Largactil Hat

Shein adds about 4,700 new styles to its site every day, and the end of the line for clothes like that is a beach in Ghana where the sand has grown tentacles. 82% of what Shein makes starts life as fossil fuel. Last November Greenpeace sent 56 Shein garments and shoes to a lab. Of those, 18 broke EU chemical limits, three of them children's clothes, and the waterproof jackets carried PFAS at up to 3,300 times the limit. A dress like that gets worn twice and goes in a charity bag. What the charity can't sell is pressed into bales, and a great many go to Kantamanto in Accra, the biggest second-hand clothes market in the world. About 15 million used garments land in Ghana every week. Traders buy the bales blind, cut the string, and something like 40% is rubbish before it's touched a hanger. Around 100 tonnes a day leaves the market as waste. When Greenpeace tested the clothes on Accra's dumps, 89% had plastic in them. Some goes on the tip, where old clothes have built up into cliffs with layers like rock. Some goes into Korle Lagoon, and the rains flush the lagoon out to sea. The sea brings it back. On Jamestown beach the tide buries it in the sand and twists it into ropes, tentacles of cloth that start on the beach and carry on under the waves. Last year reporters found M&S, Primark, H&M, Zara and Next clothing dumped in the Densu Delta, where endangered leatherback turtles nest. And some of it gets burned. In Old Fadama the public washhouses heat their water over fires of old clothes, and the air inside carried benzene at almost 200 times Germany's indoor guideline. People wash in water boiled over somebody else's wardrobe. Chile has its own version. What won't sell from the free port at Iquique gets dumped in the Atacama, and the pile can be photographed from space. There are Christmas jumpers in it. Shein knows where all this goes. In 2022 Xu Yangtian's company pledged $50 million over five years to a fund for Kantamanto's waste workers. On the first of September it floated in Hong Kong and raised about $1.7 billion, enough to pay that pledge for 170 years. Meanwhile a ewe in Powys grows one coat a year. Scientists left wool and polyester in seawater for 90 days, and the sea got stuck into the wool and barely touched the polyester. Jamestown beach is what the sea does with the stuff it won't eat.

On the sixteenth of December 1960 a twelve-year-old boy was put on a table in a San Jose hospital, given electric shocks until he was unconscious, and had an ice pick hammered through the thin bone above each eye and swept from side to side through the front of his brain, because his stepmother had told the doctor he was defiant. The doctor's fee was two hundred dollars. Howard Dully was a big, clumsy, daydreaming boy whose mother had died when he was five, and his father had married a woman called Lou who could not stand him. She took him to six psychiatrists. All six told her the problem was not the boy. The seventh was Walter Freeman, who had performed more lobotomies than any man alive, who drove between state hospitals in a van he called the lobotomobile doing them by the dozen in an afternoon, with no gloves and no surgical training, and who had once done twenty-five in a day. Freeman's notes on Howard, which Howard did not read for forty-four years, record the symptoms. He objects to going to bed. He turns the lights on when there is broad daylight. He does not react to love or to punishment. He has a savage streak. On that evidence, and Lou's signature, and two hundred dollars, Freeman wrote that the boy would benefit from a transorbital lobotomy and did it four days later. Howard remembers the table. He remembers waking with two black eyes and a fever and no idea what had been done to him, because nobody told him, then or ever. His father never spoke of it. Lou put him into a state institution the following year, and the boy with the holes in his brain spent the next forty years in and out of asylums, juvenile halls, a jail, halfway houses and the street, drinking, drifting, never quite able to say why he was the way he was, with a photograph that existed somewhere of a doctor in a suit standing over a child with a steel spike in each eye socket. At fifty-six, driving a school bus, he went to find out. He found his file in Freeman's archive at a university in Washington, in the doctor's own handwriting, and read for the first time what his stepmother had said and what the doctor had agreed to. He went to see his father, who was eighty, and asked him why he had let it happen, and his father said he had been bullied into it. Howard told the story on the radio in 2005 and five million people listened to a man weep over a piece of paper. Walter Freeman was not a quack. He was a professor of neurology, the man who had brought the lobotomy to America, and the operation had won its inventor the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1949. The journals published him. The hospitals booked him. The newspapers called it a miracle. He did it to three and a half thousand people, nineteen of them children, and he kept doing it until 1967, when a patient died on the table and the hospital took his privileges away, and he spent his last years driving the country in the van looking up his old patients to prove it had worked. That is what settled science looked like from inside, to a twelve-year-old. A mother's complaint, an expert's confidence, a procedure with a prize behind it, two hundred dollars, and a lifetime nobody could give back. The same institutions now tell you what your child should eat, in the same voice, with the same certainty, and the leaflet has a logo on it. Howard Dully is in his seventies and still cannot say what was taken. Nobody ever apologised.