Chile’s Atacama is suffering from the pollution caused by fast/trash fashion.
Now the driest desert in the world is covered with at least 39,000 tons of discarded fast fashion. An illegal dumping site in norther Chile. According to a report from AFP-Agence France-Presse, the mountains of clothes consists of items made in China and Bangladesh coming from the stores in the US, Europe, and Asia. About 59,000 tons of clothing get in the port in Chile every year. The clothes, in particular, are sent to the Chile's Iquique port in the Alto Hospicio area where some of the them are resold around Latin America, but the majority that cannot be sold ends up into landfills in the desert.

"What is not sold to Santiago nor sent to other countries stays in the free zone,” Alex Carreno, a former employee in the port's import section, told AFP, because no one pays the necessary tariffs to take it away.

According to a 2019 UN report the global clothing production doubled between 2000 and 2014, and the industry is “responsible for 20 percent of total water waste on a global level.” Experts think that this is due to the progressive lowering of production costs. It’s not good news for labour or the environment. The textile industry is responsible for 20 percent of water waste globally.

The UN report also said that clothing and footwear manufacturing contributes eight percent of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions, and that "every second, an amount of textiles equivalent to a garbage truck is buried or burnt.”

“To promote the recycle is the only way out,” said Franklin Zepeda, the founder of EcoFibra, a company created in 2018 that uses discarded textiles to make insulation panels. “Because the problem is that the clothing is not biodegradable and has chemical products, so it is not accepted in the municipal landfills,” added Franklin Zepeda.

The fashion industry must change to mitigate the environmental impact of fast fashion.

See the video of France 24