This article is part of our ‘(Re)Made in Ghana’ series, which explores what one of the world’s largest circular fashion ecosystems — Kantamanto Market — can teach us about the future of fashion. Read our series on ‘Made in Italy’ here, ‘Made in India’ here, and ‘Made in the UK’ here.
A few years ago, Ghanaian American non-profit The Or Foundation tried to strike up a collaboration with a European textile-to-textile recycling startup. It was a common-sense pairing. Ghana has an abundance of used textiles, receiving some 15 million garments per week from the Global North, much of which cannot be reworn or repurposed. The recycler, on the other hand, needed feedstock, and lots of it. But an unexpected bump in the road revealed a systemic barrier to circular fashion: global shipping codes were not designed for the circular economy, and now they were thwarting progress.
Shipping codes, or Harmonised System (HS) codes, were developed by the World Customs Organization in 1983 to help customs officials make sense of global trade. The six-digit codes — of which there are more than 5,000 — are used to classify products being imported and exported between jurisdictions, and to determine which taxes and duties are owed.
“HS codes are critical to every cross-border movement of materials, because they allow customs to understand what’s being exported and imported,” says The Or Foundation co-founder and executive producer Branson Skinner. “If you trade in new garments, there are hundreds of codes, and they’re super segmented, from fiber type to garment type and any other number of nuances.” Circular products, however, have just a couple of options. As a result, Skinner says the HS codes in this segment of fashion are no longer fit for purpose. “For secondhand, you [have to] take all of that [nuance] and you scramble it up into one code, which currently encapsulates everything. In terms of transparency and traceability, we’re not setting ourselves up for success.”
Kantamanto Market in Ghana is home to hundreds of upcycling designers, but their potential to export products has been thwarted by shipping codes that weren’t designed for circularity.Photo: Bella Webb
The used clothing collected by The Or Foundation was imported to Ghana under HS6309, which covers worn clothing among other worn articles. Despite the fact that The Or Foundation had collected the waste textiles from resellers in the local market, sorted them by color and fiber type, pre-processed them to remove finishings and fastenings, and cut them into panels, ready to be recycled, its only option was to re-export them under the same HS code, says Skinner, because there was no other option that acknowledged the value added.
In the eyes of customs officials, the materials were still just worn articles, whether they had been processed or not, and exporting under the same code you imported something as raises suspicion, kick-starting a slew of additional questions at customs. “That creates a major roadblock at customs and brings extra scrutiny, which has massively limited our capacity to explore global partnerships for recycling,” says Skinner.