Usshertown Epiphanies: On The Frontlines of Waste Colonialism

On the receiving end of this torrent of ephemeral fashion is Kantamanto Market in Accra, Ghana, where an estimated 15 million pieces are exported to each week. 40% of these garments are beyond resale or upcycling by the market’s merchants and artisans because of thier poor quality, and are subsequently dumped in the surrounding environment, where burning pollutes the air and waste clothing clogs waterways, eventually oozing into the sea and suffocating Ghana’s Atlantic ecosystem.

Based in Accra, Katia Osei is on the frontlines of this imbalance of power in global fashion. She is the Head of Environmental Justice at the Or Foundation, an NGO working at the intersection of environmental justice, education and fashion development to build a fairer and more accountable clothing industry.  

What follows is an introspective essay by Katia on her journey from Harvard graduate to Accra and the Or Foundation, and her transition from believing that data would change the tide on fashion waste to believing in the people on the ground paying attention and working tirelessly with their bare hands and creativity to redress the injustices of over consumption, production and waste.

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There’s a unique tenderness in the interactions between the sea and those who have lived with her their whole life.

I was not taught that tenderness. I was taught models and frameworks, with the confidence that enough intelligence applied to a problem could eventually solve it. I went from Harvard to consulting, learning to see the world through the lenses of optimization, efficiency, and scale. It was intellectually satisfying work, but somewhere along the way I began to feel like I was learning everything except how to understand the world I lived in.

So, I left. Or perhaps more honestly, I ran...

I came to Accra to join the Or Foundation’s team of citizen scientists based out of the Accra Arts Center, thinking I would contribute technical research on textile waste pollution. I imagined spreadsheets, site protocols, carefully bound questions. What I did not expect was that the most profound shift in my thinking would come not from the data we generated, but from the people generating it.

Since 2022, this team has been walking the same 5 km stretch every week, down Korle Lagoon across the Accra coastline, carefully documenting patterns of textile waste accumulation. Week after week, season after season, with The Or Foundation, they have built one of the most detailed longitudinal records of textile pollution anywhere in the world, not from satellites or remote sensing tools, but through presence. Through repetition. Through commitment to seeing what is there.

Long before I arrived, they were already doing the careful work of paying attention.

When I joined in 2023, the work had just expanded from monitoring into remediation. Now, what began as a small cleanup team has quadrupled in size, collectively removing roughly 30,000 kilograms of waste every single week. Together, as the Tide Turners, with The Or Foundation, they have now removed over 2.5 million kilograms of waste from two of the most heavily impacted hotspots along the Accra coastline.

I remember standing at one of those sites early on, unable to see the sand beneath layers of discarded clothing, thinking quietly to myself: there is no way this place will ever be clean. I did not yet understand what sustained attention, collective commitment, and relationship could make possible.

I definitely did not expect to see water flowing freely again through an upstream canal that had long been blocked by accumulated waste. Admittedly, when the team first began helping to clear the passage, the work felt almost symbolic, a gesture against a scale of problem far larger than any one group could resolve. But slowly, steadily, the blockage loosened. Then one day, after one of our most intense cleanups, the water began to move again. It hasn’t stopped since.

And in between the work, I have heard some of the most rigorous reflections on responsibility, freedom, history, and power while crossing polluted wetlands, while pausing to eat some kenkey in the heat, while walking the same stretch of coast for the hundredth time. They hold one another accountable to thinking deeply, to questioning inherited assumptions, to imagining differently just as much as they hold one another accountable to showing up, week after week, even when the heat is relentless, even when progress feels slow.

Before working with the Tide Turners, I thought the central challenge of pollution was technological: better recycling systems, better materials, better policies. And all of those things matter. But what I had not fully appreciated was how deeply our environmental crises are rooted in orientation, in how we understand our place within the living systems that sustain us. What has unfolded within this team family goes beyond “cleanups”. These artists, athletes, fisherfolk, and community organizers have built something truly beautiful that I am yet to see anywhere else in the world: a new way of caring for the ocean, one rooted in showing up again and again, even when we feel so tiny compared to the scale of the problem.

Three years ago, I arrived thinking I would help generate knowledge. Instead, I found myself learning how knowledge itself can be grounded in responsibility, reciprocity, and care.

So, to the Tide Turners, who I’ve had the absolute privilege of working with thank you. Thank you for expanding my sense of what is possible. Thank you for showing me that another future for the world is already taking shape, right here in this city.