Africa has been the West's dumping ground for far too long: a new recommerce enterprise aims to sell last season's high fashion at significantly lower prices.

It used to be that fashion brands would produce four clearly defined lines each year: winter, spring, summer and autumn. Now, since at least the mid-2000s, fast fashion brands are flooding the market with one collection per week of cheaply produced, low-quality apparel, enabled by fossil-fuel-based synthetic fibres.

That's driving an annual production of around 100 billion new pieces of garments, fuelling the waste crisis in the Global South. In the Nimby West, it's a largely inconspicuous crisis because it exports its unwanted apparel, masked as "second-hand", to countries such as Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and Tanzania, where a Greenpeace report estimates a truckload of garments ends up in landfill or on a pyre every second, clogging up the waterways, destroying marine life and blackening the skies.

About six billion tonnes of fashion waste ends up in Africa each year -- 23% of which is immediately disposed of.

Up to 40% of clothing that arrives in Africa is "dead on arrival": ripped, shredded and stained garments that are unsellable.

In Ghana, these bales of imported clothing are dubbed "obroni wawu" ("the white man has died clothes").

A new deal

A new "ecommerce" platform, Faro, is helping brands sell their obsolete...