Fixing Chile’s fashion graveyard

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. America is changing. And so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. I'm Tristan Redman in London. And this is The Global Story. Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

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0:44Akiki is a busy seaside city in northern Chile, where locals and tourists splash in the waves and enjoy the beaches. It's also a port and a free trade zone. Businesses can import and store goods without paying custom duties or VAT. and one import stands out. Chile is the largest bar of used clothes in Latin America, importing more than 120 ,000 tonnes per year. Around 40 % of those garments enter the country here in Iquique and where many of them end up isn't what you'd expect. This place is called Santa Rosa. It's where people came to dump bills of used clothes. For a time, it was just jeans, so we called it the Jean Spot.

1:35This is one of a number of places in Alto Hospicio which are used as rubbish pumps for clothes.

1:47Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Jane Chambers, and in this edition of Assignment, I'm in Chile to find out about the country's fashion graveyard and to meet some of the people trying to fix it.

2:02Jean Carla Zambrana Aviles, or Carla as many people call her, is taking me on a tour about to Espicio where she lives. It's around a 30-minute car ride from Maquique up a steep hill, the town surrounded by sandy hills. It's hot, windy and arid. What I really notice in some of the places we visit is the smell. It's an acrid stench of burnt plastic which tickles your nose sticks in your throat and makes your eyes burn. And then there's the rubbish. There are piles of it strewn along the roadside. Things like flapping plastic and abandoned car tyres. I live two or three blocks away from here. When they started ditching clothes here, they also burned them.

2:50And it was horrible. We had to live with the smoke and smell of burnt plastic from the clothes. We always had our windows shut. And we made complaints to try and stop the clothes being thrown away. And you've got a little girl? Yes, I have a little girl and she's got eczema, so all the smoke doesn't help that. And she has problems breathing, so we have to leave the windows shut and use air filters at home. It's not a good quality of life. These jeans, these piles of jeans in front of us are different colours, different washes. They look like they could have been dumped here yesterday, but in reality they've been here for years.

3:36The majority of clothes dumped here are fast fashion and have plastic in them. When you touch them, they are hard like plastic because the sun melts them and you can feel the plastic more. That means it's harder for them to break down than clothes that are 100 % cotton. Carla's young and energetic with a bright smile. she was determined to take action. I started an NGO called Desierto Vestido with some other students that I met in 2020. We wanted people to know more about the problems related to bringing in so many imports to this area. We realised that people didn't understand just how big the issue with the clothes is.

4:22It's truly mind-boggling to try and understand how so many second-hand clothes end up here. But Carla has her list of culprits. It's not illegal to bring second-hand clothes into Chile, and there aren't any checks on what kind of condition the clothes are in. The local authorities have cameras to monitor what trucks are coming in, but they don't have enough money to monitor things properly and, you know, find all of them and stop this happening. So they come here to get rid of the clothes they can sell.

5:03A big issue is that in Iquique's free trade zone, importers of second-hand clothes can't just throw away what doesn't sell at places like the local municipal landfill. Because the clothes enter under a special customs regime, every item has to be accounted for. If it can't be sold, businesses must either re-export it, Pay tax to sell it in Chile, beyond the free trade zone, or destroy it through an authorised waste company. Destruction's expensive, which helps explain why clothes have ended up dumped illegally in the desert. Importers say they're not to blame for where the clothes end up. They point the finger at the people they sell them to.

5:47Carla says it's also an international problem.

5:53Every country should be capable of dealing with its own rubbish. There are countries which have the money to deal with their waste, but they are sending it to poorer nations like ours to deal with it, and we don't have the resources to cope. The clothes come from the US, Europe and Asia, where they've been donated, or a stock which hasn't sold. They're baled up and bought by the ton and shipped off to Akike. When they arrive here, they get sorted. The high-quality ones are resold, the medium-quality ones are exported or sold in markets, and the unsettable ones end up as waste. Locals didn't realise just how many clothes ended up here.

6:32They knew they were being dumped, but they had no idea about the scale of the problem, so we decided to spread the word. We took photos of the mountains of clothes in the area and made maps of the places where they were being thrown out.

6:54There are no official figures to show how many tonnes were abandoned here every year, but the photographic evidence they gathered speaks for itself. Carla and her team sent their photos to global media outlets and the images went viral. There was widespread indignation that the beautiful Atacama Desert was being used as a fashion graveyard. She tells me these days they've stopped dumping clothes near her house, but remnants like the jeans and other rubbish still remain.

7:28An estimated 55 ,000 tonnes come into Akiki every year. She wants imports or second-hand clothing to be banned, or at least drastically reduced in number and better monitored. To try and understand why they're allowed in, I'm off to one of the places that acts as a hub for clothes coming into the country.

7:51I've come to the outskirts of Aquique, to the trade-free zone, or Zofri as it's known in Spanish, Zona Franca de Aquique. And there's a giant car park where locals and tourists are arriving to visit the mall, where they can buy anything from cheap booze to perfume to electrical goods. Behind me, there's a huge port full of brightly coloured containers, red and green and black, which are bringing in all the goods that get imported here. And I'm off to meet someone from Zofri who can tell me more about the used clothes market.

8:31Zofri began because we wanted more people to live here in the north of Chile and to give them employment. It's a business platform that has more than 2 ,100 businesses using it. Some of them are importing textiles like second-hand clothes and some of those end up as a waste. But I want to be really clear and explain that here at Sofri, we are not contaminating. We are the business platform that companies and investors use.

9:04That's Ivan Berrios, the chairman of the board at Zofri. He's keen to point out that they've been running various recycling projects for many years. We're in his plush, air-conditioned office opposite the mall. He's a busy man who's just rushed in from a meeting. High up on his to-do list is getting ready for a new law in Chile, which is shaking things up in the used clothing industry.

9:32The law, R.E.P., is going to give traceability to the producer and make them responsible for the clothes they import so that they aren't illegally disposed of.

9:47Ivan's talking about Chile's R.E.P. law, which in English stands for Extended Producer Responsibility. As he says, it makes companies that import or sell products responsible for what happens to them at the end of their life. For clothing, this means fashion brands, retailers and importers will eventually have to finance and organise the collection, reuse, recycling or proper disposal of textiles, instead of that cost falling on local councils or the Ministry of the Environment. Once textiles are formally included in the law, businesses will face new compliance costs in reporting obligations. It sounds like a great solution, but I'm interested in how Zofri can be sure the producers are going to do the right thing.

10:34We are doing things like defining the conditions for each business to see if they can carry on being part of this free trade zone. We are implementing a more robust oversight process to ensure traceability and compliance with this new law. But what does Ivan mean by traceability? Well, we are monitoring each of these products as they reach their destination, because this is a product that enters our system. We have a high-tech computer system that allows us to track the entry and exit of merchandise. Therefore, we will be able to provide greater traceability to this product, allowing us to know its final destination.

11:18I know that you're the platform and it's up to the businesses what they do, but some people say that you are the organisation that lets this happen and really there should be less clothes coming in. How would you respond to that?

11:39This new law isn't just about clothes. It already applies to products like used cars, and at a certain point there will be greater restrictions on what kind of vehicles come in. And I think it's only a matter of time before that applies to textiles. They will classify them into different categories according to their quality, and they will need to be good quality. But really textiles are an issue that depends on the policies defined by the state of Chile. They need to determine and define the laws and regulations in the corresponding institution. In this case, it's Congress, which has to discuss that law.

12:18This is something that I run into time and time again when discussing who's responsible for why these clothes are ending up in a fashion graveyard. It's a complex chain of responsibility. Businesses, the authorities, consumers all have their role to play. This is a documentary from the BBC World Service. America is changing. And so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. I'm Tristan Redman in London. And this is The Global Story. Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet.

13:05Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

13:13I'm Jane Chambers on assignment in Chile.

13:19I'm off to meet one of the largest textile importers in the region. My name is Bekir Konkur.

13:29My name is Bekir Konkur. And with my company, we import textiles into the free trade zone in Iquique. Every month we import around 50 containers, which is about 1 ,000 tonnes. When the clothes arrive, or stock, as we call it, we start to sort the textiles and put them into different categories, depending on their quality.

13:52And the stock that you don't use, what happens to that? We are left with any stock because we sell it to different outlets, depending on the category. Just like many retailers, even the ones selling new clothes, they don't manage to sell all of it. And so we are taking back that stock and finding another use for it. Bakir is originally from Turkey and has been working in Chile for more than 15 years. He's brought me to see a new project he's working on. We're out in the desert, around 20 minutes by car from Alto Aspicio, and the sun's blazing down. Behind me there are rows and rows of bales of clothing.

14:33is paying for a team of workers to build a factory for the clothes that aren't sold, which will transform them into something else.

14:45The factory we are building won't need water or chemicals. We are going to use machines that will turn the clothes into fibre and then into felt, which will be used in things like mattresses, furniture, insides of cars and for insulation. We think we have the capacity to process 20 tons a day. One of the reasons we are doing this is to get ready for the new law, which is our EP, so we can keep on working.

15:16Now, some people would say that you're part of the problem, you're importing too many clothes and that you should import less and then there would be less of a problem.

15:31Look, normally clothes aren't the problem, because there are different ways to recycle them. Here in the north, we have a lot of issues with rubbish, including domestic electric goods and plastic, which get dumped. But people always talk about the clothes. We want to be a solution to the problem, and I think this factory is going to help that.

15:56So they're hard at work in front of us. We've come away from the bales of stock and come to see the building work. This is a massive project. How much is it costing? We invested around$7 million. That's a lot of money. But Bakir thinks that when the factory is ready in a few months' time, they'll make money from transforming the unwanted clothes into different products. and he says that they'll be able to provide a service for other textile companies. But he's adamant it's not only about money.

16:30I'm not doing this just to make money. It's not easy being here in the desert and dealing with all the security issues we have. Sometimes people come at night to try and steal our machinery and the cloth. Bakir tells me that one of the reasons he carries on is to make sure the people he works with in the trade-free zone can continue helping him to sort and categorise the clothes and send them to the different buyers. But some of the people he's helped in the past aren't happy with the new factory.

17:03Before, when we had unwanted stock that wasn't in very good condition, people from La Quebradilla, a local open-air market near here, would buy it really cheaply. They made a living selling it at the local market. But now we aren't selling it. and they are angry. Sometimes they come here at night and try to burn the clothes that we have stored here. Because they are not happy, they no longer have this stock.

17:36Some people who are happy with Bakir are 10 minutes up the road working on a project made out of t-shirts they've collected from the landfills around here. In a few days time they'll take them to be stored until the factory is up and running and he can process them. In the meantime, they have ambitious plans.

17:58This really is an extraordinary sight. There is a motorway down below with lorries going along and containers which are coming from the port. In front of me, there are rows and rows of sandy-coloured hills and I'm on one of the hills. there are 10 people, some of them in white overalls, lots and lots of pegs and various coloured knots of t-shirts. We've got a bundle of white ones just in front of me and then beyond there's some red and pink and blue and green. I'm going to talk to one of the people to find out more about what's going on. Sitting down beside me trying to get away from the wind in a blue overall I've got?

18:40I'm Victoria Garcia and this project comes out of a partnership with my architect friend as well and this and basically aims to highlight and probably contrast two visions of the same landscape. So you and Andres who's busy banging in pegs and I think has quite frankly for days now what are you both trying to achieve? I think it's a big giant isn't it? Why is this giant important? We're trying to make people think, basically. We're trying to make people understand that we have a cultural heritage of immense value in the Trapaca region, and it's symbolized by the Gigante Trapaca, but we built this giant with clothes.

19:26So the Gigante Trapaca, the giant of Trapaca, is a sacred figure, it's a geoglyph. It measures 86 by 36 meters and is the biggest anthropomorphic figure made out of a geoglyph in the world. To give you some sense of this, the Gigante de Tarabaga, which they're replicating on the hill out of t-shirts, is a huge design in the shape of a giant figure etched into the desert, which has stood the test of time for more than a thousand years. So what we're trying to do is compare this symbolic value that the giant has to the symbolic value that the ancient people of the desert had towards the landscape and contrasting to what contemporary culture is doing to the territory which is filling out with not only clothes but all sorts of trash.