Monsters are real. They’re just made of polyester. Fishermen off Osu Beach in Accra, Ghana, know to look out for these man-made creatures from the deep that can tangle in their boat propellers.
“We call them ‘tentacles,’” explains Liz Ricketts, co-founder of The Or Foundation, an Accra-based non-profit focused on the second-hand clothing sector. Unwanted garments, she explains, wend their way from the city’s huge second-hand clothing market, Kantamanto, to the sea, where they clog into lumpy ropes that don’t biodegrade.
Last year, a report by the UK-based Changing Markets Foundation, Synthetics Anonymous: Fashion Brands’ Addiction to Fossil Fuels, revealed how our clothes are mostly made from plastic. Synthetic fibres now represent more than two-thirds of all materials used in textiles. And it’s getting worse – that number is expected to reach nearly threequarters by 2030.
Footage from The Or Foundation shows plastic litter lapping the sand on Osu Beach, and mixed in with the bottles, packaging and takeaway forks are clothes. While it’s hard to pick out a shirt from a skirt in the tangle of waste, you can see their colours and prints.
“Some are dumped directly on the beach, although most go
