Imagine finding heaps of branded clothes in perfect condition lying in the sand of the Atacama desert in northern Chile. This is what Bastián Barria, a 32-year-old civil engineer, sees all the time. Every week, he collects what he can and stores it at a friend’s house.
Last month, 300 of those items were listed on a website for free. Customers only had to pay shipping costs. The first drop sold out in five hours.
Re-commerce Atacama is part of a campaign to raise awareness of the discarded clothes, almost all of which have come from countries thousands of miles away. Chile is a primary destination for used and unsold clothes. Some are resold in secondhand markets, but millions of items end up as waste every week.
“At first, there was a certain disbelief on my part to see this happening,” Barria told me. “I asked myself why garments in perfect condition were being discarded in the desert when there are many people who might like to wear them. It’s sad. It really makes you feel powerless.”
I can identify with that disbelief and sense of powerlessness after writing several stories about waste from the fashion industry. Ghana is another place where the problem is painfully visible. I’ll never forget seeing waves washing over mounds of material on one of Accra’s beaches, and speaking to a fisher who said he came back with clothes in his nets instead of fish.
In both places people are fighting the problem, which is a product of countries such as the UK, the US and China. In his spare time, Barria helps run Desierto Vestido (Dressed Desert), an organisation that aims to raise awareness of what is happening. It teamed up with fashion activists Fashion Revolution Brazil, the Brazilian advertising agency Artplan and the e-commerce platform Vtex, to create the website and tell the world about the situation.
Initiatives like this are powerful but won’t fix the fashion system, which is fundamentally broken. Demand for cheap clothes has soared over the past two decades and the fashion industry has gone into overdrive to keep up.
As Fernanda Simon, director of Fashion Revolution Brazil, told me: “It’s a massive problem. It’s not just Chile, it’s not just Ghana. It’s a global problem. We are facing this waste and it is proof that we need to rethink the fashion system.”
Sarah Johnson, reporter, Global development
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