Loading summary
Transcript63 lines
- [00:07]
Jo Andrews
Late at night on New Year's Day, as the world was winding down from celebrating the arrival of 2025, a disastrous fire broke out at the biggest second hand clothes market on the face of the planet. The flames quickly ripped through Cantamanto Market in Ghana, West Africa.
- [00:28]
Liz Ricketts
So the fire started in late evening on January 1st and continued into the morning of January 2nd. Our team was getting calls by around midnight and was at the site by like 1:30am on the second. And unfortunately, I mean, this is the biggest fire that the market has seen. This fire impacted 10 out of the 13 sections, so. So it destroyed about 60% of the retailer side of the market and that has directly impacted over 10,000 individuals. So that's primarily stallholders, secondhand retailers, the people who work for them, as well as tailors and some upcyclers.
- [01:09]
Jo Andrews
That's Liz Ricketts, co founder of the Ore foundation, an NGO that works in solidarity with the people of the Cantomanto market. You may not have heard of the market, but your clothes have. It's likely that one way or another, clothing or shoes that we have worn has ended up there. If you've ever given clothes away to charity or goodwill shops, donated them to jumble sales or put them in a textile bin, there's a high probability they will have found their way to Cantomanto. The market is the beating heart of the world's clothing reuse industry. And it's a vital part of the hidden world of what really happens to the billions of tons of clothing we discard every year. But it's become a fragile link in a chain that's breaking apart under the intense pressure of fast fashion, the ever increasing amounts of clothing and textiles that we produce and dump year on year in countries like Ghana. Welcome to Haptic and Hughes Tales of Textiles. I'm Jo Andrews, a hand weaver interested in what textiles tell us about ourselves and our communities. This episode is an attempt to unravel some of the big questions of our age around textile overabundance. How much does it contribute to global pollution and the consumption of resources? And can we really smart our way out of this? Will technology and textile recycling come to our rescue? But to understand this, first we need to go back to the fire at the Kantamanto market. One of the people who lost her stall and all the good she had there was Rukiah Abubakar. It has really affected us. It has really affected because all the shops, all the shops there are paints. Most of us just travel to bring the goods when it happened. So we lost Everything. We lost everything. Ruqaya's sister, Bushra, is a friend of mine and she was in daily contact with her sister.
- [03:57]
Rukiah Abubakar
So she said some people have been paralyzed due to that, from the shock. Some are in the psychiatric hospital because they really can't take it, you know, they couldn't handle it properly. Others have even died due to that and have lost so much. They've lost everything. And she also stated that because some of them went in for loans and some had their suppliers bringing them and then they. Them paying later. Now they don't know what else to do. How are they going to raise the amount of money? Because these people have their written assets, if I can put it that way. You know, they have like the things. There are lots of money and if everything is gone and most of it is taken from a supplier, how then do I get the cash to pay you back if I haven't sold anything? So that was what she was talking about.
- [04:53]
Jo Andrews
And people depend on those tools for their lovelies.
- [04:56]
Rukiah Abubakar
Yes, I can say that, like 85% of the women working there do that on their own. No help from anywhere. And the young men who are also there, and even older men who are there is like, that is their last stop. They have nowhere else that is the source of their livelihoods.
- [05:17]
Jo Andrews
What kind of people are they supporting?
- [05:19]
Rukiah Abubakar
Their families, their children mainly. There was a video of this woman that I saw saying that she had just gone for a loan and she. She's got a son in school and now that everything is gone, how is she going to support him? Because there is no father, there is nobody else apart from her, you know, so that. That was very hard to. To watch and listen to.
- [05:43]
Jo Andrews
At present, no one knows what caused the fire. It might have been food vendors cooking over an open flame or possibly a firework that went astray. There will be an official report from Ghana's fire service, but the market leaders and organisers, with the support of the Ore foundation, have been rebuilding and reorganising, installing better fire precautions and addressing the safety of the electrical system. But the market is huge. Here's Liz Ricketts.
- [06:18]
Liz Ricketts
So the market sits on around 18 acres and there's an importer side to the market and there's a retailer side to the market. And the retailer side to the market is the biggest in the world. There's 30,000 people who work there. There's about 15 million garments that flow through this market every single week. And some of those garments will make their way to surrounding countries or other places in Ghana. But Most of them will be recirculated within this market through resale, repair, upcycling, or at least the attempt to do so. And it's an incredible place. I mean, it's my favorite place on the planet. It's why I do this work. I mean, the skill set and the creativity, the ability for people to take basically a minimum of 25 million garments every month and find a new home for them, while also adding a lot of value, whether that's on like a small scale, like a tailor customizing, you know, kind of frankensteining and customizing an outfit for an individual. Or there's tailors, you know, that are making 100, 150 items a day. So for instance, taking men's shirts and turning them into boxers for kids, and they're doing this with a waste stream that they have no control over. It's incredible. There's this energy of just like possibility.
- [07:33]
Jo Andrews
It takes the discarded clothing of other countries around the world and applying skill and creativity, reuses millions of tons of our waste. Until around 10 to 15 years ago, this was a roughly sustainable model where garments were usefully diverted from landfill and had value. But then fast fashion arrived.
- [08:00]
Liz Ricketts
We didn't start the Orr foundation because of textile waste. We started it because we were inspired by the bespoke tailoring culture of Ghana and wanting to connect people in America, where there's no longer really this sustainability language to culture and community of people here in Ghana that still speak that language. But basically between 2011 and 2016, we started to see more and more waste and we started to see this vibrancy of the market really being impacted by fast fashion, where a lot of retailers started telling us, you know, that they no longer really felt that there was dignity in their work. And the biggest red flag was that they didn't want their kids to take over their business anymore. We started hearing that in like 2014, 2015, and that's a sign that this market is headed towards collapse. Right? Because this is traditionally a family business and people were no longer making money. There was no longer enough good quality clothing to basically subsidize the rehabilitation of the lower quality stuff. And so the cooperation that used to exist across the market, where a retailer would have the funding to take a lower quality item and take it to a dyer and have it dyed or do a seamstress and like custom make something and then resell it, they don't have a lot of those financial resources anymore because the quality of the clothing has gone down so much. And the value of the Clothing has gone down so much while their operating expenses have gone up. And so that's led to a lot of waste, it's led to a lot of debt. And so, unfortunately, some of that kind of like, collaborative spirit within the market has disappeared. It's still there, but it doesn't function to the degree that it did when I first went to Kantamonto in 2011.
- [09:45]
Jo Andrews
The deluge of foreign made clothes streaming into the market means there's no energy left over for local clothing.
- [09:54]
Liz Ricketts
But no one in Ghana can take their own clothes from their own closet and take it to Contamonto to be resold, repaired, or upcycled, because that market has been dominated by foreign clothes to the point where all of the skill set, all of the energy, all of the creativity that is there is being applied exclusively to solve a foreign problem with no access for local recirculation. And for me, that's where we know something is wrong. Right.
- [10:26]
Jo Andrews
And the other big problem is that Cantamantos simply can't digest all the clothing that is pouring into it. Which means that clumps of rotting garments litter the once beautiful beaches of Accra.
- [10:43]
Liz Ricketts
Yeah, it's horrible. We have a cleanup tomorrow. Our team removes like 20 tons. It's over that now. I was looking at the last week we did almost 40 tons, but up to at least 20 tons of textile and plastic waste from the beach every single week. And every single week it is replenished. So again, this is where we have to look at the root cause of overproduction. Like, I'm very proud of the work that we do. We're developing new materials. You know, we're helping people create new jobs, finding new retail opportunities, doing these cleanups. I'm very proud of the work that we do. I'm proud of our team. But, like, I'm not delusional. Like, we cannot solve this problem if it is just going to replenish itself. Right. Like, there has to be a focus on the root issue.
- [11:36]
Jo Andrews
Liz and her team make sure that the dumped clothing they collect is taken to a controlled dump. But it's not ideal.
- [11:45]
Liz Ricketts
The landfill, the one sanitary landfill that Accra had access to, exploded in August of 2019. Yeah, it was bad. I was there the day that it happened to meet with a waste picker collective. There's no access to a sanitary landfill or to an incinerator in Accra. So the best we can do is kind of take the waste to a controlled dump site about like an hour to two hours outside of the city. If we can only take like one truck a day, then it limits how much we can collect from the market before it enters the environment.
- [12:19]
Jo Andrews
Liz is very clear that fast fashion is at the root of Cantomanto's problems.
- [12:26]
Liz Ricketts
I know for some people that feels very undefined. But for me, fast fashion is simple. It's a volumes over value business model. Overproduction, from my perspective is not an accident. It is a very intentional business model that involves exploiting everyone along the value chain. I mean, there's. Overproduction is only profitable to the degree that it is. I mean, you have some of the richest individuals in the world are the founders of these fast fashion companies, right? It's only profitable to the extent that it is if garment workers are exploited, if the true cost of materials is not accounted for. So you have all of these sort of irresponsible decisions that have been made along the value chain. And what happens is that people are buying a $20 garment, maybe a $10 garment, something that's as cheap as like a nice cup of coffee or a sandwich, and they don't see value in it anymore, right? So you know, someone in, in the uk, if you buy something for ten pounds, like are you going to take the time to repair a button once that breaks? Right? Like why, why would you do that? It's probably an easier use of your time to go out. And so people are literally throwing away money and they're throwing away their clothes. And so there's no longer enough embedded value in clothing to subsidize or sustain this global circular economy or this global secondhand trade, right? I mean, how does a $10 garment new subsidize the collection, sorting, repair, preparation for export, export the imports, the further sorting, the preparation for resale, repair over die, etc. Like $10 cannot do that. So the community in contement again is shouldering the burden of all of these irresponsible choices that have been made without being given access to even understanding that.
- [14:42]
Jo Andrews
She says that most people at Kantamanto don't have the opportunity to understand the global system they are part of.
- [14:52]
Liz Ricketts
Most of the people that we have the privilege of working with in Kantamanto, they might have never left Ghana. They don't know that there are like CEOs in Europe making billions of dollars off of this business model of overproduction, right? So they're just holding, psychologically they're holding all of this and they feel like it's their fault, you know, and I didn't fully realize this until we started taking delegations outside of Ghana. We took our first delegation to Paris in 2022, I think, and the retailers from Kantamanta went into the fast fashion stores and they were looking at, you know, like the seam here in Ghana is very discerning when it comes to the quality of clothing because everyone grows up sewing still. So they were opening really like inspecting it and they walked out of the store and said, that store is full of bola, which is a term that means trash. And then they said, what chance do we have? And they called for a meeting after the trip and they said, one of the things that we realized on the trip is that we no longer are going to make this our fault. Like they said, we're no longer going to show up at 5 o'clock in the morning and work until 6 and get home at 9 and sacrifice time with our kids because we now realize that we can't solve this problem by just us working harder. They carry all of that, you know, because they aren't given access to this full picture. They've assumed that like this waste is their fault. And that's so horrible. And so if you think about something like the fire happening again, the emotional distress and kind of people just feeling like they're on their own, that's just tragic. I mean, it's horrible.
- [16:42]
Jo Andrews
It also seems true that those right at the other end of the system, the purchasers of cheap, ever changing fashion, don't have the full picture either of what they're taking part in. I'm no help here. I go months without buying anything new and my clothes last for years. But let me introduce you to Holly, recently graduated from university in the UK and while she is an exemplary dresser, she buys all her clothes secondhand. She's a keen observer of her own generation.
- [17:21]
Holly
So it would be very common to order one to two big orders a week, whether it's like a 100 pound shein haul or yeah, each week specifically girls in my knowledge would order a large amount of cheap clothing from Shein. And you know, you film yourself doing a haul so you'll try on all the different pieces and you'll show what you will keep. What you don't like and oftentimes what you don't like, you have the option to return. But quite commonly you miss the return window or you just don't get round to it or you can't be bothered to go through the process of returning it so it sits in the bag of clothes that you've been meaning to get rid of.
- [18:02]
Jo Andrews
Shein is a fast Fashion company and hall is ordering large amounts of clothing, often with free postage. But what's the point of ordering clothes you don't want?
- [18:16]
Holly
I think that social media has really had a huge impact on trends and on micro trends and on encouraging us to consume at a level that we haven't before. So, you know, you'll see influencers or people you follow or people you admire with a new outfit, a new style, they're trying out something different and, you know, that encourages you to go and buy. And I think the difference is that those trends change so quickly and these micro trends change. So I think that social media has a huge impact on how much we're buying and how quickly that changes and how quickly you no longer have use for your clothing.
- [18:59]
Jo Andrews
And is that why your fellow students were doing this?
- [19:03]
Holly
Yeah, I think so. I think that especially at uni, but as a teenager, really, I think that your clothing and your fashion becomes a huge. A huge part of how you present yourself and a huge part of who you are. And a lot of people will move to uni with like a, okay, I'm going to reinvent myself a bit. There's no one here that I know, you know, I want people to like me. I want people to think I'm cool. And your clothing is a huge part of that. So if you're, you know, seem to be wearing the same thing too many times, I think it's coming back into. Back into popularity to be an outfit repeater. But there was a period of time when I was growing up where that was like an insult, where if you wore the same thing too many times, you weren't fashionable, you weren't stylish, you didn't have enough clothes, that kind of thing.
- [19:47]
Jo Andrews
Can you just explain what an outfit repeater is?
- [19:50]
Holly
Of course. It's literally someone who wears the same outfit more than once to the point where it was so common to buy an outfit just to wear once that if you didn't do that, you were considered an outfit repeater, which is wild as a concept.
- [20:05]
Jo Andrews
And this was a term of insult.
- [20:07]
Holly
Yeah, definitely. And yeah, I think now there are more people willing to claim the fact that they're outfit repeaters and they can be proud of it. And I think it's slightly changed, but at one point, yeah, it was absolutely an insult.
- [20:22]
Jo Andrews
This was all big news to me. But the other thing that confused me, and yes, I know I'm generations away from Hollywood, is how could students afford to order a mass of clothing once a week? Holly says it partly depends on their background.
- [20:38]
Holly
But there are also things nowadays like klarna. Have you heard of klarna? Basically means that you can pay in instalments for your clothing orders. So if you buy a large order on a clothing website, you can split that into instalments monthly. It can be like £5amonth for the next however many months, or £3amonth, £3 a week. But things like that mean that, you know, if your student loan comes in, you can use that for certain new clothes. If you're working a part time job, you can use that for some new clothes. And I think that for students, your sense of fashion is evolving so quickly at that age that that becomes a really important, you know, that consuming becomes a really important part of your identity. I don't think that people have enough time to make it as circular as it should be, or not have enough time, but aren't as conscious of that, or it's not a priority.
- [21:33]
Jo Andrews
It's possible, especially given the shock of recent events, that we may look back on the experience of Holly's generation as something bizarre and extraordinary. But the difficult truth is that our consumption of textiles and clothes, clothing continues to rise exponentially year on year.
- [21:58]
Lisa Macintyre
Now, current estimates are 100 billion garments being manufactured every year globally. But that is a guesstimate. What we can see is that the graphs for textile production and the graphs for garment production are increasing. It's not a straight line of increasing, it's a curve going, accelerating.
- [22:17]
Jo Andrews
Lisa Macintyre is Associate professor in the School of Textiles and Design at Heriot Watt University in Scotland.
- [22:26]
Lisa Macintyre
The problem is getting bigger because we keep producing more garments. So been talking for a long time about reducing our carbon emissions, about reducing our volume of production. But every year we increase them. And the technological advances in making technologies more efficient are far outstripped by our overproduction and over consumption of garments.
- [22:49]
Jo Andrews
Lisa and a number of others have written a great paper that sets out the possibilities and reach of current textile recycling. Have a read if you're interested in the subject, I've put a link to it on the Haptic and Hue webpage for this episode. In it, they detail just how damaging our current level of textile overproduction is. It's responsible for about 10 to 12% of global carbon emissions, large amounts of energy consumption, and it's one of the world's biggest consumers of water and producers of water pollution.
- [23:32]
Lisa Macintyre
We use about 18,000 different chemicals to produce textiles, some of which are banned, some of which are very harmful but not banned, and some of which are much More benign and not necessarily particularly harmful. But 18,000 different chemicals, at no point does anybody in that system know exactly what they are. They wash off our textiles and therefore end up in our waterways and therefore pollute rivers and the marine environment. In countries like ours, where we have really strong environmental legislation, we have reversed a lot of the damage that we were doing in the 1940s and 50s where we were pumping all this effluent out into the rivers. But in countries without such strong environmental legislation, all of the chemicals that are put onto textiles, some of that will end up in effluent that is washed off the textiles and that goes straight into the waterways, and therefore you end up with dead rivers. There is over consumption of water in countries where water is scarce, because things like cotton is a very thirsty plant. You have to irrigate the cotton in order to get a good harvest. So you're taking water in a country where water is not massively readily available and you're pouring it on crops rather than giving it to people to drink.
- [24:50]
Jo Andrews
And then on top of all of this, we simply can't dispose of everything we make. The most interesting part of the paper Lisa co wrote deals very clearly with textile recycling. I realized reading it, I've been pretty confused about this. But Lisa sets out the different types very clearly.
- [25:14]
Lisa Macintyre
So they're used interchangeably in the literature sometimes, which can make the literature very confusing. But the best of them is reuse, because that requires no additional energy. It just means you're taking a garment that already exists and you're reusing it. Somebody else is reusing it, or you're reusing it for a slightly different purpose. The next best is closed loop recycling, and that means that you're taking an item and you're turning it back into a similar item of similar value. So textile to textile recycling would be classed as closed loop, but is vanishingly rare. The next one is open loop recycling, which means you're taking a textile material and you're turning it into a different product, normally a product of lower quality. So maybe you're taking a T shirt and you're cutting it up and you're using it for cloths. That would be open loop recycling. And then energy recovery is you're burning it and you're trying to reclaim some energy. People do talk about that as recycling, but I really think that's taking it very, very far.
- [26:19]
Jo Andrews
So the most efficient kind of recycling and the commonest is reuse. That's the gold standard and exactly what Kantamanto Market does.
- [26:31]
Lisa Macintyre
So that is the priority of everybody who's collecting textiles for recycling. Mostly they're collecting them for reuse. So sorting facilities are first separating off anything that they can reuse without any kind of mechanical or chemical process. All of the value, all the numbers that are going around in the literature are all estimates, guesstimates. But the literature says that between 25 and 35% of textiles are separately collected. So not thrown in a general waste bin, but collected separately. So if about a third of textiles are separately collected, about 50% of that is, is then reused or is sorted for reuse, which is not necessarily the same thing. It means it's either sent to a charity shop or it's sent overseas where we hope that somebody will reuse it. But we send far more stuff overseas for reuse than is ever actually reused because they don't like rubbish quality garments any more than we do.
- [27:34]
Jo Andrews
So our best guesstimates around 15% of garments possibly get reused.
- [27:43]
Lisa Macintyre
And then we come to the open and closed loop recycling. So that's somewhere around about 3 to 4% of all textiles potentially according to people's estimates, are recycled in some form. So the textile is unmade and then remade into something else. But almost all of that is down cycling into cleaning cloths, into low value carpet or insulation or something of a, of a low order. But that still is better than not using it because it means that you're not taking virgin resource, virgin fiber and reusing it for a low value product. So even though it's not the gold standard, it's still better than not doing it. And a vanishingly small proportion of textiles are fibre to fibre recycled. And the current best estimate, which is somebody's guess at a cocktail party no less, is less than 0.1% of separately collected textiles are turned into new textiles and re enter the clothing cycle. The vast majority of so called recycled textile materials that we have are made from is polyester and it's plastic bottles open loop recycled into textiles, because plastic bottles are a higher grade of plastic than the plastic we use for clothing. So rather than turn those plastic bottles into new plastic recycled plastic bottles, they get higher value if they turn it into polyester for textiles and make them into new leggings, for example.
- [29:24]
Jo Andrews
And lastly then there's incineration for energy and then landfill. And at present there simply aren't any figures out there. But we must assume that of the remaining 70% of discarded textiles, some are incinerated, some go into landfill and the rest is illegally dumped.
- [29:50]
Lisa Macintyre
There's a whole lot of Illegal dumping as well as the legal dumping. If you look at images of the Atacama desert from space, you'll see loads of textiles that were well intentioned, sent overseas for reuse, but that have then been dumped in the desert rather than used for any separate purpose.
- [30:06]
Jo Andrews
And here's the real kicker. Until now I naively thought that some form of recycling would come to our rescue, that we would, with a little time, be able to smart our way out of this crisis. Lisa is incredibly doubtful.
- [30:23]
Lisa Macintyre
I mean, I'm doing research on that at the moment and lots of other people are as well. And we are doing our best because we have a huge waste problem to deal with and it would be better that it was recycled. But most forms of recycling end up with a product that is more expensive than the virgin product and a product that is probably not as good quality. And you've put in a whole load of energy and human resource to try and remake it. So recycling of textiles is never going to be as efficient as recycling of glass or tin, for example.
- [30:59]
Jo Andrews
She thinks we should still try to do it, but doubts it will ever be properly commercial. And she also doesn't think that any of the bright shiny experiments that seem to promise so much will come to our rescue anytime soon.
- [31:16]
Lisa Macintyre
There are lab scale technologies that show that it is technically possible. But if you put 100 grams of polyester into even one of these lab scale recycling facilities, you do not get 100 grams of polyester back out. And you also throw loads of energy and chemicals at that in the process. So recycling is a potential solution. But it's always going to be expensive. It is always going to be expensive in financial terms, in labor terms, in chemical terms and in energy terms. It's going to produce CO2, and it's not the perfect solution. I think that with 100 billion garments going into the system every year, hoping that 0.1% of 30% miraculously upscales is a very optimistic way of looking at it. Now, I am an optimist, but even for me that's a stretch.
- [32:12]
Jo Andrews
For me that's incredibly important. What we need is not a magical new process, but a simple old one. Lisa puts it bluntly.
- [32:25]
Lisa Macintyre
I think that we need to vastly reduce our consumption and I think that that should be our priority, not hoping that technology saves us from our own reckless behavior.
- [32:36]
Jo Andrews
And back at the Cantamonto market in Ghana, Liz agrees.
- [32:41]
Liz Ricketts
And I don't know why it's so difficult for people to to understand that. Because everyone who's investing money, and even you Know, like the most advanced fiber recycling. I'm sorry, but if we still are only recycling 1% of post consumer waste, like what are we doing? Like all of the money, the millions and billions of dollars that are being invested in these like new high tech plants, that's a waste of money if it's going to continue to be buried underneath this oversupply of stuff. So that's my way of saying, like, there's not an easy. There's really no good answer to that question until everyone gets on board with addressing this root cause and starts to again reduce production volumes and displace the production of new products with upcycled and resold and repaired products.
- [33:32]
Jo Andrews
Textile waste is a real crisis and one that is getting worse every year. But somehow, because it's an enduring one, it never seems to rise to the top of the pile. And until it's us who drown in our own textile waste rather than poorer countries that are out of sight, that's unlikely to change. But what can change is our own behavior. And Lisa says slowly, it is beginning to.
- [34:03]
Lisa Macintyre
I think that on the positive side, reuse is massively up and is also up amongst younger demographics. So things like vinted and depop have massively increased the value of secondhand garments and have converted quite a lot of people to using secondhand in preference to cheaper quality, fast fashion items. So I see that as a huge positive and I expect that will continue to grow. I think that recycling technologies will come on board. But unless tax is applied to virgin quality materials and used to subsidize recycled materials, it's going to be very hard to make that commercially viable.
- [34:52]
Jo Andrews
Lisa says she personally loves clothes and loves shopping, but she has changed her behaviour since she started this research. She's come to understand that the order of the words reduce, reuse and recycle is vitally important. Reduce is the most important, reuse. The second and only then is recycle the third best option. Lisa now repairs her own clothes, shares with others for special occasions and buys much less.
- [35:30]
Lisa Macintyre
And there's a researcher called Kate Fletcher who was a campaigner in the early days of talking about textile sustainability. And she suggests that we wear things for 30 times, a minimum of 30 times. And I find that really helpful when I'm shopping because if I do go shopping and I go, oh, it's gorgeous, it's pretty, must have it, then I think, am I really going to wear that 30 times? And if the answer is no, then I leave it. But that also really helps me with bargains because a bargain is not a bargain unless you're actually going to use it. I ask myself that question, am I going to use it 30 times? So that's really helped me.
- [36:06]
Jo Andrews
And as the little stalls in Cantamanto rebuild and recover from this latest disaster, Liz says the people who work here and help to run the market deserve to be respected for what they do.
- [36:23]
Liz Ricketts
You start to look at clothing as if it is material that exists for you to co create with and everything starts to have this personal connection and memory to it. And I really wish that more people could experience that. And so for us, like we are just trying to do whatever we can to intervene to support this community, because that's what contamonto is. Contemento is a community first and foremost. You know, for me, contemato is not defined by where the clothing comes from. It's this incredible community in this massive market with an incredible skill set that deserves to be respected and uplifted.
- [37:18]
Jo Andrews
Thank you for listening this month. A number of you have been asking for a new episode on textile waste and recycling for some time. I hope this fits the bill. I want to thank Pam Weeks particularly, who prompted me once again to look sick seriously at recycling schemes. And of course I want to thank everyone who gave up their time and wisdom to take part in this episode. Textile waste is a problem that isn't going away and all of us will hear much more about it in the years to come. If you'd like to see pictures of Kantamanta Market and those once built beautiful beaches in Ghana, or find the link to the Ore Foundation's work and the paper co authored by Lisa MacIntyre, head over to www.haptic andhugh.com listen and look for series seven. Haptic and Hu is hosted by me, Jo Andrews. It's edited and produced by Built Taylor and sound edited by Charles Lomas of Darkroom Productions. Haptic and Hue is an independent podcast free of ads and sponsorship, supported entirely by its listeners who generously fund us through Buy Me a Coffee or by becoming a friend of Haptic and Hugh. Friends get access to an extra podcast each month month hosted by me and Bill Taylor, and in the next episode we'll be talking to Jess Bailey and Deb McGuire, who have some amazing news about North Country Whole Piece Quilts, but I'm not allowed to tell you exactly what that is until the podcast goes live next month. To join friends go to www.thatapticandhew.com join, but until then it's goodbye from me and enjoy whatever you are making ra.