This is the story of how potential textile waste is intercepted, transformed and given a second life at the Material Research & Development (MRD) Facility of The Or Foundation. Speakers, hangers and laptop stands are a few of the products our talented MRD team is able to create from clothing waste coming out of Kantamanto (the world’s largest secondhand market) that would have ended up in landfills and water bodies.
Too much of the secondhand clothes that are exported to Kantamanto every week ends up as unusable waste that needs to be discarded. As we work to address these problems from source (the Global North), we are also exploring ways to bring down the quantity of waste that ends up polluting our environment. The work of transforming these materials into fibreboards and subsequently into speakers and more is one of the many alternative approaches we have.
With these products we are proving that cleaning up fashion's waste crisis can be creative, colorful and fulfilling with the potential to generate hundreds of jobs making products from materials that are responsibly and thoughtfully crafted.