The Cut of Women's Clothes 1600

BBC - This World: The Secret Life of Your Clothes (2014)
HDTV | 1280x720 | .MP4/AVC @ 2500 Kbps | 58mn 55s | Audio: English AAC 160 kbps, 2 channels | Subs: English | 1.09 GiB
Genre: Documentary

In Britain we give thousands of tons of our unwanted clothes to charity shops every year. But where do they actually go? It turns out most don't ever reach the rail of the local charity shop; they are exported to Africa. And even though we have given them away for free, our castoffs have created a multi-million pound industry and some of the world's poorest people pay good money to buy them. In this revealing film for BBC Two's This World, Ade Adepitan tells the fascinating story of the afterlife of our clothes. He follows the trail to Ghana, the biggest importer of our castoffs. One million pounds' worth of our old clothes arrive here every week. Ade meets the people who making a living from our old castoffs, from wholesalers and markets traders to the importers raking in a staggering £25,000 a day. But not everyone is profiting. With cheaply made western clothes flooding the market, the local textile industry has been decimated. Ade visits one of the last remaining cloth factories and finds it on its knees. And the deluge of our clothes isn't just destroying jobs; it has also had a seismic effect on Ghanaian culture.