Fashion Brands Are Paying to Clean Up Textile Waste

Your donation bin has a destination, and for once the fashion industry is standing in it. On 2 October 2026, Adidas, Bestseller, H&M Group and Inditex unveiled the Apparel Recovery Coalition inside Kantamanto Market in Accra, Ghana, a two-year experiment asking why brand money for textile waste should stop at the borders where the clothes were first sold.

Built with Ghana-based nonprofit The Or Foundation and run day to day by Circle Economy as its independent facilitator, the coalition will test whether producer-responsibility funding can follow secondhand garments across borders into the countries that receive them. The plan is to pay for reuse, upcycling, recycling and proper waste handling in the markets where discarded clothing actually ends up, rather than only in the wealthy countries where it was sold new.

As reported by ESG Dive, the coalition intends to use its two-year run to develop and test a business model that mirrors how post-consumer textiles really move around the world, pulling brands, sorters, recyclers, policymakers and affected communities into designing it together.

Why a Ghanaian market sits at the center of the textile waste debate

The launch venue was the message. About twenty-five million garments are recirculated through the market every month, sorted, repaired, dyed and resold by tens of thousands of traders, tailors and upcyclers. But mixed in with the wearable bales are clothes too damaged or low-quality to ever sell, and traders are left paying to dump or burn textile waste they did not create, the dynamic activists call textile waste colonialism.

Ghana is one stop on a much bigger route. According to TEXtalks, citing European Environment Agency figures, European countries exported more than one and a half million tonnes of used textiles in 2025, roughly three point two kilograms for every person in the EU, with Africa receiving forty-three percent and Asia forty-eight percent. The nonprofit's co-founder Liz Ricketts has argued for years that the fees brands pay to manage textile waste should travel with the garments across borders instead of staying home.

What the brands will actually pay for

The four brands will make voluntary contributions during 2026 and 2027, though the amounts have not been disclosed. As reported by Modaes Global, the first demonstration project will operate around the Accra market, funding infrastructure upgrades, environmental remediation and training programs for workers and traders, while a second demonstration project is planned for another country that receives large volumes of secondhand clothing.

The sequence moved fast. A press release announced the coalition on 29 September 2026, the public launch followed at the market on 2 October 2026, and the funding window now runs through 2027, with findings expected to show whether cross-border producer responsibility can work in practice. After that, the experiment expands: the coalition plans to replicate the model in at least one more recipient country.

The catch: every cent is voluntary

None of this is law. The contributions are voluntary, the amounts are secret, and skeptics note that producer fees still do not legally cross borders anywhere, so the textile waste problem keeps landing on the traders. At the launch, KOBA president Reverend Opoku Afreh said the community expects the coalition to "build upon the existing knowledge, skills and resourcefulness of the Kantamanto community" rather than replace it, as reported by Global Textile Times. For now the only real pressure is reputational: the brands signed up in public, inside the market itself, and walking away would be visible.

What to watch next

For anyone who thrifts, this is the other side of the resale boom: not the clothes that get a second life, but the ones that don't, and who pays to deal with the textile waste they leave behind. If the pilot produces hard evidence, it could shape how producer-responsibility rules treat exported clothing, including in the EU. Watch for two things: whether the brands disclose what they actually spent, and which country hosts the second demonstration project. One of the most-watched experiments in fashion this year just moved the bill a little closer to the people who created it, and for once, they showed up to hear it.