Rachida Bouhid, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)
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Industrialized countries send millions of metric tonnes of used clothing, electronic equipment and other products to the Global South, and with them, the environmental and health costs tied to producing, consuming and disposing of those goods.
In Accra, Ghana, thousands of pieces of secondhand clothing arrive each week at the Kantamanto Market, one of the world’s largest textile resale hubs. Some of these garments will find a new buyer and get a second life. Others — unsellable or low-quality — will end up in dumps, waterways or informal landfills.
The environmental accountability that applied to these products back in Europe or North America doesn’t follow them to Ghana.
It’s a paradox rarely discussed: materials circulate globally, but environmental responsibility stops at the border.
When we drop off a used phone at a collection point, donate clothes to an organization or replace an obsolete computer, we often feel like we’ve done our part for the environment. But the story doesn’t end there. Many of these items begin a second life elsewhere, or simply reach the end of the road, sometimes thousands of kilometres away.
Complex and hard-to-trace chains
This issue came up earlier this year at a symposium entitled When the Global South Inspires the Global North, held during the 93rd Acfas (Association canadienne-française pour l’avancement des sciences) congress.
I was in attendance as part of my research on organizational governance models and the shift toward a regionalized circular economy.
In her opening remarks, Jocelyne Landry Tsonang of the African Circular Economy Network pointed out that products often travel without the responsibility mechanisms, eco-taxes or funding that should come with them. The environmental and social costs associated with the end of a product’s life are then shifted to regions that generally have fewer resources to manage them.
Electronic waste is a particularly telling case. According to the Global E-waste Monitor 2024, the world generated 62 million metric tonnes of electrical and electronic waste in 2022. Yet only 22.3 per cent of this waste was officially collected and recycled through documented channels. The rest often follows paths that are difficult to trace, feeding into complex global markets.
As Canadian geographer Josh Lepawsky demonstrated in his 2018 book Reassembling Rubbish, electronic waste doesn’t just flow in a straight line from north to south. It moves through globalized networks where reuse, repair, material recovery and dismantling all intersect.
But even when these flows generate economic value, the environmental and health risks tend to stay concentrated in the regions where the products end up.
The uneven distribution of pollution
In several African cities, waste pickers extract copper, aluminum and other metals from used electronic devices. Their work helps recover resources that would otherwise be lost. However, these activities are frequently carried out without adequate protective equipment, under precarious conditions and with little institutional recognition.
This is what Canadian scholar Max Liboiron calls an unequal distribution of pollution. In her 2021 book Pollution is Colonialism, she argues that environmental harm is never spread neutrally. Some populations benefit while others absorb a disproportionate share of the fallout.
The textile industry provides another striking example. Every year, large volumes of used clothing are exported to second-hand markets in Africa, Latin America and Asia. When a significant portion of these shipments consists of low-quality clothing that is unsellable or difficult to recycle, the receiving countries are left with a waste management problem they did not create.
The Kantamanto market captures this perfectly. It’s often held up as a circular-economy success story thanks to the sheer scale of reuse and repair happening there. But it’s also stuck with mountains of clothing nobody will buy. The environmental cost of that clothing doesn’t fall on the markets that shipped it out — it falls on Ghana.
Better integrating circular economy practices
A 2017 analysis by the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University defines the circular economy simply — it’s a model that cuts resource extraction and waste through reuse, repair, recycling and longer product lifespans.
But as early as 2015, researchers writing in Economy and Society warned that debates on circularity tend to fixate on material flows and technical fixes, sidelining the social, political and territorial questions underneath.
This critique is particularly relevant for Global North-Global South trade. The articles compiled in the December 2024 special issue of VertigO, dedicated to the circular economy in the Global South, show that circular practices — far from being limited to the institutional models promoted in industrialized countries — are based on local systems of repair, reuse and recovery that have long existed, often outside formal frameworks.
The people who sustain these systems contribute to value creation, waste reduction and resource circularity, yet they are rarely factored into the financing or governance of the circular economy.
The issue therefore goes beyond recycling. It is about how responsibilities get distributed globally. The Basel Convention regulates the transboundary movement of hazardous waste, but plenty of gaps remain when it comes to used goods, textiles or electronics meant for reuse.
The environmental costs associated with products are shifted to the destination regions rather than borne by the markets that put them into circulation. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)
A better approach to responsibility
There are increasing calls for a broader definition of responsibility, one where the benefits of bringing a product to market, and the costs of its end of life, don’t simply stop at the border. A truly sustainable circular economy means circulating more than materials: it means circulating responsibility, funding and protections too.
None of this means shutting down the global trade in used goods. In many parts of the world, these flows support real economic activity, extend product life and create local jobs. The challenge is making sure financial and regulatory responsibility travels with the products themselves.
Canada isn’t immune to this problem. Our recycling, deposit-return and extended-producer responsibility systems are still built around national or provincial borders, even though the products we consume, and the waste they eventually become, are part of global supply chains.
Sorting our waste more carefully is a good first step. But a real shift toward circularity means asking where things go once they leave our homes, who’s responsible for them and what resources back that responsibility up. If our waste crosses borders, our accountability needs to as well.
Rachida Bouhid, Ph.D Scholar, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
