deeply in Chile ’s Atacama Desert , there lies an ugly monument to fast way and tatty on-line wear computer memory : piles upon voltaic pile of unsold vesture hop on like synthetic sand dunes .
The majority of the man ’s clothing is made in China , literally on the other side of the world from Chile . However , huge quantities of the dress that are n’t sold in Europe , North America , and Asia terminate up here .
remnant and 2nd - hand dress are sold to merchandiser who find the significance through Iquique port in the Alto Hospicio destitute geographical zone , northern Chile . While purchaser from the capital of Santiago in the south of Chile purchase some of the clothing and redistribute it around Latin America and beyond , much of it persist unsold and is eventually dump in the Atacama Desert , a conventionally distant and Brobdingnagian desert hundreds of kilometers away .
A view of the problem.Image credit: © Cristobal Olivares/ Greenpeace
An investigation byGreenpeace Germanyin 2021 ground that up to 20 tons of old clothes end up being illegally dump in the Atacama Desert each mean solar day on average . In total , it ’s amass into a pile of some 39,000 long ton of discarded textile , fit in to theUnited Nations Economic Commission for Europe .
The mounting trouble is a relatively late one . It’sestimatedthat global wearable product reduplicate between 2000 and 2014 , with the intermediate consumer now buying 60 percent more pieces of garment compared to the early 2000s . at the same time , people keep each piece of article of clothing for just half as long as they used to .
Altogether , anestimated87 percentage of toss textiles are chucked off and terminate up in landfill , despite the vast absolute majority being feasible for recycling and repurposing .
Beyond its slews of habiliment , the Atacama Desert is afascinatinganduniqueplace . Squished between the Pacific Ocean and Andes Mountains , it ’s the driest place on earth , other than the poles , where some areas have n’t experience a drib of rain for century . It ’s such an otherworldly landscape painting , NASA expend it to train scientists who are fix to look for polarity of life on Mars .
The atomic pile of article of clothing in luck of the Atacama Desert are only the seeable impact of the clothing industry , however . One of the big issues is water usage . Cloth manufacturingusessome 93 billion cubic metre of water each year , enough to meet the need of five million people .
Along with urine usage and the strong-arm pollution it leave behind , quick mode also has a substantial impact on nursery gas emissions that lead to climate change .
Researchsuggeststhat the fashion and material industriousness was responsible for some 2.1 billion metric piles of glasshouse gas ( GHG ) emission in 2018 , about 4 percent of the world amount . That ’s more than all maritime shipping and outside flights combined .
“ The global production of clothing and footgear generate 8 % of the existence ’s glasshouse natural gas emission and , with manufacturing concentrated in Asia , the industry is mainly reliant on surd ember and innate accelerator pedal to engender electricity and heating . If we bear on with a business - as - usual approaching , the glasshouse gas pedal emission from the industry are expect to stand up by almost 50 % by 2030 , ” Elisa Tonda , Head of the Consumption and Production Unit at the UN Environment Programme , tell in astatementin 2019 .
