In the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, near the cities of Iquique and Alto Hospicio, mountains of second-hand clothing are becoming an increasingly severe environmental problem. These garments come from Europe, Asia, and the United States, most of them made of synthetic fibers and chemically treated fabrics that are difficult to degrade and are not accepted by local municipal landfills. As a result, large quantities of clothing are burned in the open or simply dumped in the desert, forming huge and ever-growing piles of waste. According to statistics, Chile imports about 131,000 tons of second-hand textiles each year (2022 data), of which about 70,000 tons ultimately end up in landfills or desert dumps, while the recycling rate is only about 1%.

Faced with this predicament, environmental engineer Franklin Zepeda founded EcoFibra, a company that tries to turn these discarded garments into building materials. Located in Alto Hospicio near Iquique, its production line first sorts the clothing, removes hard components such as zippers and buttons, and then shreds and presses the remaining fabric into dense panels used as building insulation and soundproofing materials. EcoFibra processes about 8 tons of clothing per day on average, with its main products supplied to low-cost social housing projects. Although this scale is negligible compared with the total waste of about 40,000 tons per year, Zepeda hopes to use it to "stop creating the problem and start solving it."

In fact, as the largest importer of second-hand clothing in Latin America, Chile has become the world's fourth-largest importer of used clothing. Fast fashion and unsold garments from developed countries pour in in large quantities, only to slowly decompose in the desert and release toxic substances. Environmental lawyer Paulina Silva points out that these garments are highly flammable, and the smoke from dump fires is toxic. Local university researcher Renallina Chavarrí and Iván Franchi, a professor at the School of Economics and Business, both emphasized the severity of the problem, with the latter saying: "There is no sustainable economic model that can coexist with a garbage dump visible from space."

Although EcoFibra's attempt is commendable, analysts believe that end-of-pipe recycling alone cannot fundamentally solve the problem; the key lies in controlling import volumes at the source. The enormous volume and polluting nature of these garments require intervention at the production end and at the level of trade policy. Chile and the international community need to jointly examine a sustainable development path for the second-hand textile trade, rather than letting it accumulate in the desert day after day.

Source: Chile's Atacama desert has dumps where huge quantities of unsold and second-hand clothing end up, and a small factory nearby now shreds textile waste from that pile and presses it into insulation pane · Originally published on 2026-09-01