A giant dump of unused fast fashion clothing in Chile’s Atacama Desert is now clearly visible to satellites.
The still-growing mountain of discarded or unworn clothes — manufactured in Bangladesh or China and sent to retail stores in the US, Europe, and Asia — are brought to Chile when they aren’t sold, according to Agence France-Presse.
At least 39,000 tons of those clothes accumulate in landfills in the Atacama Desert, the outlet found in 2021.
On May 10, a high-resolution satellite photo of the discarded clothes was posted in a blog by SkyFi, the developers of a satellite photo and video app.
–SkyFi (@SkyfiApp) May 10, 2023
“The 50 cm resolution image, which is classified as Very High Resolution, was taken using satellite imagery, and it shows how big the pile is compared to the city in the bottom of the picture,” the developers wrote.
The clothes cannot be sent to landfills as they contain chemicals and are not biodegradable, Franklin Zepeda of EcoFibra told AFP.
The unused clothes are located near the port of Iquique in Chile, a little over a mile away from the poorer areas.
The dump attracts local and foreign women who look for clothes to wear or sell. This is according to AFP.
The fast fashion industry aims to give consumers affordable access to fashion trends but contributes between 2 to 8% of the world’s carbon emissions, the United Nations found in 2018.
Nearly 85% of all textiles go to dumps every year, and fashion production consumes vast amounts of water and pollutes rivers and streams, Insider’s Morgan McFall-Johnsen previously reported.
The Ellen McArthur Foundation, a UK think-tank, estimated that enough clothes to fill a garbage truck are burned and sent to a landfill every second.
Fast fashion’s market size is expected to grow to $122. 9 billion in 2023, up from $106. 4 billion in 2022, according to market research firm The Business Research Company.
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