What Happens to Our Clothes When We Don't Want Them Anymore?

Chile’s Atacama Desert is not the first place you expect to see when you talk about textile dumping. It turns out that the Atacama Desert – formerly famous for being the driest desert in the world – is now famous for another reason. The Atacama Desert was home to a monstrous heap of our unused and abandoned clothes. Even worse, the Atacama Desert’s gigantic clothing dump grew so big that satellites could see it from space.

For the last few years, fashion has been bristling with discussion on how unwanted textiles are being dumped in developing countries. See the New York Post’s article on the mountains of exported clothes in landfill in Kenya and the documentary by the Changing Markets Foundation exposing the export of fast fashion’s abandoned cheap synthetic clothing (also to Kenya).

Unfortunately, this situation of palming off our unwanted clothes isn’t new at all. With a quick Google search, there are articles about fashion “dumping into the Global South” stretching back to 2021. But apparently the situation of our exporting unwanted textiles is relatively fresh news to people, especially those who don’t work in close proximity to the fashion industry.

As a bit of an experiment, I posted the satellite image of the Atacama Desert situation to my Instagram story. I wanted to see the reactions and thoughts of the non-fashion crowd to the fallout from the global fashion machine.

Some of my followers are either working or have worked in the fashion industry, though most of them aren’t or haven’t. Turns out, in a quick poll of my followers, that most didn’t even know about what’s going on in the Atacama Desert.

I don’t know about you, but I find this result completely mind-boggling. How can the world have completely missed the huge pile of clothes that can be seen from space? The fashion industry doesn’t exactly advertise this, and if I didn’t work in fashion, I’d bet I wouldn’t know either..

As much as the fashion industry keeps trying to solve the issue of being one of the biggest contributors to environmental instability in the world, are we really doing enough to educate people on the environmental fall out of fashion, particularly fast fashion?

I think my little Instagram poll shows how far we have left to go to find some sort of resolution between fashion and the environment. Especially with shifting the mindset of people to not engage in fast fashion and educating them about where cheap synthetic clothes go to die.

If we want to give people pause before they add to cart, we need to do more, and the information and solutions need to be accessible to the everyday person.

And you know what else I found out? The monstrous Atacama Desert clothing gravesite had started to shrink since October 2021.

So, where have all the clothes gone? Have they been incinerated?

I will leave it to your imagination. Or, alternatively, you can read this LinkedIn post for another intriguing perspective.

About this content

This article was written by Rachel Gallagher, founder of About Your Clothes, a fashion education platform helping people understand how fashion affects people and the planet.

Rachel is a fashion writer, editor and educator whose work explores fashion communication, textile waste, garment workers, supply chains, materials, overconsumption, and circular design. She creates fashion education for everyday people who want to better understand the systems behind what they wear.

This article is part of About Your Clothes’ editorial series on fashion systems and their impact on the planet, and the true cost of clothing.