Why your recycled clothes could end up in this South American desert

A global tide of discarded clothing, much of it from Western recycling programs, is overwhelming a remote South American desert, exposing the hidden cost of fast fashion. | Contesto: cronaca

Punti chiave

• Why your recycled clothes could end up in this South American desert

Contesto

The Atacama Desert in Chile, one of the driest places on Earth, has become the final resting place for tens of thousands of tons of used clothing from across the globe, a stark monument to the broken promises of textile recycling. Mountains of unsold fast fashion, flawed garments, and items donated in good faith to charity bins in Europe and North America are accumulating in vast, illegal dumps across the arid landscape. This environmental crisis, unfolding in plain sight, reveals a fundamental failure in the international second-hand clothing trade and challenges the very notion of sustainable consumption. The journey of a single discarded garment to this remote desert is a convoluted one, tracing a path through the multi-billion dollar global trade in used textiles. Clothing donated to charities or placed in municipal recycling bins is often sorted and baled for export. While some items are resold locally, a significant portion is shipped to developing nations as a cheap source of clothing. Chile, with its major port of Iquique in a duty-free zone, has long been a hub for this trade, receiving container loads of used and unsold clothing from Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The intention is for importers to sort, resell, or re-export the materials, but the system is overwhelmed by sheer volume and poor quality. Experts point to the rise of ultra-fast, disposable fashion as the primary driver of this deluge. The plummeting quality of synthetic fabrics, designed for a handful of wears, means that a growing percentage of donated clothing is functionally worthless. These polyester and acrylic blends are not only difficult to recycle but also have virtually no resale value in second-hand markets. Consequently, importers in Chile find it economically unviable to process the lowest-grade materials, which can constitute up to 40% of a bale. With no viable local recycling infrastructure and prohibitive costs to ship the waste back, the unwanted clothing is simply trucked out of the port and dumped illegally in the surrounding desert. The environmental and social consequences are severe and mounting. The synthetic fibers of the clothing mounds do not biodegrade;...

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Categoria: cronaca