No one planted it there overnight. It accumulated, garment by garment, until it became a mountain of more than 60,000 tons of clothing in the middle of the Atacama Desert, near Alto Hospicio, in northern Chile.
The company SkyFi photographed it with its satellites and confirmed what sounded like an exaggeration: it can be seen from space. Among the remains, the NGO Ekō and the Desierto Vestido collective found labels from Zara, H&M, Nike, Levi’s, Adidas and Tommy Hilfiger. Clothing that someone bought, barely used and discarded without thinking about what would happen next.
Europe exports 30% of the world’s discarded clothing. It arrives at the port of Iquique, in a free-trade zone, and when no one buys it on the second-hand market, it ends up dumped on the sand because no one finds it worthwhile to pay to remove it. The UN has already called it an environmental and social emergency. Every European discards 11 kilos of clothing a year, and this is the picture of where it ends up.
