Sisters for Sustainable Fashion Futures
Words by Natalie Sifuma
We know a good number of Sisters who got their university statement pieces from thrifting, and we know just as many who set up thrift-store businesses to cater to different African demographics. Thrifted fashion has seemingly always done the trick, but the longevity of most items we buy or sell is often a gamble, and because most of these items are made from synthetics, when we discard our clothes, we inevitably contribute to an environmentally costly process.
The thing is, many Sisters (and Africans in general) don’t know where our discarded items end up. We are often oblivious to how close or close enough we are to the sites where our cheap or aged fashion piles up. And so to explore the concept of fashion and textiles from a social and environmental perspective, Sisters in Climate and Threading Change partnered to host an African women’s group trip to the Dandora Dump Site on Sunday 15 September 2024.
The trip, titled Fashion & Textiles: Beyond the Wardrobe, was intentionally unconventional but also educational. Organised with an understanding of what fashion means to African women, the trip was also intended to encourage a necessary discomfort on how our fashion choices affect the world around us and envision what social change in this area of our lives could look like.
Our ground partner, the Nairobi Recyclable Waste Association, welcomed our group of 10 with enthusiasm. The Association representatives were five dedicated Kenyans, and they each offered the relevant logistical and background information before we ventured into and during the tour of the Dump Site.
By standard description, Dandora Dump Site is a sprawling 40-acre yard whose story goes back to the seventies. The Site straddles a few low-income neighbourhoods in Nairobi such as Dandora—for which the Site is named, Korogocho, Baba Ndogo, and Mathare. These are the neighbourhoods where most of the 8,000 Dandora Waste Pickers come from, and theirs is a daily tale of rummaging through the shallow heaps and iceberg-sized mountains of waste in the hope of finding items they can sell.
It’s worth pointing out that to ‘manage the Site size’, waste is burnt and this is disconcerting given the number of people and households within proximity to the densely polluted air. A 2023 documentary by the Changing Markets Foundation mentioned the impact of this Site on people’s respiratory health.
At the periphery of the Site is the once magnificent Nairobi River. A natural resource that would otherwise be flowing unperturbed continues to choke on the heaps of textile in its path. Its pollution also has a ripple effect on those living along and close to its bank, making these communities prone to water-borne diseases.
Thanks to the guidance and patience of the Nairobi Recyclable Waste Association team, we got to understand the different kinds of waste beyond textiles, how this waste is sorted at the Site, a bit about the infamous ‘Trash Lords’, and see the tonnes of textiles lying useless in an area that would otherwise be used for recreational and communal purposes.
The tour concluded with a debrief that delved into existing advocacy efforts on sustainable public sanitation from the Clean Up Kenya representatives with us. It became clear that even from a policy standpoint, many roadblocks threaten the necessary development of places like the Dandora Dump Site. Still, all hope is far from lost.
As a community, Sisters in Climate understands the value African women place on fashion; in fact, our approach to having more African women join the ‘climate chat’ has been with consideration for the four F’s that speak to our community members: Fashion, Food, Farming and Flowers. This trip helped all those present understand that our fashion choices must be considerate of social and environmental wellness. The question of ‘what happens to the clothes we throw away?’ needs to be on everyone’s mind. We need to challenge ourselves to explore pathways to promote sustainable fashion futures.