The global trade in used clothing has become one of the most contentious fault lines in textile supply chains. The question at its centre is straightforward: are wealthy countries extending garment life cycles, or are they exporting waste to the Global South?

Nowhere is that dispute sharper than in Ghana, where environmental campaigners and secondhand clothing dealers have clashed for years over the impacts and benefits of used clothing exports from the Global North to African markets.

At the heart of the trade sits Kantamanto, the vast secondhand market in Accra. Wholesalers there operate as an intermediate tier between exporters in Europe, North America and elsewhere, and the retailers who buy bales of clothing to resell.

The Ghana Used Clothing Dealers Association, which represents wholesalers at Kantamanto, and a retailer who buys bales to sell on the market, were both invited to set out their positions. Their accounts frame a debate that sourcing executives cannot ignore, because it sits at the intersection of circularity commitments, waste regulation and export markets.

For brands and retailers, the stakes are commercial as well as reputational. Used clothing exports have become a de facto outlet for post-consumer textile volumes collected under take-back and recycling schemes. If importing countries tighten restrictions — or if exporting jurisdictions reclassify low-grade secondhand garments as waste under environmental law — those volumes lose their destination, and the cost of compliance shifts back upstream.

Campaigners argue that a substantial share of what arrives cannot be resold, effectively transferring disposal costs to importing countries. Dealers counter that the trade supports livelihoods and gives garments a second life that would otherwise end in landfill or incineration closer to home.

The dispute cuts across several policy tracks that apparel sourcing teams already track. Waste shipment rules, extended producer responsibility schemes, and eco-design and circularity standards all touch on how used textiles are classified, graded and exported. Where a garment is graded as reusable product rather than waste determines whether it can move freely in trade.

That classification question is increasingly live. Jurisdictions in the Global North are under pressure to account for textile waste volumes, and importing countries in Africa and elsewhere are weighing measures that could restrict or condition secondhand imports.

For the dealers of Kantamanto, the trade is an established supply chain with its own tiers, grading systems and commercial relationships. For campaigners, the flows raise questions about whether exporting countries are measuring the true circularity of their systems or simply displacing their waste stream.

Both sides agree, implicitly, on one point: the outcome will be decided by how the trade is graded, regulated and priced — not by broad claims of circularity on either side.

The sourcing decision this forces is concrete. Companies running take-back, resale or recycling programmes should verify where their collected volumes actually go, what share is genuinely reusable, and how their claims would stand up if those exports were reclassified as waste. Traceability to the final tier of the secondhand chain — the market stalls of Kantamanto among them — is now a compliance question, not a marketing one.