Take care of your ‘JUNK’
‘JUNK: Full wardrobe’ What does Matteo Ward's new docs-series teach us about our fashion issues?
On 4 March 2023, the first two episodes of 'Junk: full wardrobes', the 6-part docu-series originated from the collaboration between Will Italia and Matteo Ward that tells the story of the problems of the fashion and fast fashion supply chain, will be released as a Sky premiere.
Matteo Ward is a green activist and designer, or as he would call himself: 'fashion repentant', who has been working for years to revolutionize public opinion on the world of fashion. His latest endeavor is Junk, a docs-series aimed at sensitizing viewers and governments to active political action.
Each episode is filmed in a different country: Chile, Ghana, Bangladesh, Indonesia, India and Italy and focuses on one of the many side effects that the 'disposable' fashion industry has on the world and people with the aim of not only seeing the reality but doing something about it.
The first episode focuses on waste disposal and is set in Chile, where a great deal of attention has been focused in the last year from all over the world on what is happening in the Atakama desert, best known as the largest textile dump ever.
But where does all this waste come from and what makes such an accumulation possible?
The first stop is in Iquique, a free zone, where 'You don't pay taxes on what you import, it's mainly European appliances and clothes.' In fact, Chile, as a poor country, lives off the small proceeds it manages to obtain from these scraps and for this reason does not prohibit their importation. Every week boats with thousands of kilos of used clothes dock on the coast of the city of Iquique, and hundreds of bags of batteries begin their second life in the country. Here they are sorted and divided into 'new', 'in good condition' and 'broken or stained’, about forty per cent of all that arrives is in unusable condition, and is directly taken to landfill 'in the dunes of the desert where it covers the ground', some 49,000 tonnes of textile waste produced each year considering that a cow weighs about 800kg, we can imagine this quantity as about 55,000 cows. The economic model allows only a few entrepreneurs to benefit from this resale business while the environment and the poor population pays the damage, directly and not. For example, because the discarded clothes that are accumulated in the Taka desert are statistically composed of 70% polyester, a derivative of plastic, they tend to catch fire easily and intoxicate people. At the time of the documentary, the clothes from the famous landfill site were covered by piles of soil but that did not mean they ceased to exist, in the same way that we should be aware that our waste continues to exist even when we have no way of seeing up close what happens to it. 'I buy something I stop using it and throw it away as if nothing happened, but where does it ends up?’
Matteo Ward in Ghana
This we must learn to ask ourselves by appealing to our conscience, and this is what is specifically addressed by the second episode of the series, which is set in Ghana, specifically in Kantamanto, the largest second-hand clothes market in West Africa. Here, new batches of clothes accumulate every Thursday, amounting to '15 million discarded clothes called: '"Obroni Wawu"' 'the clothes of the dead white man', because in their culture clothes are only thrown away when one dies, these are bought by wholesalers in a closed box and resold by hundreds of thousands of dealers on the street. In this system, many women, having no other ways to work, carry heavy sacks of clothes on their heads, receiving a few pennies in return, another model that attracts those who have no other way to survive.
The ‘Or foundation’ is the only organization in the area that studies the phenomenon of the Kantamanto market. They tell us that despite the incredible hard work of recycling, which sees 25 million items of clothing circulating every month, there are still always too many and the quality is always decreasing; it is estimated that of the 15 million items of clothing arriving every week, 40% end up directly in the sewers, forcing people to live in filthy and precarious conditions. Piles of dirt clothes on which cows graze and children play dot the streets, turning slums into scenes of fire and extreme poverty.
But why and how can this happen? And what responsibility do we bear for this total lack of regulation that seems to characterize these countries? The total lack of import, recycling and disposal policies and the resulting open-air dumps in which poor parts of the world seem to be forced to live for no reason allow the European powers and big textile companies not only to get rid of their waste but also to continue to produce it in a field seemingly devoid of the foreboding truth of the consequences of the actions we are responsible for. This is why it is so carefully ensured that deregulations in these poor countries are preserved in the face of blackmail of isolation and threats of exclusion from international trade for those who attempt to change them. Often those in power are so far removed from the problems that they do not even see them, but this does not mean that beaches like Chokor Beach and its reef of rubbish stretching for more than 3 km do not exist and are not something against which our actions can have a bearing. We live in a world so interconnected and vast that it is impossible not to take into account how much of an impact our individual weight can have, even if we do not realize it, and this allows us at the same time to feel responsible for both the damage of our actions and the benefits we can bring through them.
Perhaps the only way to overcome the helplessness we often feel distressed by is to find a personal meaning to give to the enormous amount of things we are surrounded by, or as Joyce puts it, a young up-cycler interviewed by Matteo who is oriented towards creating new life out of old scraps, 'look at the bad guy in us and pull the emergency brake', preventing us from continuing to act as if no choice matters simply because we cannot perhaps see the effects directly, when what this whole story of such a big, connected world teaches us is that our strength lies in the fact that everything can have it.
This is why, before leaving us at the end of episode 1, Matteo buys a mannequin in Chile, which once dressed in clothes collected from the Atakama desert is brought back to Italy 'where it came from', and installed in Milan, in the cathedral square with a qr code provides a series of tips replicable by each of us, in our lives as conscious consumers, to correct our attitude in relation to the world of fashion:
Matteo Ward with the mannequin in Chile
Choose love! Buy clothes with which you know there is the potential for a serious and lasting affair!
Vintage-hunt: what you are looking for was probably already made years ago. Have you tried looking for it in vintage shops?
Broken or worn-out clothes? Nothing is waste until we discard it - try getting it repaired before throwing it away!
Swap party! Swap wardrobes with friends!
Choose biodegradable and/or compostable fibers where possible: if they ever become waste, at least they won't pollute for hundreds of years!
Let's extend the life of our clothes. Let's exchange them if we get tired of them. Let's prioritize vintage if we feel like a change. Let's repair them if they break. Transform them if we cannot fix them. Let us love them to the end, knowing that every point of arrival is nothing but a new beginning.