We all know by now that fast fashion is a raging enemy of the environment. It never looks like “the real thing” because it’s made quickly by grossly underpaid workers using chintzy materials, some of which are bad for our bodies. The supposed thrift of cheap clothes comes with an exorbitant cost to the planet that, unfortunately, only starts with carbon emissions. Most of us tuck these facts into the back of our brains behind our gluttonous obsession with amassing trendy trinkets, but it’s hard to ignore the actual mountain made of fast fashion trash that is forming in the Chilean Desert.
Chile, I’m learning, is something of a hub for unsold and used clothing. Clothes are made on the cheap in places like Bangladesh and China, passed through Europe and the U.S., and then end up in Chile. About 59,000 tons come into Iquique port in the Alto Hospicio free zone in northern Chile, Barron’s reported. Some of these clothes are sold in Chile, and some are exported throughout Latin America, but most of them end up piling up in the Chilean desert 1,100 miles from Santiago.
