In November 2021 Chile’s desert made headlines in many newspapers and online articles. Chile is one of the driest deserts worldwide, and is progressively being used as landfill for fast fashion debris, making the desert suffer heavily from pollution.
Many people are aware of the social effect caused by the widespread merchandising within the fashion industry, including child labour or inadequate salary, however the catastrophic impact it has on the environment isn't reported enough.
“Some 59,000 tonnes of clothing arrive each year at the Iquique port in the Alto Hospicio zone in Northern Chile.”
Chile has been a midpoint for used, pre-owned, and unsold fashion for a while now, because clothing moves through regions including Asia, America, and Europe before ending up in Chile where the items are distributed and sold again. Merchants coming from the capital Santiago purchase some amounts, and pieces get illegally imported into Latin American countries, but most of it, roughly 39,000 tonnes, which is unsellable gets left discarded in the desert.
Franklin Zepeda who is the founder of a firm called EcoFibra which utilises wasted clothing to turn into insulation panels stated that “The problem is that the clothing is not biodegradable and has chemical products, so it is not accepted in the municipal landfills.” The items that remain unsold or ones that don’t get shipped elsewhere are left in the free zone. As a tax free zone, allowing imports, exports, industrial processing, and merchandising its an area where nobody is willing to pay the required cost to remove the leftovers.