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The environmental disaster fuelled by used clothes and fast fashion | Foreign Correspondent

The environmental disaster fuelled by used clothes and fast fashion | Foreign Correspondent Kwabena Ofori Osei 62 Views • 3 years ago

The dark side of the world’s fashion addiction. Many of our old clothes, donated
to charities, end up in rotting textile mountains in West Africa. This is a story
about how our waste is creating an environmental disaster.

Have you ever thought about what happens to your old clothes after you drop them off at the
op shop? It might be time to start, because these goodwill gestures are helping to fuel an environmental catastrophe on the other side of the world.

When charities in Australia can’t sell donated clothing, tonnes of it ends up being exported to
countries like Ghana, in West Africa. Ship after ship docks every week with bales from Europe,
the US, China and Australia.

They call them ‘Dead White Man’s Clothes’. Once they arrive in Ghana, they’re taken to the
bustling Kantamanto markets in the capital Accra and from here, they make their way to
villages and towns across the country.

The industry provides jobs for thousands of people, like Asare Asamoah, a successful importer.
He brings in clothes, mainly from the United Kingdom, and if they’re good quality, he can make
a decent living.

But it’s risky business. He has to pay upfront for a bale and never knows whether it’s trash or
treasure. With cheap, fast fashion flooding the world, the quality of the clothes arriving in
Ghana is getting worse and worse.

‘Sometimes you’ve gone and bought something, then you don’t get what you want’, says
Asamoah. ‘Then you lose your money.”

And there’s a dark side to this industry.

Correspondent Linton Besser travels to Ghana to uncover the dirty secret behind the world’s
fashion addiction.

While 60 per cent of imported fashion items are reused and resold, 40 per cent are rubbish,
creating an environmental catastrophe for this poor nation.

With the main dumpsite for textile waste now full, unregulated dumpsites ring the city. These
fetid clothes mountains are often set on fire, filling the skies with acrid smoke.

‘It is totally a disservice to us in this part of the world because we have become sort of the
dumping ground for the textile waste that is produced from Europe, from the Americas”, says
Accra’s waste manager, Solomon Noi.

Emmanuel Ajaab imports used clothes from Australia but he despairs at the poor quality of the
clothes that arrive. From a bale of about 200 garments, he finds only seven he can resell at a
good price.

“In Europe and UK and Australia, America, they think Africa here, sorry to say, we are not like a
human being”, he tells Foreign Correspondent.

The dumped textiles also get swept up in the monsoonal rains and end up choking the city’s
waterways and beaches, posing a danger to fishermen and aquatic life. Liz Ricketts, who runs
an NGO campaigning for awareness of Ghana's textile waste crisis, lays the blame at the feet
of international fashion houses.

“Waste is a part of the business model of fashion. A lot of brands overproduce by up to 40 per
cent”, says Ricketts.

Noi begs the people who donate their clothes to think twice about where they end up.

“If they come here, like you've come, and you see the practicality for yourself, then they will
know that, no, we better take care of these things within our country and not to ship that
problem to cause problems to other people.”

About Foreign Correspondent:
Foreign Correspondent is the prime-time international public affairs program on Australia's national broadcaster, ABC-TV. We produce half-hour duration in-depth reports for broadcast across the ABC's television channels and digital platforms. Since 1992, our teams have journeyed to more than 170 countries to report on war, natural calamity and social and political upheaval – through the eyes of the people at the heart of it all.

Contributions may be removed if they violate ABC’s Online Terms of Use http://www.abc.net.au/conditions.htm (Section 3). This is an official Australian Broadcasting Corporation YouTube channel

Travel Deep Inside a Leaf - Annotated Version | California Academy of Sciences

Travel Deep Inside a Leaf - Annotated Version | California Academy of Sciences Ambakisye-Okang Dukuzumurenyi 27 Views • 5 years ago

Please turn on subtitles with the CC (Closed Captions) button to see the explanatory annotations designed for educators.

Transcript of closed captions:

0:05: We are approaching a redwood tree. To animate a scientifically accurate leaf, artists studied the texture of a redwood leaf specimen on a glass slide at high resolution. They even counted the stomata, and used that exact count for this film!

0:25: These leaves would be measured on a centimeter scale. Throughout the animation, we will gradually zoom in to smaller scales.

0:40: As we approach a single stoma, we are now on a millimeter scale.

0:48: As we enter the interior of the leaf, we see many individual palisade cells. These cells are where photosynthesis takes place; they are translucent to allow sunlight to enter.

1:00: As we approach a single palisade cell, we’ll zoom down to the micrometer scale. The shapes inside the cell are organelles: the bright globules at the bottom are the Golgi apparatus; the yellow spotted tubes are endoplasmic reticulum studded with ribosomes.

1:09: That large, blue membrane surrounds the nucleus; the purple blobs are mitochondria.

1:18: The faint, yellow, spider-web structure of the cytoskeleton provides structure and support to the cell.

1:24: You are about to enter a chloroplast; inside you see flat, pancake-like membranous structures called thylakoids. This is where the light-dependent reactions of photosynthesis take place to produce ATP, the cell’s energy carrier molecule. way

1:38: The time scale has changed: the molecules are shown moving 1 million times slower than in real life!

1:42: As we near an individual thylakoid, the animation scale continues to shrink down to the molecular level, where things are measured in nanometers.

1:52: The green and blue bush-like structures are photosystems: clusters of proteins that absorb light energy from the sun and help convert it into the chemical energy that’s stored in the bonds of the energy carrier molecule called ATP.

2:03: The yellow-green, rotating structure is an enzyme called ATP synthase. This molecular machine facilitates the flow of protons down their concentration gradient from one side of the thylakoid membrane to the other, using the energy released in the process to assemble ATP.

2:16: The pulses of light in the thylakoid membrane in which the photosystems are embedded represent energized electrons being passed from one photosystem to another, passing along the energy which will be stored in the bonds of ATP (the classic “bucket brigade”).

2:26: The small “wigglies” are ATP molecules. Living things store energy in the bonds of the ATP molecules and then use that energy to conduct all the processes of life.

This animation is a model, and has its strengths and limitations. In order to model something well, visual artists have to make decisions about what to represent and how best to do so. What’s present in this model, and what’s intentionally missing or altered? Find out by visiting https://www.calacademy.org/edu....cators/travel-deep-i
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The California Academy of Sciences is a renowned scientific and educational institution dedicated to exploring, explaining, and sustaining life on Earth. Based in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, it's the only place in the world to house an aquarium, planetarium, rainforest, and natural history museum—plus cutting-edge research programs—all under one living roof.

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