Nearly half of the garments sewn are never sold and go straight to the garbage dump, sometimes on another continent. The world's largest dumping ground for clothes is becoming the Atacama Desert. This is also where the reindeer sweaters you get under the Christmas tree can go.
This text has been auto-translated from Polish.
When you reach the Atacama, you're hit by the dry, desert-heated air. You may also get dizzy from the altitude, in some areas exceeding four thousand meters above sea level. But what is most impressive in the Chilean desert are the landscapes - cosmic, austere, reminiscent of landscapes from another planet. Here you will find colorful lagoons, lunar valleys, massive volcanoes and geysers shrouded in smoke.
Above, a pristine sky stretches, making the Atacama one of the best places on Earth for astronomical research. Nowhere else do the stars seem as close as here - among the desert expanses of the Chilean north.
In recent years, the pristine vastness of the Atacama, an area comparable in size to Greece, has been turning into the largest garment dump in the world. A huge textile landfill is growing in the northern part of the desert, with up to 60,000 tons of clothing going into it every year. The sight - first revealed to the world in late 2021, via a famous photograph by Martin Bernetti - is gruesomely impressive. Amidst the cosmic landscapes and Earth's unique desert ecosystem, masses of toxic trash visited from afar, mostly from the United States and Europe, are landing.
Digging through the growing mountains of clothing, one can find colorful tops from H&M, autumn coats from Zara, jeans from Shein, Nike shoes and tons of other products from a variety of familiar-sounding brands, including more luxurious ones. Most are European or American, though of course the clothes were sewn not in countries of the global North, but at the lowest possible cost in the sewing rooms of Bangladesh, Burma or Cambodia.
Local activists and journalists have already begun referring to this part of Atacama as cementerio de ropa - a graveyard of clothes. The gigantic dump continues to expand, stacking up into growing mountains of items and consuming more parts of the desert.
The textile industry is now the second (after the fuel industry) most damaging to the climate and the environment. It contributes to massive soil pollution and river poisoning (including lead, arsenic and mercury), consumes at least 20 percent of the world's water resources and emits more than 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions - more than the combined emissions of international flights and shipping.
Apparel manufacturing generates more than 90 million tons of synthetic garbage annually and accounts for 10 percent of the microplastic floating in the oceans. What's more, only 12 percent of the total mass of "used," returned or unsold clothing is effectively recycled, and only one percent goes back into further circulation as new textiles. This is because the processing is costly and complicated - most clothing today is sewn from either the cheapest synthetic materials (primarily polyester, acrylic and nylon) or difficult-to-process blends of natural and synthetic fabrics. Plastic clothing from global brands will take several hundred years to decompose.
One of the first companies that in recent decades decidedly focused on quantity at the expense of quality, giving sewing an express pace, was Spain's ZARA. It was in the context of this brand that the term fast fashion was born, first used in the pages of the New York Times in the early 1990s. It was the time when the company of Amacio Ortega, now one of the wealthiest men on Earth, entered the American market, opening its first boutique in New York. ZARA then began to produce even faster and on an even larger scale than before, releasing a finished product on the shelves within just 15 days of creating a design.
Other companies, including Sweden's H&M, Britain's TOP SHOP and Ireland's Primark, soon came into competition, and under the guise of democratizing and egalitarizing fashion, they began to push consumerism even further, reaping multi-billion dollar profits from massified sewing in slave-like conditions. Many chain stores reached such an absurdly fast pace of production that they began to introduce no longer a few, but dozens of different lines a year. And just when it seemed that it was impossible to produce faster and cheaper, brands such as Shein entered the game. The Chinese company tripled the revenues of the existing giants and took the speed and junk nature of the apparel industry to an even higher level.
It is estimated that today's textile industry produces more than 100 billion pieces of clothing each year, more than double the amount produced just 20 years ago. These numbers have long since exceeded indicators of actual demand, because, as a report commissioned by McKinsey & Company points out, so much clothing is sewn that more than 40 percent of the clothes produced fail to sell. Even if the production of clothing around the world were suddenly halted as of tomorrow, there would still be several times as much clothing as the Earth could safely accommodate and people could dispose of for several years.
The highest price of the corporations' enrichment and over-consumption of the global North is paid by the global South. This was brilliantly described, for example, by Aja Barber in her book Consumed. The Need for Collective Change: Colonialism, Climate Change, and Consumerism. "Fashion deepens and perpetuates the cycle of exploitation and oppression. Ultimately, it most threatens and harms those who are at the very beginning of that cycle, and then at the end of it," writes the American researcher. Overproduced T-shirts, pants, jackets or bags are most often burned or turned into environmentally toxic waste, dumped in Africa (including in multi-mile-long landfills in Kenya, Ghana or Nigeria) or where they originally came from, namely China and Bangladesh, among others. Or on the Atacama, where landfills of unwanted clothing are now so huge that they can be seen from space.
How do clothes end up in the Chilean desert? It all starts in Iquique - the capital of one of Chile's northernmost regions and one of the country's most important ports. The largest port duty-free zone in South America, ZOFRI (Zona Franca de Iquique), is located here. Imported products arrive here every day. And among them are tons of new, never-sold, used or returned clothing. They arrive here mainly from the United States and Europe - Chile has remained the continent's largest importer of textiles for years.
In theory, according to the country's regulations, imported clothing can either be processed or sold. However, it is not in the interest of clothing corporations to invest in recycling or upcycling, the safe disposal of textiles or their re-sale. This is because it would be too labor-intensive and costly. It is much more profitable for the big companies to get rid of the problem: to ship the clothes by ship to South America and abandon them in a remote desert.
All the more so because existing laws allow it, and the Atacama area remains a tax-free zone, making it a particularly attractive place to store waste. Abandoned textiles can lie here for years, with no additional fees and no unpleasant consequences for the manufacturers.
The consequences are borne by the ecosystem and borne by local residents. "Our city has turned into a dumping ground for the world. Only 15 percent of imported clothing is re-sold here, 85 percent ends up in illegal landfills." - Patricio Ferreira Rivera, mayor of the city of Alto Hospicio, near which mountains of textile trash are growing, appealed two years ago.
The neighborhood of landfills is harming residents. A variety of chemicals and microplastics are released from the clothing, poisoning nearby soils and the few water sources (Chile's north has been struggling for years with an ongoing drought). Fires often occur at landfills, during which clouds of toxic substances escape. "We are demanding a change in the law and existing trade agreements. We don't have the resources ourselves to be able to solve this problem. These are not small landfills - these are tons of clothes, which continue to be trucked into the desert and pollute the entire neighborhood, despite protests. We've had enough," Ferreira Rivera explained for months.
With a population of more than 140,000, Alto Hospicio - like the nearby part of Atacama - has in recent years become a so-called "sacrifice zone" (sacrifice zone) - an area heavily exposed to environmental pollution and the impact of toxic substances or waste that appear nearby. Sacrifice zones, wrote US sociologist Ryan Juskus last year, are characterized by disproportionately high industrial pollution and become victims of various industrial "side effects" that are harmful to nature and human life and health. Due to environmental contamination, residents of such places are also much more likely to develop cancer, respiratory diseases, strokes or heart problems.
According to a 2022 UN report, nearly 9 million people in the world currently live in sacrifice zones - and they are not always in the global South. One of the most contaminated places to live is in "the richest country in the Third World" (as Charlie Le Duff wrote), the United States. This is the so-called Cancer Alley (Cancer Alley) in Louisiana, stretching along the Mississippi River between the suburbs of New Orleans and the city of Baton Rouge.
There are as many as 150 refineries and factories along a stretch of nearly 130 kilometers. Their activities mean that the air the residents (mostly African-Americans) breathe is contaminated with ethylene oxide, a carcinogenic toxin also responsible for, among other things, fertility problems and DNA damage. Measurements several months ago showed that the level of this substance in the air is even higher than previously thought, far exceeding acceptable standards, and that residents are dozens of times more likely to develop cancer than in other parts of the country.
The formation of such sacrifice zones is closely related to the deepening of social inequality. At one pole is a group that gets rich abundantly from the strong expansion of a particular industry; at the other is a group that tends to be among the economically disadvantaged and becomes even poorer under the influence of increasing pollution.
The inhabitants of the sacrifice zones are usually low-income people belonging to the least privileged social classes - this is the case in Louisiana, and the same is true in Alto Hospicio, which for years has remained one of the poorest places in Chile. Today it is becoming a city of migrants, coming from Venezuela and Bolivia, among others. In Chile, this is the sixth "official" dedication zone - the others are Quintero-Puchuncaví, Coronel and Mejillones in central Chile, and Tocopilla and Huasco in the north.
In 2022, when the graveyard of clothes made headlines around the world, it was decided to get rid of the problem: there was a huge fire, in which a large part of the collected textiles was burned. "There was suffocating smoke over the whole area for several days, everything stank of burning plastic and it was impossible to breathe," she - Ángela Astudillo, a law student and activist from Alto Hospicio, said in an interview with El Pais. "Later, there were reports in the media that the problem had been solved, but that's not true. The Atacama continues to receive tons of textiles. The landfills haven't disappeared, they've simply moved farther into the desert to make them harder to locate," she says.
The activist admits that when she first saw with her own eyes the piles of designer clothes in the middle of the desert, she was horrified; a sense of helplessness, sadness and deep absurdity came over her. She decided to act and in 2020, together with three friends, founded the NGO Desierto Vestido. In it, she is involved in climate education and teaching responsible consumption, designing circular fashion, and above all, working on the ground - cleaning the desert of textile trash.
In April of this year, Desierto Vestido joined forces with fashion collective Fashion Revolution Brazil and Brazilian marketing agency Artplan, jointly organizing a series of fashion shows at the landfill - Atacama Fashion Week. The collection was created by São Paulo-based artist Maya Ramos, and all the designs on display were based on clothes from the desert. Ángela herself also designs and creates upcycled clothing on a daily basis. She regularly traverses piled-up landfills, documenting them in photographs and collecting abandoned items to give them a second life.
"When you start creating something from things that someone has thrown away, the definition of what is waste becomes relative. If you just find the right way, you can create something really great. And at the same time help our desert at least a little bit and reverse its tragic fate." - says Ángela, who has no intention of giving up in her work. She wants to work until she does, even though neither the Desierto Vestido projects, nor the actions of local councilors and lawyers, nor the protests of residents have had any effect so far.
Alto Hospicio, located on the outskirts of the long country, more than 1,500 kilometers from Santiago, is still left to fend for itself. Ships laden with unsold clothing continue to sail to Chile.
