Heaps of clothes are spread across a colossal area on the outskirts of Chile’s Atacama plateau, the world’s driest desert. There is everything from Christmas sweaters to ski boots, with items manufactured in nations such as China and Bangladesh, either thrown out or never even sold in the US, Europe, or other places. Some 59,000 tonnes of clothes arrive in Chile annually, some 20,000 tonnes of which are sold on. The rest is dumped in the desert.
The Chilean dump is a symptom of a fashion industry that has gone berserk. The world’s clothes production has doubled since 2000; some fashion houses now introduce two collections a month to meet our unprecedented clothes consumption. But the wastage is appalling: one third of clothes imported to the EU are never sold –
