Each year, 59,000 tons of clothing arrive at the port of Iquique.
The illegal dumps of textile waste are growing at the speed of low-cost fashion production.
Chileans are mobilizing to recycle and change consumption patterns.
In Alto Hospicio, the dunes are not made of sand but of used clothing, from rhinestone skirts to après-ski, everything that ephemeral fashion can produce comes to end its life here.
To fight against this scourge, local actors are mobilizing.
Chile has specialized for forty years in the trade of second-hand clothing.
From the United States, Canada, Europe or Asia, all the textiles that consumers no longer want constitute the 59,000 tonnes that arrive each year at the port of Iquique.
It is in this commercial zone, with preferential customs duties, that a first sorting takes place for resale in the country or export to other Latin American countries.
Textile waste that generates pollution
In Alto Hospicio alone, around 39,000 t of waste is illegally stored.
“The damage and environmental impact of these micro-landfills in general, and of textile waste in particular, are beyond doubt for the municipalities where they are located,” explains Moyra Rojas, regional secretary of the Ministry of the Environment.
“These micro-discharges generate some fires, which obviously produces air pollution, and some are also located near inhabited areas.
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Whether buried underground or left in the open, textiles are not biodegradable, their chemical decomposition can take decades, and pollutes the air and groundwater.
Local initiatives
Any clothing that does not pass resale or contraband filters will end up in illegal landfills. After ten years working in the Iquique free zone, Franklin Zepeda, tired of seeing these “mountains of textile waste” near his home, decided to “get out of the problem and be part of the solution”. In 2018 he created Ecofibra to deal with this growing problem. “These wastes are those that went to the desert and now we use them as raw material to make our thermal insulation panels. "
The Ecocitex company collects, sells and donates second-hand clothes, it also manufactures recycled clothing yarn.
Rosario Hevia, President of Ecocitex, insists on the need “to educate people so that they reduce their consumption of unnecessary textiles and take responsibility for extending their useful life.
»She explains that it is by changing the way we consume that we can reduce the production of waste.
According to a 2019 UN study, global clothing production, which doubled between 2000 and 2014, is "responsible for 20% of the total waste of water in the world."
Every second, an amount of textiles equivalent to a truckload of garbage is buried or burned.
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Society
"It's good to buy cheap, but behind it, isn't there a problem?"
Nice
Nice: Ecological and economical, clothing bartering joins the trend of thrift stores
Chile
Garment
Pollution
Planet
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