Chile’s Atacama Desert is known for its beauty, wildlife, starry night skies and amazing hot air balloon rides. Now it’s also becoming infamous for its dunes of discarded fast fashion.
Up to 59,000 tons of unsold clothes make their way from the U.S. and Europe to the Iquique Port in Northern Chile’s Atacama Desert every year, according to an Aljazeera estimate. The idea is to sell the clothes in Latin America. But only about 20,000 tons of the clothes leave Chile. What’s left in the Zona Franca de Iquique, or tax-free import zone, winds up piled up in illegal desert landfills or burned.
Clothing takes hundreds of years to biodegrade, if it ever does at all. Many municipal landfills won’t take textiles because chemicals they contain seep into the ground and cause problems. Some of the other problems with fast fashion — child labor, terrible working conditions and outrageous water consumption — were already common knowledge among people who care about such things.
But the idea of piles of cheap, vibrantly colored clothing journeying from China to the U.S. and then to an enormous desert in South America is mind-bogglingly bizarre and wrong. One recycling project, Ecofibra Chile, is working with importers to remove textile waste and transform it into thermal insulation panels. Other local groups are trying to get funds to address the problem of discarded clothing with heavy machinery to remove the clothes and recover public spaces, starting with areas closest to cities. Of course, there will still be the problem of where to relocate all those hoodies and dresses.
Teresa Bergen. Fast fashion stacks up in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Internet: (adapted).
It can be inferred from the text that piles of clothing are made in China, then they follow to the U.S., and eventually they are sent to Chile
