"THERE’S AN ACTUAL MOUNTAIN OF TRASHED FAST FASHION IN CHILE", 08 November 2021

... Clothes are made on the cheap in places like Bangladesh and China, passed through Europe and the U.S., and then end up in Chile. About 59,000 tons come into Iquique port in the Alto Hospicio free zone in northern Chile, Barron’s reported. Some of these clothes are sold in Chile, and some are exported throughout Latin America, but most of them end up piling up in the Chilean desert 1,100 miles from Santiago...

About 39,000 tons of fast fashion end up in these piles in the Chilean desert every year...

The reason this particularly gross mountain of capitalist waste is forming in Chile right now is obviously complicated, but the main reason seems to be that this particular dumping area — which is populated by some of the poorest people in Chile — is a “free zone,” which means that it is considered to be outside of Chilean territory and therefore the “merchandise” that arrives here doesn’t get taxed.

"This clothing arrives from all over the world," Alex Carreno, a former employee in the port's import area, told AFP, a Chilean news outlet. “What is not sold to Santiago nor sent to other countries stays in the free zone,” Carreno explained.

The other thing is that the trash is so toxic that other landfills — not in the free zone — won’t take it. "The problem is that the clothing is not biodegradable and has chemical products, so it is not accepted in the municipal landfills," Franklin Zepeda, the founder of EcoFibra, a company that makes insulation panels using discarded clothing, told AFP. That means that while these particularly ugly mountains are forming in Chile, the effects, inevitably, will not stay in Chile...