Vast pile of discarded clothes in desert is so big it’s visible from space
By Aristos Georgiou
22 May 2023
(Newsweek) – A satellite image has revealed an enormous pile of discarded clothing that is so big it’s visible from space.
The clothing pile, which contains everything from Christmas sweaters to ski boots, is located in the Atacama Desert—the driest non-polar desert in the world—near the municipality of Alto Hospicio in northern Chile.
The pile is spread out across a clearing in the desert terrain. One side of the pile measures more than 1,000 feet across.
Texas-based satellite imagery company SkyFi recently shared an image of the pile, revealing the true scale of the pollution problem created by the fashion industry.
Chile has long served as a hub for secondhand and unsold clothing—often manufactured in China or Bangladesh—that is imported into the country from Europe, Asia or the United States before being resold around Latin America, Agence France-Presse reported.
It is estimated that around 59,000 metric tons of clothing arrive at the port of Iquique, which is next to Alto Hospicio, every year. The port is part of the Iquique Free Trade Zone—a duty-free area that was established in an attempt to encourage economic activity.
Some of the clothing arriving at the port are bought up by merchants in the Chilean capital of Santiago, while large quantities are smuggled out of the country to other parts of Latin America. But at least 39,000 metric tons that cannot be sold end up at clandestine dumps in the desert, such as the one near Alto Hospicio.
SkyFi first found out about the huge clothing pile from an article in 2021 and was curious to verify whether it was true.
“There is a lot of misinformation out there, and we often use satellite imagery as a primary data point, a source of verification,” SkyFi Growth Marketing Manager Tom Babb told Newsweek. “In the Earth observation community, this is referred to as ‘ground truth.'” [more]
Vast pile of discarded clothes in desert is so big it’s visible from space
Fast fashion has spawned a mountain of leftover clothes in the Chilean desert that’s so massive it can now be seen clearly from space
By Matthew Loh
22 May 2023
(Insider) – 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.
“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 can’t be sent to municipal landfills because they aren’t biodegradable and often contain chemical products, Franklin Zepeda, the founder of EcoFibra, a company that tries to reuse the textiles by making insulation panels, told the AFP.
So the unused garments sit next to Chile’s Iquique port, about a mile from some of the city’s poorer neighborhoods.
The landfill sometimes attracts migrants and local women, who search the dump for items they can wear or sell, per AFP. [more]
