A viral tweet has exposed what can only be described as the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ of cheap fashion apparel, whereby dunes of unsold stock have piled up throughout the Atacama Desert in Chile.
Almost 40,000 tonnes of unsold clothes from US markets end up in northern Chile’s free zone of Alto Hospicio each year. Amid punitive tariffs on stock removal from the area as well as pandemic-induced debt crises across the continent, there is little incentive to clean up this mess. Worryingly, these mounds of garments which have blanketed over the Chilean desert also release harmful toxins – meaning they face rejection even from landfill sites. Researchers Elyse Stanes and Christopher Gibson of the University of Wollongong argue that such products can take up to 200 years to biodegrade.
