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A staggering 60,000 tonnes of used clothing is shipped to Chile each year, 65% of which is illegally dumped in the Atacama desert. To raise awareness about how this is affecting the land and its people, activists and designers organised an event amid the trash.
By now, I’m sure you’re well-aware that the world is literally drowning in clothes.
Though recycling programmes have existed for decades, with little means of recycling jeans or dresses, of the 100 billion garments bought annually, 92 million tonnes of them get thrown out. By just 2030, that figure is expected to increase by over forty million.
Yet global production continues to surge, doubling between 2000 and 2014 (according to The Economist), as does rampant consumption, with the average consumer purchasing 60% more clothes annually and keeping them for half as long as they did 15 years ago.
It’s an environmental disaster that, despite numerous COP summits and IPCC reports urging the industry to change its ways – and change them soon – shows no signs of abating.
Namely due to the fact that the world’s driest desert (and one of the most inhospitable places on Earth) has become a swiftly swelling graveyard of fast-fashion lines past.
Located in Chile, the arid Atacama is increasingly suffering from pollution, habitat loss, and water contamination as a direct result of our obsession with following trends.
According to the latest UN figures, Chile is the third largest importer of secondhand clothes in the world.
The country, which has long been a hub of secondhand clothing made in Asia and passed through Europe, sees some 60,000 tonnes of unwanted garments arrive each year at its northern Iquique port to be sold throughout Latin America.
Almost all of this waste has come from countries thousands of miles away, including the US, China, South Korea, and the UK.
What isn’t bought or smuggled – a staggering 65% to be exact, the equivalent to the weight of nearly 27,000 compact cars in scrapped fabric – finds its way to Atacama, ending up in rubbish piles you could easily mistake for sand dunes.
#WhatFastFashionIsntShowingYou
The Atacama Desert in Chile. Yup. Another colonial waste site in the global South where non white people live, where donations from wealthier countries end up. 39,000 tons of fast fashion waste you’re looking at here. pic.twitter.com/tb4CShQmW9
— Aja Barber (@AjaSaysHello) November 26, 2021
These mountains of illegally-dumped trash (it’s forbidden to dump textiles in legal landfills because it generates soil instability) are so vast they can even be seen from space.
‘This place is being used as a global sacrifice zone where waste from different parts of the world arrives and ends up around the municipality of Alto Hospicio,’ Ángela Astudillo, co-founder of Desierto Vestido, an NGO aiming to shine a light on this issue, told the Guardian.
