In Chile, some 1,850 kilometers north of the capital Santiago, is the port city of Iquique. Iquique has a seafront casino, nearby beaches and a duty-free port. Chile imports many international goods without customs and taxes through this port including vast volumes of secondhand clothing from around the world. The highest quality items are resold abroad but most, predominantly the fast-fashion items, are rejected and then dumped into the Atacama desert, one of the driest places on Earth. A practice with the government does little about.
Once in the desert they grow into massive mounds and are then burned - it’s not clear whether this is to make more space for more discarded clothing or to destroy evidence of this harmful practice. Whatever the reason, the burnings create unhealthy air.
According to Grist, “Activists have been fighting against this desert dumping for years, documenting the burnings and suing both the federal and local governments to stop it. But the real blame for Chile’s mess lies beyond the country’s borders. From the moment these garments are spun from fibers to the time of their undignified disposal, they are part of a vast global pollution machine — one that has grown massively as the world economy has globalized and factories have begun pumping out ever-cheaper, ever-faster styles to customers half a world away.”
The number of clothes churned out by so-called fast fashion is astounding - “some 170 billion garments a year — roughly half of which wind up being thrown out within that year.” The production of this clothing “generates as much as 10 percent of all planet-warming emissions, making it the second-largest industrial polluter, while also holding the distinction of being the world’s second-largest consumer and polluter of water. When all its many offenses are cataloged and counted, fashion is the third-most-polluting industry on the planet, after energy and food.”
See the article for deeper dives into the environmental impact of various clothing (and footwear) items, what brand(s) you could substitute for a lower impact as well as glimmers of hope associated with ideas being put forward by those in the fashion industry around creating “circularity” - “a term that refers to a closed-loop supply chain that continually repurposes clothing.”