Draped in layers of denim, Sadlin Charles walks the catwalk of sand between piles of discarded clothes and tyres in Chile’s Atacama desert. His outfit has been made from items found in the surrounding heaps of rubbish, which are so vast they can be seen from space. Almost all of this waste has come from countries thousands of miles away, including the US, China, South Korea and the UK.
A staggering 60,000 tonnes of used clothing is shipped to Chile each year. According to the latest UN figures, Chile is the third largest importer of secondhand clothes in the world. Some of these clothes are resold in secondhand markets, but at least 39,000 tonnes ends up being illegally dumped in the Atacama desert. The desert is one of the country’s most popular tourism destinations, famed for its otherworldly beauty and stargazing, but for those living near the dump sites it has become a place of devastation.
