- Kenya and other African nations are being overwhelmed by imported textile waste. Synthetic textiles are largely made up of plastic fibers and can contain toxins ranging from PFAS to phthalates. They don’t biodegrade, instead clogging up vast open-air landfills and leaching toxins into the soil, water and air, and posing a human health threat.
- This fashion waste crisis is fueled by the explosion of fast fashion, and now ultra-fast fashion (brands releasing thousands of cheap new items daily), meant to be worn and quickly thrown away.
- France’s Senate recently approved groundbreaking legislation to fight the fast-fashion phenomena, aiming to curb overconsumption and inform consumers.
- While welcoming France’s move, activists say the law doesn’t go far enough and are calling for broader measures.
NAIROBI — Mountains of waste stretch as far as the eye can see, smoking in places, giving off an acrid stench that stings the eyes and catches in the throat. These are the first sensations that overwhelm you upon arrival at the Dandora dump in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, one of the largest open-air landfills in Africa.
Starting early each morning, men, women and marabou storks — huge, vulture-like birds —scavenge the site to find enough to sustain them through another day. Plastic bottles to resell, a bone to gnaw on … But there’s something else here: A close look reveals countless scraps of fabric from discarded apparel. Most of these clothes didn’t originate in Kenya.
An investigation by the Changing Markets Foundation reveals that more than 900 million items of used clothing were exported to Kenya from Europe, the U.K., the U.S., Canada and China in 2021 alone. Of these items, more than half were considered waste, unsellable, and more than a third likely contained plastic-based fibers that don’t biodegrade. Instead, they break down into ever smaller microfibers that can contaminate food or be breathed into the lungs.
“Plastic is so cheap to make that we can now find plastic making the majority of our clothes,” says Imogen Napper, a marine scientist at the University of Plymouth, U.K. “And it was only invented 100 years ago. We know it under the name of polyester, acrylic, nylon …”
Napper initiated the first study to demonstrate the number of synthetic microplastic fibers that can detach from acrylic garments when washed in a domestic washing machine.
“[W]hen you look closely at those clothes you can see fibers coming from it,” she says. “It can be ingested by different animals, then it could get dislodged or lodged in one of their stomachs, the chemicals associated with plastics can dissolve and plastic chemicals have been known to potentially cause cancer.”
These many types of tiny synthetic plastic fibers also can contain a toxic cocktail of chemicals used in textile production, including PFAS, better known as “forever chemicals” that provide water and stain repellency; plasticizing phthalates; dyes containing heavy metals; formaldehyde-based antiwrinkle finishes; and more. Microfibers can also pick up and carry toxic contaminants found in open-air dumps. These hazardous chemicals can contaminate soil, water, air and the food chain.
Discarded textiles are found in massive quantities at the Dandora dump, just meters from residential buildings, and also in the Nairobi River, which flows past the dump before emptying into the Indian Ocean.
As big as the Dandora dump is today, it’s getting bigger.
The textile market is booming, and so is the flood of waste apparel. According to the U.S. International Trade Administration, the nominal value of secondhand clothing imports into Kenya rose by 80% between 2016 and 2020, from $100 million to $180 million.
And Kenya is far from unique. A Greenpeace report on Ghana highlights the same problem. The proliferation of huge open-air dumps chock-full with petrochemical-based clothing waste is a growing trend across Africa, largely fueled by the explosion of fast fashion in industrialized nations — apparel produced quickly, cheaply, and not made to last.
“We have to address how we manage this waste,” Napper says. Otherwise, she warns, plastic degrades into smaller particles in the open-air dumps when hit by “ultraviolet light. So when it’s being exposed to the sunlight, that plastic, these fibers [degrade into microplastics] quicker. It could go in the river, then the ocean. It could go into the air including the air that we’re breathing.”
According to the French government’s Environmental and Energy Management Agency (ADEME), more than 100 billion items of clothing are sold worldwide each year, with production doubling between 2000 and 2014. This trend has been accelerated by ultra-fast fashion, which introduces several thousand new designs per day, whereas fast fashion brands launch “only” several hundred daily.
The escalating fast fashion waste crisis has pushed France to act. In March 2024, Anne-Cécile Violland, a member of parliament, introduced a bill aimed at reducing the impact of these new modes of consumption. The legislation was adopted unanimously by the French Senate in June 2025.
“The first goal of this bill is to raise consumer awareness,” Violland says. “In less than 20 years, we’ve doubled the number of textiles we buy per year, while cutting the budget we spend on them by 30%. So, the idea is also to say: we need to stop overconsuming.”
The legislation prohibits online advertising for ultra-fast fashion, including through influencers, and requires the entire textile industry to apply a rating to garments based on their environmental impact.
“From that rating, a financial penalty will be calculated. So, obviously, a T-shirt made by Shein [a Chinese ultra-fast fashion brand], by underpaid workers, possibly Uyghurs [a persecuted Muslim minority in western China] exposed to solvents, will not get the same score as a Zara T-shirt [a fast fashion brand] made in Morocco — and therefore won’t get the same penalty,” Violland says. “It’s a signal that says to consumers: ‘Well, if there’s a penalty on this product, maybe I should think twice. Wouldn’t it be better to buy one sustainably made T-shirt rather than five from Shein for the same price?’”
For Sam Quashi-Idun, head of investigations at Greenpeace Africa and author of the report on fast fashion’s impacts in Ghana, this is a step forward: “It’s refreshing to see countries take steps to tackle this issue because fast fashion is really poisoning our environment. In Ghana, we have a huge industry that relies on receiving secondhand clothes, and yes, we want countries to send their clothes — but they must be usable and sellable, not waste. So I hope that other countries will follow what France is doing in terms of legislation,” he says.
That wish may soon come true. Once the legislation is implemented in France, Violland says she plans to have it presented to the European Commission. If it moves forward there, it could be adopted by all EU member states.
Less consumption, in theory, means less production — and therefore less waste. But for Mathilde Pousseo, general delegate of Éthique sur l’étiquette (“Ethics on the label,” a coalition promoting ethical clothing production), it’s more complicated than that.
“The law adopted by the [French] Senate mainly targets ultra-fast fashion, but in France that’s not the biggest part of the problem,” she says, pointing to Emmaüs, a charity that collects and resells used clothing, and to other reuse centers that are part of the coalition against fast fashion. “[T]hey’ll tell you that what’s overwhelming their stock isn’t Shein, it’s mostly Zara, private-label brands, etc. They’ve turned this bill into an anti-Shein law to protect French companies like Decathlon, despite their own disastrous practices.”
Pousseo cites an investigation by Disclose, a French investigative journalism NGO, that found Decathlon may be linked to forced Uyghur labor in China and deforestation in Brazil. “The real issue is overproduction. That’s what we need to regulate,” she says.
In three months, the fast fashion legislation will go before a joint parliamentary committee, giving Éthique sur l’étiquette an opportunity to extend the penalties to all fast fashion, not just ultra-fast fashion.
Once finalized, it will be applied in France before being submitted to the European Union.
Banner image: A marabout, a large wading bird. Like humans, they look for food in the landfill. An opportunity for them to swallow plastic.
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