times in the market is because of the electricity connections within the market space.

[00:29:13] Sammy Oteng: It's so bad that sometimes the retailers have to connect cables as long as like a kilometer away just to be able to get electricity. So if you think about like all of these trends, we're also trying to fit the market with solar panels and that way, like be able to get renewable energy within the market space without risk of setting the whole place on fire. 

[00:29:34] Sammy Oteng: Another thing is also outfit the stores in such a way that we are able to put in windows and doors so they don't have to pay extra money to store. They have materials, they can always keep them in their stores, lock them up, and it'll also cast down the labor that they have to put into the work that they do.

[00:29:50] Sammy Oteng: Cause every morning of loading and unpacking and merchandising your garments, and in every evening unpacking and loading is putting them storage. It's a lot of work. But if they have windows and doors, that [00:30:00] means they cast down all of this. Another thing that we also planning to do is our fiber to fiber recycling.

[00:30:06] Sammy Oteng: And with that, we are partnering with some local textile companies. Voter star textiles. With that, what we're trying to do is bring in textile waste from Kantamanto and then being able to re manufacture them into fibers and two yarns, and then into fabrics that can be used to support, uh, revitalized their local textile industry.

[00:30:27] Rebecca Burgess: The funding would help expand the organization and build capacity in key areas. Sammy says, we're often juggling so many responsibilities at a time, and with this funding we can bring on some community members full-time as well as the young creators and fashion students. And of course, the Aura Foundation's plans do not end there.

[00:30:48] Sammy Oteng: Another thing that we are also trying to do with the money as well is also we are partnering with a company that does recycling for fish and net. And from our research we realize [00:31:00] that one of the sectors that textile waste is really challenging or really pushing a problem on is the fishing community.

[00:31:07] Sammy Oteng: Cause most of these textile wastes end up on the beaches and in a sea. And because like the textile waste end up in there, it further causes the fishes to travel further away.

[00:31:21] Rebecca Burgess: I applaud Sammy, and I'm very grateful for all the work that he and the Or Foundation have been doing. And I remain blown away by their vision and their ability to manifest that vision. And it is incredible to see that even before the legal architecture for extended producer responsibility is in place for our clothing, that we see immediate resources being put into the Kantamanto community to alleviate the immediate suffering.

[00:31:44] Rebecca Burgess: And we know the struggles and challenges within the community have been going on for a very, very long time, and the problems have existed for years. So even if fast fashion companies were to end production today, we know the community would need support to recover from all of the years of [00:32:00] economic, ecological, and social undermining that it has experienced.

[00:32:04] Rebecca Burgess: So may this episode leave you with some hope that at least some immediate resources we know are flowing into Kantamanto. But also we leave you with this vision for a transformed textile system, one that helps support clothing us while honoring all lifeways across this planet. Please join us next time for the 10th and final episode of the debut season of the Weaving Voices Podcast.

[00:32:42] Rebecca Burgess: This episode is made possible because of all the people who work behind the scenes on it. I'd like to thank my producer, Jennifer O'Neil, audio editor, Bethany Sands, and intern Maha Sanad. I'd also like to thank Whetstone founder Stephen Satterfield. Whetstone Head of [00:33:00] podcasts, Celine Glasier, sound engineer Max Kotelchuck, music Director Catherine Yang, associate producer Quentin Lebeau, production assistant Shabnam Ferdowsi and sound intern, Simon Lavender, the cover Art by Whetstone Art Director Alex Bowman.

[00:33:18] Rebecca Burgess: You can learn more about this podcast at WhetstoneRadio.com, on Instagram and Twitter @WhetstoneRadio, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, Whetstone Radio Collective for more podcast video content. You can learn more about all things happening at Whetstone at WhetstoneMagazine.com.