In Conversation with Liz Ricketts
The Or Foundation, founded by Liz Ricketts and Branson Skinner, is a not-for-profit working in both the USA and Ghana, challenging the dominant fashion model and the colonial practice behind the secondhand supply chain. The ‘Or’ stands for choice, which is what the work of the organization is all about: Reckoning, Recovery and Reparations and advocating for an alternative Justice-Led Circular Economy.
Below, Liz speaks with Woven Narratives about the challenges of the secondhand supply chain and how Extended Producer Responsibility policies will help tackle the fashion industry’s waste crisis.
Video courtesy of The Or Foundation
Sacha
So much of the sustainable fashion discourse reaffirms us as consumers, and not as humans and citizens. And I know this is something that's set out in the Or Foundations mission. Why is it so important to encourage people to form a relationship with fashion beyond just consumerism?
Liz
Let me take it from a few different perspectives. So I think, first of all, I can speak to my relationship with fashion and what got me into this work, which is essentially that, you know, fashion is a form of human expression. Fashion is the performance of clothing. It is how we embody representation, in, you know, our most raw form, I think, as individuals within a society.
I studied fashion design from that perspective of it being essentially an art form, that is also a business and understanding that it's both, but very much from the perspective of me being an artist and being a creative person, and wanting to find an application for that. When I was studying in design, and then worked in the industry, it was at the time where fast fashion changed everything. So I was working more at the luxury side of the industry as a designer and a stylist, and working within brands, but also with celebrities and working on productions, and seeing that literal shift from it being about expression and being something that valued creativity, you know where you have 2 seasons a year. I think with that 2 seasons a year it was like a rhythm that was very healthy for creatives within the industry. You had time to really find and be tethered to an actual concept, to have it be intellectual and not just superficial. But then, more importantly, you had time to spend with the people who would buy your clothes, and they weren't just consumers.
So when I started working in the industry it was very common for people to go to the department store, go to the retail location and talk directly to the people who are in the store and have events where people would have that transparency into what the clothes meant, and how they could fit the body. Yes, it was very privileged, but there was a lot of joy and creativity in it, and then, when fast fashion came along, you go from 2 seasons a year, to 5, and then to weekly or monthly drops. It removes that human scale aspect to the industry, I mean, today, I just see brands as packaging. To me, It's just marketing, that's all that's left. It's not really a concept anymore. And I watched that happen, like you literally watch whole new jobs being created. And it’s like this marketing apparatus was just dropped down in the middle of every single company. So the people creating the clothes and coming up with ideas for the clothes no longer had any relationship with the people buying the clothes, and no time to cultivate any concept that's not superficial and isn't about what sells. I saw the direct impact of that, you know, people turning to substance abuse, attempting suicide. It’s extremely unhealthy, not only from the consumer perspective but then from the people making the clothes and the creator perspective. And so, it's very, very clear that it's just inhumane. Being a consumer is an inhumane way to relate with the world.
“Fast fashion relies on the scarcity mindset. It relies on constantly telling you that you can never have enough and never be enough of a person, and it’s just extremely disruptive, and inhumane”
That led to us starting the non-profit, and the work that we're doing many years down the road. Now, here we are. But in the middle of it we are running education programs. I think this is like the early 2000s or early 2011 to 2015 and again we saw how consumerism had replaced and kind of flattened everything that you are as a person, within the industry and outside of the industry. It was quite interesting to see the sustainability movement adapt this narrative of voting with your dollar. We’d be going into schools, we had programs that taught every age level, but primarily 10 to 14 years olds and that was intentional, because that's the time they're starting to form their own identity and maybe starting to shop for themselves. But you can't go into a classroom and tell kids that the solution is to vote with their dollar right? So it becomes very, very clear that, again, society is moving in this direction where we're accepting, without questioning, this transition to becoming a consumer and not recognizing how unhealthy it is to embody that and to let ourselves be flattened in that way. Because you would never tell a kid that - there’s problems with class, you're basically telling a kid like, if you have more money, you have more power and more voting and if you don't have money, then you don't have power. So that was another moment where it became very clear to me what was going on. Today we shared a story of Aditi Mayer emphasising that the point of fast fashion is alienation, and it is to remove yourself from everything that makes you you, and to allow for this collapsing of your identity.
It's just toxic. And I think that fast fashion relies on the scarcity mindset. It relies on constantly telling you that you can never have enough and never be enough of a person, and it’s just extremely disruptive, and inhumane to me. So any way that we can find our way back, for me, it's not as much about the relationship with clothing. It's about our relationship with anything. I mean, I think sometimes we joke that if we could just stop and go back to zero, we would raise money to build parks everywhere, because I think, sometimes within this movement and in this conversation that we're all having, who care about this issue, we want to slow down consumption and we want to stop consumption but then all we do is talk about consumption. It's like the point is that people need other things to do with their time. People go out and buy stuff because that's the socially acceptable thing to do with your friends, or that's the thing that's free, or that's the thing that's safe. I grew up in a place where my parents would drop me off at the Mall, because it was one of the only safe places in terms of gun violence or drugs where you could drop your kids off to be with their friends and feel like they're going to be okay.
So there’s a much larger conversation of how do we want to live? And how can we start? How can we move away from trying to tackle consumption by talking about consumption and just finding other ways to be human together.
Sacha
I think what you said is so important, because we still talk about reconnecting with clothes, reconnecting with textiles and even the physical waste itself, but we don’t talk about reconnecting with the people doing the work behind that. But you can’t reconnect with the clothing you’re wearing if you're ignoring the people who make them and the people who do the work everyday to keep the system going - or it doesn't actually have that impact.
Liz
I think that's honestly, always a little bit interesting for us with the conversation, because we're obviously focused on secondhand clothing trades, we also advocate for government worker rights and living wage. But our community is secondhand clothing workers and so that's the conversation we're often in. I think that a lot of people maybe shop secondhand because they don't want to subscribe to the current conditions for garment workers around the world. So they choose secondhand so that they can opt out of that, whether they're buying secondhand, fast fashion secondhand, you know, vintage, or whatever, it’s a way out of that right. But then the same people don't spend time getting to know the workers, the people working or laboring within the secondhand supply chain in their own city, and that's now your supply chain, you don't just get to opt out of a supply chain overall. There's still a supply chain to secondhand and it involves the people hanging stuff on the rack, which a lot of times it's often people who are disenfranchised who are working in these spaces who can't get jobs elsewhere and might be being exploited in terms of wages. But that's not a part of the conversation. So I think exactly to your point of just like we all need to accept that no matter where we are getting our clothes from, there is a supply chain, whether it's delivering the clothes from vinted or Depop, or it's the person in the secondhand store hanging stuff on the rack. THERE IS a supply chain, no matter what you're choosing, and we all need to try to connect with the people who are part of that.
Sacha
Absolutely, and following on from this, how do we challenge the societal misconception that second-hand clothing donations are always a philanthropic act with positive impact, when in reality it’s just an act of convenience enabling people in the Global North to consume more?
Liz
We always talk about how with our work it's kind of like you've slapped someone across the face 5 times and then you’re asking them to help and they’re like, wait I don’t understand. Because you’re starting from ground zero with almost everyone in the Global North, but also in Ghana. I mean a lot of people who are on the receiving end of the secondhand supply chain don’t know anything about the system they’re a part of because they’ve been cut off as well. There are so many assumptions and I think people immediately get mad because they feel that they've been lied to - maybe by a brand and there's misleading language.
I also think we need to get to a place where the information is holistic enough and healthy enough where people can accept that they also played a role because they made certain assumptions, and maybe they do have a level of colonial mythology ingrained in how they've grown up that stopped them from asking just basic questions. You know, it's like you're dropping off 3 garbage bags of clothes - and it's in a garbage bag - to a homeless shelter or to an organization. But then you want to pat yourself on the back for doing something noble. There's a lot that needs to be broken down there - you just gave someone your trash and you've not recognized that you literally put it in a trash bag and you didn't wash it. So you have assumptions about the value that this person holds in society compared to yourself. Also you didn't think to wonder who's going to sort through all of this, who’s going to finance it. It takes money to move anything.
We’ve been doing this for a very long time, and I still feel overwhelmed and honestly afraid of how sometimes our work is received or understood. Because, a lot of media, whether we say yes or not, comes to Ghana to cover the issue, because it's sensational from an aesthetic point of view and we always try to emphasize the multiple sides of the story, and that people are working really hard, and that it's not holistically a bad thing. But I think most of the public when they read those stories, or they see those news stories, they immediately are angry and feel disillusioned by it and that can cause real problems for us on the ground. Ultimately is it really changing anything? If people just feel angry or don't see the full picture.
It worries me because it's not simple at all. And if you look at how long the conversation has been going on about garment worker rights and sweatshops, and how you look back at the 90s and early 2000s with Nike, it’s taken a really long time, and I don't even think we have a very holistic conversation or very grounded conversation about garment worker rights still.
But if I'm going into my optimistic, poetic self, I think that it’s a really incredible opportunity with the second-hand clothing trade. Because we're at a point in society where the internet is bad and it's very difficult to have a conversation, especially in sustainability, where in the conversation, there doesn't have to be a hero, a villain and a victim. Life really just isn't like that and we're creating this unrealistic characterization of people's motives and actions that I think is not helpful. And so I think that if there is a silver lining and there is a benefit to focusing on the secondhand clothing trade and trying to build a holistic conversation it’s in that the problem and the situation that we are tackling or that we confront in Ghana, there’s no singular villain or one singular victim. There's not one singular brand that is placing an order in our factory that is exploiting people, right? What we are witnessing and experiencing is the unfolding of the consequences of all of us making decisions, the consumer included. So if there is an opportunity to embrace collective accountability within that, in a way that's healthy, and that lends itself to a more productive and human conversation then that's our hope.
But I think it's very hard to do.
Sacha
The Or Foundation is pushing for Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) policies to be implemented for brands and products. Can you explain why this is so important and how this might work to tackle the burden of waste that the Global South is facing?
Liz
I think within the sustainability conversation, at the root of it is we all understand that clothing is disposable in large parts because of price, right? Price does dictate at least partially how someone values something. So as long as garments are priced below the real value or the real cost that they have to society, then we can't tackle the problem. So I think we're all trying to handle that in multiple ways. We’re trying to ensure that garment workers receive a living wage which would naturally raise the price of garments at least a little bit, and it's the same with Extended Producer Responsibility . EPR is a way to incorporate the cost of waste management and of circulating clothes into the price of new garments so that that's reflected in the decision making process, and how someone might hopefully be less likely to view a garment as disposable, if it carries more of the true cost of what it cost to produce and what it would cost to dispose of and properly manage. So EPR is essentially that - it's a tax - the brands pay on a per garment basis of clothes that they put on the market. I also think that's really important, that it's a per garment fee because again, still the one conversation that no one will have - although we’re talking about overconsumption and we’re talking about overproduction now thankfully as part of the conversation - but brands - small brands and big brands - are still not willing to publish their production volumes. It's considered a trade secret and until we do that, we don’t really understand the problem and I think it’s really hard for a consumer to understand the real difference. It’s not just them knowing how many garments a brand like H&M produces, it’s them also knowing how many garments a brand, like, one of our favourite brands in partners, Collina Strada produces. They produce very few clothes, I think it's 20,000 garments a year. So until someone learns what a small independent brand is producing, it’s hard for them to recognise how big ‘big’ really is.
So the crux of it is that clothing is exported to Ghana, because that's the economically beneficial thing to do, right? The clothing recyclers in Europe - I know there’s some evolving chemical recyclers - but the prices that we've seen out of Europe is, you know, recyclers paying 10 cents a kilogram for feed stock for their recycling. So if a clothing collector, aggregator, or charity, in the UK or in Europe can sell clothing to Ghana for a $1.75 a kilogram, but they can only sell it to a recycler for 10 cents a kilogram, then of course they're going to export it and it's not economically viable for them to not do that. So we don't have a balanced economic model. People aren't willing, brands aren't willing to pay what the true cost of recycled materials also are and so we need a subsidy to come into play to help us with the transition.
It’s so funny, we always have this conversation about the circular economy and we're literally talking about developing whole new businesses, whole new systems, infrastructure. But no one talks about how costly that's going to be and we need to subsidize that somehow. How are we going to go from having barely any repair centers in the UK, for instance, to now paying people a living wage to repair clothes in the UK - that has to be supported financially. So EPR Is a way to hopefully balance that out. And all we're saying is that if clothing is going to continue to come to places like Ghana, which it will have to, because there isn't the infrastructure in Europe, the UK, or the United States to manage the waste that's produced there, then money should also come to Ghana so that we can establish infrastructure as well. Ultimately that's what equity looks like, and what a redistribution of resources looks like and it's not this one-sided conversation, but where people in Ghana can actually choose the future that they want.
Sacha
And even if EPR policies are implemented, what needs to happen to make sure they are implemented equitably and the wealth is distributed to where it needs to go? As with the example of France being the only country to implement EPR, it seems that the wealth was not redistributed accordingly.
Liz
Ultimately the conversation about global accountability, where the money can flow to multiple places should be something that anyone working along the value chain should be excited about. It baffles me that some people see this as a threat. By saying that money needs to move to multiple points along the value chain you're saying that more money needs to go into the pot which benefits everyone, whether you're a recycler or a clothing collector or sorter, or someone repairing clothes in Europe or someone in Ghana. It would benefit everyone but it's a little bit shocking sometimes to see how closed-minded people are, because people are afraid of not having enough resources. It soon becomes about how you can claim to the little amount of resources that will exist instead of how you can join forces to increase the amount of resources that exist for everyone.
Sacha
As a result of your agreement with SHEIN starting in 2022 and the financial installments you’re receiving from their EPR fund you’ve been able to support 163 women to leave headcarrying in Kantamanto market. Could you explain a bit more about the work of the Kayayei, who physically and metaphorically carry this burden of the Global North’s excess and why it is so important to support women’s capacity to leave?
Liz
Kayayei are female headporters who can be as young as 6 years old, typically in Kantamanto, they are 14 to 25, sometimes up to 30. But these are young women that are head carrying different products around in different markets, not just in Kantamanto. They’re economic and climate migrants from northern Ghana, which is a part of the country that's been underdeveloped and unsupported for a long time, and that connects back to colonialism and it's just interesting looking at the sort of connection throughout history. But Northern Ghana is predominantly Muslim, and under colonialism the British cut people off from access to secondhand clothing and also access to books in Northern Ghana because they refused to convert to Christianity. So there's always been this disenfranchised population of women and men that have been used to labour the system that they don't benefit from. So these women end up migrating South essentially, because they're looking for a better life. There's no jobs, and there's desertification at home, and they end up head carrying because there aren't other things for them to do.
In the markets the bales that they're carrying are 55 kg, which is their entire body weight or more and what we know from working in the market for several years is that it can be fatal, and that girls can die because their necks will break under the weight of the bales. So for us, it connects back to this conversation about fast fashion again, just from the perspective of cheap commodities requiring cheap labour, and ultimately, within any system there is going to be a vulnerable population that is squeezed to make sure that money is flowing across the rest of the value chain. For the retailers and tailors in Kantamanto, Kayayei are actually their second biggest expense. The bale is the biggest expense and then kayayei is the second biggest expense, because they're typically hiring someone every single day. So that puts it into perspective. If the clothing is lower quality and if the product doesn't have enough value to trickle across a community in the first place, then, it means that the retailers are in debt, and they don't have the resources to pay someone properly. And again the kayayei end up being at the bottom of that and being the most exploited.
“Circularity cannot just replicate the exploitative patterns of the past”
Everything we do is driven by the the desire to eliminate head carrying within the market. If we build a circular economy of reuse, repair, upcycling, recycling but don't address that these women have to transport this and use their body as a forklift to transport this clothing for that industry, then we haven't changed anything. We're still not reflecting the true cost and the labour of that system. And I think that's what our work is all about. Circularity cannot just replicate the exploitative patterns of the past. And that’s again where we struggle with the the narrative or people understanding why it's important to understand Kantamanto is that if we're talking about building a circular economy then everyone working in Kantamanto now labours within that industry, but right now no one sees them as part of the fashion industry. We have to be accountable to that. We cannot allow for circularity to be built off the same exploitative patterns. So for us it’s the driver of everything we do. All of the material based work that we do, the collecting, the sorting, it’s all built around how do we do this without head carrying. How do we empower the kayayei themselves to do those jobs so that they're setting the prices, they're engaging with the retailers and tailors in a different power dynamic as buyers of their material. Ultimately the Upfit project, which is about how do we change the physical infrastructure of the market so that the women don't have to head carry. But the name of our organization the Or Foundation it means choice and alternative and for us that’s the point of everything. Fundamentally, I think all of us have a choice every day, which is that we either wake up and work really hard to preserve the privileges that we have, or we work really hard to fight for other people to enjoy the privileges that we have. I think we're not always aware of the gap between ourselves and people who are less privileged because we don’t establish what enough is for ourselves.
For us, working with the women who are working as kayayei is all about how can we accompany them out of this position where they feel that they have no agency and create a space, create opportunities and try to facilitate a structure where they can start to identify what it is that they really want for themselves. Whether that's a job, or going back to school or moving home to their family, just getting to a point where they feel that they they have the freedom to choose, where their choice is not compromised by feeling that they're forced to work a job that they know is dangerous, just because that's the only way they can eat. That’s not how we're supposed to live as human beings.
Sacha
What lessons do you think the linear fashion system can take from Kantamanto market and its circular and localized approach?
Liz
The first thing is recognizing that there are lessons. For me what Kantamanto represents is that sustainability is a language. Everyone can play different roles, there can be a consumer, there can be a tailor, there could be someone ironing the clothes, there can be someone selling the clothes but Kantamanto works in terms of the upcycling culture and the creativity, because everyone more or less is fluent in the same language of what people value. The fact that people don't rely on marketing to tell them what is cool or not cool, at least not to the same degree that we do in the global North, and the fact that people know how to sew and have grown up within social systems that value sewing as a skill. I don't think we're ever going to get to a point where every consumer can travel to the factory where their clothing is being made. But if every consumer has sown a garment, that already takes you so far in terms of the appreciation that someone will have. It's transformative for someone to have to make their own clothes, it completely transforms their perspective on value. So the first thing is valuing sewing as a skill, and really coming back to a place where we can all enter the conversation from that basic level. Then I think the other thing is self-respect.
“we've accepted the idea that everything we touch as a human being becomes less valuable because we touch it, then we view ourselves as viruses. “
One of our friends, Kwaku, who has featured a lot on Instagram has come on the delegation trips. He’s a tailor, and he makes these split panel polos in Kantamanto, he's making 100 to 150 of the garments every single day, using a waste stream he has no control over, and he doesn't complain or feel that that's not his responsibility. He’s paid very little for the garments that he makes. He only charges 8 Cedis per garment, so it's less than a dollar per garment. That’s not at all what it's worth from an outsider perspective, or what it costs him to make. But he does it because of having self respect and dignity around why he's choosing to work and he often sells clothes to retailers across West Africa, so he'll bale up the the garments that he's making, and then ship them to Burkina Faso, or Cote d'ivoire, and before he does that he takes the time to iron it and fold every single garment, and when he goes to the Bale he'll put 3 at a time, and smooth them out and make sure there's no wrinkles or no tears or anything, and you just compare that to the way that we send clothes to Ghana, and it just couldn't be more different. The clothes are just thrown in and squished, and sometimes people have slammed their boots into them. I can't help but feel that that ultimately comes from a lack of self respect. The root of the problem to me is just like we don't like each other. I think, in the global north and even in the sustainability community, I think there is a disgust for humanity that is really unhealthy and it’s driving a lot of the misdirection. Because we've accepted the idea that everything we touch as a human being becomes less valuable because we touch it, then we view ourselves as viruses. We view ourselves as something disgusting that can only depreciate a material item and can't add value to it. And I think we gotta start loving ourselves. It's obviously hard within this narrative of climate change. It's hard when you're seeing how destructive we've been as a species, and you have to recognize that. But the answer is not to hate one another or to believe that we are something that needs to be removed from the planet. I think we can change how we interact with one another and how we interact with nature. We have the power to do that. Kantamanto is full of a bunch of people who have not yet accepted this view on humanity and there’s a lot of hope and energy.