Every year 39,000 tons of unsold cheap clothes end up in the Atacama Desert in Chile because they are too toxic for the municipal landfills.
Iquique - It's no secret that there is a lot going on in the clothing industry.
The fact that “fast fashion” in particular - that is, cheap clothes that are sometimes sold for cents over the counter - is not created under fatal working conditions in emerging countries either.
A video from the Chilean Atacama desert now shows that things are no less unscrupulous at the end of the value chain.
A
camera One
team
paid a visit to the driest desert in the world and filmed a mountain of textile rubbish that can hardly be hidden behind the huge dunes.
The images show the shocking extent of a clothing dump around a small wasteland in the desert.
The filmmakers fly a drone over the colorful mountain of shame: Thousands of tons of clothing were "disposed of" here.
It is not about worn and then thrown away T-shirts, pants and the like, but brand new clothes that have not found a buyer and have been sorted out.
"Fast fashion": What is not sold quickly ends up in a huge landfill in the desert
For the most part, the hundreds of meters long mountain of rubbish consists of excess production from the “fast fashion” industry.
In China or Bangladesh, some of the clothes are produced by children and always under unworthy working conditions and are distributed via the port of Iquique in Chile, which is the Latin American hub for cheap fashion.
If a buyer cannot be found quickly, they are sorted out - and apparently end up on a grand scale in the Atacama Desert.
As the news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports, citing a former employee in the import department of the port of Iquique, around 59,000 tons of cheap clothes pass through the capital of the Tarapacá region every year.
Only 20,000 tons of it actually find a buyer - the remaining 39,000 tons end up in the dump in the desert.
Clothes cemetery in the Atacama Desert: A man tries to recycle the garbage
“The problem is that the clothes are not biodegradable.
It contains chemical products, which is why it is often not accepted in municipal landfills, ”explains Franklin Zepeda of the AFP.
He is the founder of the EcoFibra company and tries to make heat and sound insulation panels for buildings from discarded clothing.
That remains a drop in the ocean, especially since it is a million times larger than this one landfill in the Chilean desert.
According to the United Nations, the fashion industry is responsible for eight to ten percent of global carbon dioxide emissions and uses more energy than the aviation and shipping industries combined.
According to
Business Insider
, almost every second a garbage truck full of clothes is taken to a landfill to be burned.
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