The Atacama Desert in northern Chile is the driest place on Earth, yet it is piled high with used and unsold clothing from around the world. Near Alto Hospicio, faded red and blue garments and sun-bleached cotton stretch out in low ridges; up close, they are tons of tangled jeans, jackets, sweaters and T-shirts, some still bearing store tags. These clothes were manufactured and shipped across the ocean, yet were never worn by anyone before being dumped here.

Chile is the world's fourth-largest importer of used textiles and the largest in Latin America. Most used clothing enters Chile through the port of Iquique into the duty-free trade zone ZOFRI, located on the edge of the Atacama Desert. Alex Carreno, who once worked in the port's import department, said the clothes come from all over the world; resellers buy part of them and ship them to Santiago or other countries, while "what is neither sold to Santiago nor shipped to other countries stays in the free trade zone." Staying in the zone effectively means staying in the desert.

According to estimates by the Circle Economy foundation, about 59,000 tons of secondhand and unsold clothing arrive in Chile each year, of which roughly 40,000 tons go unsold and are dumped in illegal landfills; more than 300 hectares of desert are already covered with textile waste. Reinalina Chavarri, director of the Sustainability Observatory at the University of Chile's Faculty of Economics and Business, said: "Most of it ends up in places like the desert, and only about 1% is recycled."

Why do landfills refuse these clothes? Engineer Franklin Zepeda explained: "The problem is that clothing is not biodegradable and contains chemical products, so municipal dumps won't take it." This mainly applies to synthetic fibers, but the effect on the ground is the same: cotton may rot, while polyester will linger in the sun for a long time.

Zepeda decided to do something. "I wanted to stop being part of the problem and become part of the solution." In 2018 he founded EcoFibra in Alto Hospicio, not far from the dump. It is a small factory, not a solution to the entire flood of used clothing, but its approach is noteworthy.

The process is simple and physical: workers sort by material, remove non-fiber hardware such as zippers, buttons and metal clasps, and the remainder is shredded and pressed into dense mats. According to a Circle Economy case study, EcoFibra processes nearly 8 tons of textile waste per day. These mats become insulation material that blocks both heat and sound. According to the company's product literature, by mixing in wood, EcoFibra also produces finished boards.

These boards are used inside walls. The product literature says that compared with traditional boards, they offer comparable insulation at lower cost and are fire-resistant, and are mainly used in residential construction, including social housing. A jacket that crossed the Pacific but was never worn is broken down into fibers, flattened, and embedded behind the plaster wall of someone's new home, where its only job is to insulate.

There is something strange about this trajectory. Clothes are made to be worn, yet many of them skip the wearing stage entirely, going from factory floor to desert floor to inside a wall. Meanwhile, demand for cheap clothing keeps climbing. Over the past two decades, clothing purchases in Chile have risen by 233%, and the surplus has to go somewhere. Turning sweaters into insulation panels is indeed a clever second life, but it also shows how much is made that ultimately no one needs. The boards do their job well; the fact that so much material is needed to make them is the harder thing to face.

Source: Unsold and secondhand clothing piles up in dumps in Chile's Atacama desert, and a small factory nearby now shreds it and presses it into insulation panels. The boards going up inside the walls of new · Originally published 2026-09-09