You feel like a saint when you toss that old, worn out jumper into a recycling bin. You tell yourself that you are saving the planet and helping someone in need. Well, hold the applause. There is a very high chance your old outfit never reached anyone in need. It likely ended up in the middle of the Atacama Desert in Chile, helping to build a massive, colourful mountain of textile waste that you can probably see from space.
Welcome to the weird world of the Iquique Free Trade Zone in northern Chile. It acts as a massive filter for the world’s unwanted clothes. Every year, huge shipping containers arrive from the UK, North America, and beyond. They are packed with items that we deemed too ugly or too damaged for our own charity shops.
Local traders sift through these mountains of polyester and cotton. They sell the good stuff at local markets. It keeps the economy moving and creates jobs. That sounds lovely until you reach the bottom of the pile. What happens to the thousands of tonnes of stained, ripped, or just plain hideous shirts that nobody wants?
The local landfills refuse to take them. They are for household waste only. Paying for proper disposal costs money. So, what do the traders do? They act like toddlers who do not want to clean their rooms. They simply take the clothes, drive a lorry into the beautiful Atacama Desert, and dump the mess.
Every year, they ditch about 39,000 tonnes of clothing in the hills. The desert is bone dry, so these synthetic rags will sit there for decades, perhaps centuries, leaching chemicals into the sand. It is a stunning visual metaphor for the fast fashion industry. We buy it cheap, wear it once, and then make it someone else’s problem thousands of miles away.
Now, a local businessman sees a business opportunity in this trash. Bekir Conkur is building a factory that promises to turn this desert disaster into usable felt. He plans to use machines to shred your old jeans and shirts, turning them into insulation for cars or furniture. It is the ultimate irony. Your favourite high school T-shirt might one day live on as the padding inside a luxury car door.
Chile is also forcing companies to step up. New laws will eventually make the brands and importers pay for the cost of dealing with their own trash. It turns out that the only way to stop people from turning the desert into a bin is to make them pay for the cleanup.
Until that happens, your next donation might just be the latest addition to a Chilean sand dune. Maybe we should just buy fewer clothes in the first place, but that would be far too simple, would it not?
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Related topics: South America
