European countries dump 37 million items of Mitumba in Kenya per year - Report reveals

European Countries are dumping 37 million items of ‘junk plastic clothing’ in Kenya every year, a new investigation by Clean Up Kenya and Wildlight for the Changing Markets Foundation (CMF) has revealed.

The Junk plastic clothing known locally as Mitumba is essential ‘fashion waste’ which CMF say is too dirty and damaged to be reused thus creating serious health and environmental problems for vulnerable communities in the country.

According to the United Nations-associated research company, more than two-thirds of fashion waste is made of plastics like nylon and polyester, which are impossible to recycle due to their environmentally hazardous nature.

“A large proportion of clothing donated to charity by well-meaning people ends up this way. Why? Because the backbone of the fast fashion industry is plastic, and plastic clothing is essentially junk,” said Betterman Simidi Musasia, founder and patron of Clean Up Kenya, which advocates for sustainable public sanitation.

Musasia says that researchers discovered junk clothing in some places piled as high as four-storey buildings and spilling into rivers in Kenya, which they say is an indication that African nations have become an “escape valve” for “systemic overproduction” by European Union (EU) countries.

“We went to the Ground Zero of the fast fashion world to unmask an ugly truth - that the trade of used clothing from Europe is, to a large and growing extent, a trade in hidden waste,” he said.

“Countries like Kenya are fast fashion’s escape valve. Traders buy bundled clothing blind and understandably dump the growing percentage that turns out to be useless.”

Some Kenyan traders in the Mitumba industry echoed Musasia’s sentiments affirming that the number of imports was significantly rising in the last few years.

 “In truth, our addiction to fast fashion is saddling poorer countries like Kenya with polluted soil, air and water,” Musasia explains.

Data from the UN Comtrade Database shows that between 2019 and 2020, the EU and UK exported over 5 million tonnes of used textiles.

CMF found that in 2021, Germany, Poland, the UK, Hungary, Italy, Belgium, Lithuania, Estonia, France and Ireland accounted for 95 per cent of all second-hand clothing exports from the EU to Kenya with a total value of almost €25 million (about Ksh 3.3 trillion).

Germany topped the list by exporting more than 50 million clothing items where over 25 million of these were waste and almost 17 million were plastic based.

It was closely followed by Poland and the UK jointly exporting more than 12 million plastic-based items in the same year.

This summer, the EU is due to propose a set of measures that could require brands to pay for their waste and produce items from more sustainable materials.

“Unless the fashion industry is fundamentally changed, what we have seen in Kenya and around the world will be just the beginning,” he says.

The report by CMF comes amid government threats to ban mitumba in the country.

Investments, Trade and Industry Cabinet Secretary Moses Kuria said that the Kenya Kwanza administration would do away with second-hand clothes if it found an alternative from the local textile industry.