A mountain of clothes appeared in Chile’s desert. Then it went up in flames.

This story was produced by Grist and co-published with El País. Reporting was supported by the Joan Konner Program in the Journalism of Ideas.

On the morning of June 12, 2022, Ángela Astudillo, then a regulation pupil in her mid-20s, grabbed her water bottle and hopped into her pink Nissan Juke. The co-founder of Gown Desert, or Desierto Vestido, a textile recycling advocacy nonprofit, and the daughter of tree farmers, Astudillo lives in a gated condo complicated in Alto Hospicio, a dusty metropolis on the fringe of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, together with her husband, daughter, bunny, and three aquatic turtles. 

Exiting the compound, Astudillo pinched the wheel, pulled over subsequent to a automobile on the aspect of the highway, and greeted Bárbara Pino, a style professor, and three of her college students, who have been ready inside. 

They headed towards a mountain of sand often called El Paso de la Mula. Lower than a mile from her dwelling, squinting into the gap, Astudillo noticed a thread of smoke rising from its route. Along with her within the lead, the 2 autos caravanned towards the dune, the location of the second-largest garments pile on the planet. 

As they bought nearer to El Paso de La Mula, the skinny path of smoke had expanded into an enormous black cloud. Astudillo stopped the automobile and texted the teachers behind her. 

It appears to be like prefer it’s on hearth. Hopefully, it’s not there. 🙁 🙁 🙁

She then dialed them immediately and requested, “Do you continue to need to go?”

Pino, director of Santiago’s Fashion System Observatory at Universidad Diego Portales, had deliberate this journey for months. Astudillo had volunteered to be their information. The mound of discarded material in the midst of the Atacama weighed an estimated 11,000 to 59,000 tons, equal to at least one or two instances the Brooklyn Bridge. 

By the point the workforce reached the gates of El Paso de la Mula, greater than half of the garments pile was on hearth. Smoke obscured the whole lot, hanging like an opaque black curtain. Municipal authorities turned the group away, forbidding them to remain on the premises. However Astudillo knew the panorama, so she directed the workforce to the dune’s far aspect, the place entry was nonetheless unimpeded. 

There, the scholars surveyed the inferno. It was “like a conflict,” Pino stated. She felt waves of warmth. Black smoke unspooled from the burning garments. The air was dense and arduous to breathe. Smoke coated the again of their throats and clogged their nostrils with the acrid scent of melting plastic. They lined their faces, attempting to not breathe it in. Then the group heard a sequence of loud pops as mini explosions burst from throughout the huge expanse of burning clothes. 

Regardless of the hazard, Pino and her college students rummaged, pulling out specimens to look at from amongst unburned parts of the pile. On prior visits to the garments dump, Astudillo had uncovered clothes produced by the world’s most well-known manufacturers: Nautica, Adidas, Wrangler, Previous Navy, H&M, Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, Perpetually 21, Zara, Banana Republic. Retailer tags nonetheless dangled from a lot of her findings. The garments had come to the Atacama from Europe, the US, Korea, and Japan. Now, as Astudillo started taking footage and importing them to Instagram, Pino wandered the mound, horrified and fascinated by the grotesque quantity and number of attire: ski jackets, ball robes, bathing fits. She plucked out a rhinestone-encrusted platform stiletto in good situation. She crouched to seek for its match, however the wind was getting stronger. If it shifted, the workforce realized, they’d be trapped within the spreading hearth. 

For 14 years, no rain has fallen in Alto Hospicio or the encompassing Atacama Desert area. These dry situations, coupled with the nonbiodegradable, predominantly artificial, petroleum-derived fibers that trendy garments are made with, meant that the pile by no means shrank. As a substitute, for greater than twenty years, it grew — metastasized — with each discarded, imported merchandise that was added.

In 2021, six months previous to the fireplace, a photographer from Agence France Presse, Martín Bernetti, captured a fowl’s-eye picture of this sprawling mound of attire, basically an oil slick, strewn throughout the sting of the Atacama desert. 

The aerial picture was picked up by information retailers throughout the globe, from the entrance web page of the New York Put up to the BBC, and continues to flow into as we speak. However the mountain of garments depicted by that 2021 drone photograph is completely gone. As Astudillo, Pino, and the three college students witnessed, and unwittingly tasted: The blaze tore by way of the pile, throwing black plumes of poisonous ash into the air.

The city of Alto Hospicio sits on a cliff above the Pacific Ocean, a bed room neighborhood for the seaside trip metropolis of Iquique beneath. Think about if Atlantic Metropolis in New Jersey have been concurrently hemmed in and backed by a excessive Nevada plateau, and if the 2 locales have been linked by a two-lane switchback freeway. 

Every day in Iquique’s port, large cranes pluck containers filled with discarded clothes from the decks of ships and deposit them onto flatbed vehicles. Nobody actually is aware of precisely how a lot clothes passes by way of the port yearly; estimates vary from 60,000 to 44 million tons. Subsequent, they head to the close by Free Commerce Zone, identified regionally as “Zofri,” the place trailers again into the warehouses of 52 used-clothes importers and forklift operators switch sealed bales of clothes, or fardos, inside. 

Chile is the biggest importer of secondhand clothes in South America, and between 2020 and 2021 it was the fastest-growing importer of used clothes on the planet. The port of Iquique is a longtime tax-free zone, incentivizing this booming business of castaway textiles.

From Zofri, bales of clothes are bought, uninspected, to retailers betting that a minimum of among the objects inside are sales-worthy. “While you purchase, you’re shopping for along with your eyes closed,” one former service provider stated. Typically 80 p.c of the clothes in a bale are usable. Typically the other is true. As a result of bales are so low-cost, nonetheless, most retailers want solely promote 40 p.c to show a revenue. 

In line with the worldwide environmental advocacy group Ekō (previously often called SumofUS), an estimated 85 p.c of the used clothes imported into Iquique stays unsold. Chilean federal regulation states it’s unlawful to get rid of textiles. 

Thought-about Iquique’s yard, Alto Hospicio is among the poorest cities in Chile, extensively often called a spot to desert pets and dump trash. Within the late Nineteen Nineties and early 2000s, the small desert city is the place greater than a dozen teenage ladies mysteriously vanished, till their apprehended killer led authorities to our bodies buried in desert graves. 

In 2001, Manuela Medina*, a former gardener, noticed a chance in Iquique’s rising textile abundance. Relocating to Alto Hospicio, she established an unauthorized compound on authorities lands on the base of El Paso de la Mula, the massive sand dune on the far aspect of an unregulated shantytown. Each few days, she employed a fletero — a driver with a jalopy — to journey the switchback roads, out of the brown dunes of Alto Hospicio, to reach within the colourful oceanside metropolis of Iquique, which sits a thousand miles north of the nation’s capital, Santiago.

Close to the dock the place cranes unload large container ships, inside Iquique’s free commerce zone, Medina ventured into the contiguous warehouses, asking secondhand clothes importers, “Do you may have any rubbish?” 

Again at her compound, Medina unloaded her wares in piles on the bottom the place she had the luxurious of storing them indefinitely — the Atacama Desert is among the driest locations on Earth, that means objects don’t endure regular degradation from parts like rain. Right here, Medina bought her piles to retailers and others for $10 every. 

As an increasing number of bales of ropa americana, or secondhand garments, arrived in Iquique, the garments flooded importers’ warehouses and overflowed distributors’ stalls in open air markets, together with La Quebradilla — one of many largest open air markets in South America, positioned only a few miles from Medina’s unauthorized compound. 

Quickly, importers and secondhand retailers started to ship surplus used garments on to Medina. Fed by each day truck deliveries, after which by a number of each day tractor trailer load deliveries, Medina’s pile grew.

By 2020, Medina’s gargantuan desert dump had turn out to be an open secret in Chile, stretching throughout dozens of acres. Others adopted her mannequin, creating mini-dumps throughout the desert and alongside roadsides, however Medina’s pile remained the most important. 

On March 29, 2022, Paulin Silva, an environmental lawyer, stood earlier than the Primer Tribunal Ambiental de Antofagasta, a regional tribunal in northern Chile that makes a speciality of resolving environmental points inside its jurisdiction. She was presenting a lawsuit, introduced on behalf of herself as a resident of Iquique, towards the municipality and the federal Chilean authorities for his or her inaction over the sprawling, unregulated garments dumps. For her submission of proof, she requested the tribunal to affix her in touring the mound of clothes.

For weeks, her casual workforce of supporters (a geographer, her sister, and her brother-in-law) had been documenting the issue, joking amongst themselves, “By which dump are we going to occasion tonight?”

Since acquiring her regulation diploma, Silva has prosecuted a handful of environmental instances, however this one was private, and she or he felt empowered to sort out it: “I’ve the training; I’m a lawyer; I can do one thing,” she stated. She’d grown up in northern Chile, a pencil skinny nation bordered by the Pacific Ocean. Her father is from Alto Hospicio and her mom is from Iquique. At 35, she’s a number of years older than Astudillo, the co-founder of the nonprofit Gown Desert, whom Silva requested to be a witness for the case. When Silva was a toddler, she noticed folks dumping garments all over the place — the streets, yards, and metropolis squares. As a result of this was the one place she knew for a lot of her life, she thought, “It’s regular for folks to stay with … rubbish gathered round them.” 

This native “clothes-blindness” was documented by Astudillo’s colleague, Bastián Barria, an engineering pupil and her co-founder of Gown Desert. In November 2020, he and others carried out a survey to establish native attitudes concerning the clothes waste. Of the virtually 400 folks in Alto Hospicio he surveyed, representing lower than 1 p.c of the city’s inhabitants, greater than half didn’t assume there was any concern.

When Silva was 18, she moved a thousand miles south, to Valparaiso in central Chile, to check regulation and that was the place she remained till the pandemic, when she returned dwelling. That’s when she realized the dump scenario had worsened. Exponentially. 

Through the many years between Silva’s girlhood and as we speak, clothes manufacturing worldwide doubled, whereas utilization — the variety of instances an merchandise of clothes is worn earlier than it’s thrown away — declined by 36 p.c. International locations like Chile, Haiti, and Uganda turned depositories for quick style discards. In 2021 alone, Chile imported more than 700,000 tons of recent and used clothes — the burden equal of 70 Eiffel Towers.

“Even when we stopped clothes manufacturing all through the world tonight,” stated Francisca Gajardo, an Iquique-born clothier, “we nonetheless have extra clothes than we’d like or that the Earth can safely maintain. It gained’t go away properly, and we’re not stopping as we speak.” 

9 days after the enormous fires, round 4 p.m., Silva was having a lightweight meal, the Chilean equal of afternoon tea often called as soon as (pronounced “on-say”), together with her household in northern Chile. Just a few days prior, the Primer Tribunal Ambiental de Antofagasta had knowledgeable her it was able to view her case proof by touring the garments pile in particular person. Silva took out her cellphone to share the excellent news on Instagram with Desierto Vestido, however earlier than she might, she noticed the photographs of the burning garments Desierto Vestido had simply uploaded and shared. 

Silva sprang from her chair to course of what was taking place to the proof in her case only a few miles away. She suspected why the court docket had been prepared to view the landfill: “As a result of clearly the matter was burned,” she advised Grist.

Whereas no official explanation for the fires has ever been reported, native residents declare it started late on Saturday evening or within the early hours of Sunday. Days later, poisonous air nonetheless clung to the realm. Astudillo, who visited the location often, described the pile as “volcanic” — with garments smoldering beneath the sand, venting smoke filled with textile chemical substances from artificial supplies. She warned, “You may’t be exterior for lengthy.” 

Within the days following the fireplace, on June 22, as a substitute of main the tour of the prosecutorial proof, Silva filed an announcement to the Primer Tribunal Ambiental de Antofagasta: “With disappointment and disgrace I inform you that 11,000 tons of garments within the textile dump have been burned.” 

Though Paulin offered the court docket with Gown Desert’s smartphone video recordings of the garments in flames, the protection argued that the Instagram account the place they’d posted the movies couldn’t be verified and confirmed. Missing a certifiable timestamp, the movies have been inadmissible.

One yr later, in August 2023, the Primer Tribunal Ambiental de Antofagasta referred to as a trial listening to so that every one events concerned within the case — the Consejo de Defensa del Estado, the physique that judicially represents the state in Chile, the municipality of Alto Hospicio, and Silva — might current proof.

Through the listening to, the Mayor at Alto Hospicio, Patricio Ferreira, stated that considered one of his priorities is to “remodel this drawback into a chance to generate employment.” He alluded to discussions he had with European businessmen to discover initiatives associated to recycling.

Silva bought folks to testify in her favor, activists and teachers who’ve given statements to completely different media retailers in regards to the environmental drawback generated by the textile landfill within the Chilean desert. However on the day of the listening to, none of them arrived.

“On the finish of the day, in observe, I’m alone on this motion,” she stated.

Chile’s authorities just lately voted to undertake recycling measures that make sure producers accountable for his or her waste. Referred to as the prolonged producer duty regulation, or REP utilizing its Spanish acronym, the laws handed in 2016 and took impact in January 2023. At present, Chilean corporations that make tires and packaging (similar to baggage, plastics, paper or cardboard, cans and glass) should comply. 

Finally, based on the Ministry of the Atmosphere, Chile intends to include clothes and textiles as a precedence product into the REP regulation.

Nevertheless, within the case of garments, many describe the REP as a “paper resolution” that lacks tangible enforcement, stated Pino, from the Universidad Diego Portales.

In parallel, the Ministry of the Atmosphere is creating a round financial system technique for textile waste. In contrast to the REP, the company crafts public coverage for the private and non-private sectors to stop overproduction. 

The ministry has been holding workshops and conversations to gather enter from stakeholders, together with teachers, enterprise executives, retailers and nonprofit leaders. It’s also tabulating the outcomes of a preliminary survey on client clothes-buying habits. The small print of this round financial system technique is predicted to be revealed in March this yr.

On the minister’s invitation, Pino has shared her style experience — each within the markets and within the desert — with the group. “These two issues are great initiatives,” she stated about each efforts, however she lamented that they fail to handle the difficulty of used garments. 

A decade in the past, when the REP was first being mentioned, Denisse Morán, president of the Tarapacá Recyclers and the pinnacle of ServiREC, a recycling cooperative that operates inside Iquique’s free commerce zone, sought out her native consultant to request that the regulation apply to each clothes producers and clothes importers. 

“Oh, since you are from Iquique?” she recalled him asking her. 

“Not solely as a result of I’m from Iquique,” she replied, “however as a result of all of us put on garments.”

For years, many residents in Alto Hospicio noticed the piles of textiles as extra of a chance than an eyesore or environmental menace, one thing that supported the native financial system. 

When Jazmín Yañez arrived on the town from southern Chile in 2018 virtually penniless and getting ready to homelessness, for instance, somebody gave her a couple of cast-off clothes and family rubbish — from towels, kitchen implements to furnishings — to promote. Ever since, Yañez, now 28, has waged a zealous marketing campaign to salvage, repair, and reutilize all “waste” supplies. She operates a casual retailer from the kitchen of her home referred to as Cease Recicla: “Your trash is my treasure,” the place she sells, exchanges, and presents objects similar to rugs, used clothes, college provides, costumes, and electronics to impoverished moms, like she as soon as was.

It’s this trash/treasure duality that saved Astudillo and different locals from viewing the area’s booming used clothes commerce as an issue. However six months earlier than the fires, in January 2022, Nathalia Tavolieri, a Brazilian journalist, invited Astudillo to El Paso de La Mula, the place she encountered Manuela Medina’s mountain for the primary time. 

Astudillo had seen quite a few clothes dumps strewn and mounded all through the desert, however nothing as massive as this immense tangle of blouses and pants. “It was horrible,” she stated, weeping as she recalled her first go to. “Possibly if I had been older, perhaps I might have accomplished extra issues [to stop this from happening].”

The expertise galvanized her. She had already co-founded her nonprofit Gown Desert, or Desierto Vestido, two years earlier than, to boost consciousness and creatively reply to the nation’s burgeoning waste clothes concern. As a part of the mission’s efforts, she and 20 different members host workshops and conversations. They upcycle castaway supplies into new clothes and craft home items. Seeing the vastness of Medina’s clothes pile, Astudillo stepped up her resolve, as a result of “many individuals don’t see — or don’t need to see.”

“It was very, very arduous,” she stated, “to know that we stay in a spot that’s so polluted and broken by everybody’s waste.” A number of months later, Astudillo introduced Gajardo, the garments designer and a fellow Iquiquean, to the dump, and gained an ally in her efforts. Regardless of rising up and procuring on the area’s quite a few outside secondhand garments markets, Gajardo was appalled by the scope of the waste. She developed rashes from rummaging among the many materials. 

“The truth that we have now a desert, the truth that there’s a spot to obtain this, doesn’t imply that the place has to turn out to be the dump of the world,” she stated. Since then, Gajardo’s conviction to by no means design garments from virgin supplies has deepened. Moreover, by way of her model You Are the New Generation, she affords workshops in reusing clothes, and visited Kansas Metropolis, Missouri, final yr by way of the U.S. State Division’s Younger Leaders of the Americas Initiative to show folks to make new garments by harvesting outdated ones.

Different entrepreneurs have tried to show the garments drawback into income, however have confronted a sequence of setbacks. 

Franklin Zepeda is a celebrated Chilean entrepreneur who toured Europe’s textile recycling vegetation earlier than returning to the area in 2013 to determine Ecofibre, now often called Procitex. (Its identify is an acronym that means Proceso Round en Textil in Spanish).

With seed funding from CORFO, the Chilean financial growth company, and later from personal capital, Zepeda was capable of route textiles imported into Iquique to his plant, the place they have been disassembled, shredded, doused with flame retardant, and reworked into insulation panels. Zepeda bought reward for this work in a number of major international news outlets, however he shuttered his plant in Alto Hospicio in 2021 due to unfavorable economics, together with the taxes on delivery the insulation panels to different areas of the nation.

Dario Blanco, supervisor of the ZOFRI Consumer Affiliation AG (AUZ), a commerce affiliation that brings collectively businessmen from the Iquique free zone, believes that the answer to the area’s drawback of discarded clothes is on the market — it should simply take the correct firm and insurance policies. And there are many entrepreneurs, style designers, and environmentalists engaged on the difficulty of textile waste, each in Chile and internationally.

As Bloomberg reported in May, New York, California, Sweden, and the Netherlands are creating laws just like Chile’s prolonged producer duty regulation that went into impact this yr, mandating that the style business fund recycling packages through tariffs calibrated to the amount of clothes produced.

To be able to assist New York Metropolis uphold its present regulation limiting or forbidding textiles within the waste stream, FabScrap, a nonprofit based in 2016 by a former New York Division of Sanitation employee, receives 7,000 kilos of pre-consumer textile waste every week. Sorted by volunteers, the nonsynthetic scrap objects are despatched to a New Jersey facility that shreds the fabric, producing “shoddy,” a stuffing used to fill punching baggage, sofas, and gentle toys.

A Czech firm referred to as RETEX has been making an attempt to deliver its fabric-macerating expertise to Alto Hospicio. Blanco says that in alternate for securing a contract with Chile, the corporate promised to rent native employees. However, Blanco admitted, negotiations like these have fallen by way of prior to now. For instance, he stated, a Spain-based firm, Egreen, deliberate to open a fabric-waste processing plant, however the deal was scrapped late final yr.

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The governor’s sustainability adviser on the Regional Authorities of Tarapaca, Pablo Zambra, just lately fashioned a 25-member committee that features stakeholders similar to Astudillo and Barria from Gown Desert and Morán, the president of the Tarapacá Recyclers, to publicize financial incentives for round financial system initiatives. Collectively, they hope RETEX will achieve doing what Zepeda’s firm didn’t do: flip a revenue. As of this writing, no importers are concerned.

In the meantime, day-after-day, container ships proceed to dump extra cargo. 

Within the fall of 2022, Alto Hospicio’s mayor, Ferreira, acknowledged the unsolved problem however blamed clothes producers, citing a “lack of worldwide consciousness of moral duty.” 

“Our land has been sacrificed,” he stated. 

Pino agrees that the style business and its customers are culpable. “Now we have to fret in regards to the full cycle: earlier than, throughout, and after our garments,” she wrote in an editorial revealed in 2021.

She believes a extra complete resolution is critical, together with regulating the entry of textile supplies to Chile, educating customers about prolonging clothes’ lives, selling Chile’s homegrown style business, and supporting analysis to design new makes use of for material waste. 

Ecocitex, based in 2020 by engineer Rosario Hevia in Santiago, has sprung up as one other Chilean firm addressing a surfeit of clothes.

Ecocitex operates in a fashion opposite to the nation’s organized and casual secondhand garments markets. It invitations folks to recycle high-quality clothes or pay $1.50 per kilogram to depart poor high quality clothes and stroll away empty-handed.

Through the pandemic, Andrea Espinoza Pérez, a civil industrial engineer on the College of Santiago, initiated a study on the ecological impacts of initiatives like Ecocitex. She needed to know: Did factory-processed, used clothes produce fewer emissions than the unique clothes manufacturing course of? With information offered by Ecocitex’s founder Hevia, scientists decided that the garments deconstruction course of is efficient as a result of it retains waste garments out of landfills, and it replaces the demand for virgin supplies. Nevertheless, the examine discovered that Ecocitex’s process is extremely energy-intensive — utilizing about 73 p.c of the power required to provide the identical product from uncooked supplies. 

In the meantime, neither Zepeda’s Procitex nor Hevia’s Ecocitex in Chile, nor Fabscrap’s efforts in New York and Philadelphia, have matched the direct profitability of Medina’s now-defunct enterprise. (Medina has began a brand new enterprise storing tires.) In reality, all have relied closely on a wide range of underwriting measures, together with subsidies, nonprofit funding, subscriptions, or volunteer labor to generate their merchandise. 

Lately, Zepeda has earned his dwelling as an worker of Chile’s largest retailer, CENCOSUD. He collects surplus garments donated by clients, and produces insulation panels for buildings which might be bought by the identical retailer. 

As for Ecocitex, in June, the enterprise caught hearth and the constructing was destroyed. The trigger remains to be beneath investigation. Undeterred, Hevia has launched a campaign to rebuild. In the meantime, she is elevating funds by promoting blankets constituted of recycled fibers to a mining firm.

By final January, the peak of the Chilean summer time, the big, unpleasant garments dump at El Paso de la Mula, the one Agence France Presse had proven the world, was nowhere to be discovered. 

All that remained was a smattering of ashes and the tread marks of bulldozers. Right here and there, throughout Medina’s unofficial yard, small piles of clothes peeked out of the sand dunes. However based on municipal officers, dumping and burning continues. Rey, an indigent man who lives by the aspect of a desert highway in a blue and yellow tent emblazoned with “Nationwide Geographic,” attests that he and others settle for cash from nonprofit refuse-disposal contractors or freelance truckers in alternate for setting fires to no matter waste is discharged from a truck. This manner, the trucker can maintain extra of his hauling earnings, which might in any other case be whittled down by the official dump charges.

Astudillo says that past the boundaries of Manuela’s dune, there are as many as 200 micro-garbage dumps, and consequently, miles and miles of ashes within the desert — not simply scattered over the bottom, but additionally within the air. She advised Grist in late December that that is an on a regular basis factor. “You exit to purchase bread and also you scent the burning scent. You scent the supplies that make up the garments: oil and plastic. After 5 within the afternoon, I not let my 7-year-old daughter go away the condo, and I shut the home windows to stop smoke from coming in.” She additionally confirmed the abandoning of garments continues: “They throw it away, they burn it instantly.”

On December 12, the Primer Tribunal Ambiental de Antofagasta issued its remaining ruling within the case with Silva, commissioning a unit of specialists to hold out an on-site report on the buildup of textile waste in several areas of Alto Hospicio, and to suggest an answer to the buildup of waste.

The municipality of Alto Hospicio, which claims it doesn’t have the workforce to adequately handle the issue, has additionally put in almost 100 cameras alongside the primary roads as a method of monitoring polluters, and has begun doling out fines as excessive as $350 for unlawful dumping. Thus far, vehicles have been apprehended transporting home and industrial rubbish, in addition to cumbersome objects similar to mattresses, washing machines, and furnishings. 

Drone footage recorded by Cheng Hwa, considered one of Pino’s college students, the day of the June 2022 fires captures the municipality preventing what was in essence an oil hearth. Hwa, who grew up in Iquique and now works in tech for the hospitality business, had lengthy been conscious of the desert dumps however didn’t comprehend the magnitude till he witnessed them at shut vary. 

He’s haunted by what his drone footage made seen. “How the desert of sand begins to show right into a desert of garments,” he stated. “It has no restrict; there is no such thing as a closure … Garments start to look on the bottom till the horizon is totally lined.”

In Iquique, he typically glances up towards the excessive plateau of Alto Hospicio. “You may’t see the dump, however [you can see] the column of smoke on days that [clothes] burn. That cloud of smoke lets you recognize … It makes [the issue] seen on a day-to-day foundation.”

Thirty miles south of Iquique, towards the town’s fundamental airport, on her household’s farm, Astudillo and her dad and mom drop items of used clothes on the bottom, however in a purposeful method. Over the previous 20 years, Astudillo’s father has experimented with rising bushes within the infertile, saline soils. Lots of his efforts failed till he started utilizing sure materials to mulch his bushes. This improves the standard of the soil, enabling it to retain moisture. For the previous yr, Astudillo has been working with one of many Zofri importers, who requested to stay nameless. She consults together with his employees in regards to the clothes bales and recommends methods of sorting the fabric into particular classes based mostly on fiber content material, a few of which she collects personally. These objects — a pair of cotton shorts, a T-shirt, a shirt — turn out to be mulch for a pine and eucalyptus forest rising within the desert.

Just lately, as Astudillo was leaving the farm, she stashed a couple of perennials in her truck and drove them to Manuela’s compound in Paso de La Mula. Simply past Medina’s courtyard, the place sky- blackening fires had as soon as burned, Astudillo troweled a small gap for the vegetation. As she dug, she dislodged a number of odd socks and a pale blue sweatshirt — discarded garments that had survived the fires, however have been buried by bulldozers. 

Astudillo crammed the outlet, amending the desert sand with compost and backyard soil. “For me it’s like a Band-Assist for a wound that’s so massive in that place,” she stated. Then she tucked in cardinal flowers — a local plant whose petals resemble capturing flames. 

Editor’s observe: Throughout visits to her compound in Alto Hospicio, Manuela, the proprietor of the secondhand clothes dump, advised Grist reporters her identify was Manuela Medina. Nevertheless, different retailers have used the surname Olivos. Her authorized identify is Manuela de Los Angeles Medina Olivos.