This story was produced by Grist and co-published with El País. A Spanish-language version can be read here.
Reporting was supported by the Joan Konner Program in the Journalism of Ideas.
On the morning of June 12, 2022, Ángela Astudillo, a law student and co-founder of Dress Desert, a textile recycling nonprofit, set out to visit El Paso de la Mula, the site of the second-largest clothes pile in the world, in northern Chile. With her were Bárbara Pino, a fashion professor, and three of her students.
As they approached the dune, they noticed a trail of smoke and soon discovered that more than half of the clothes pile was on fire. Despite the danger, Astudillo, Pino, and the students ventured to the far side of the dune where they witnessed the blaze tear through the pile.
Before the fire, a photograph taken by Martín Bernetti showed the sprawling mound of clothing, a consequence of Chile’s booming secondhand clothing industry. With the majority of the used clothes imported into Iquique remaining unsold, it ended up in an unauthorized compound established by Manuela Medina at the base of El Paso de la Mula.
This compound, which accumulated clothing from the port of Iquique, is located near Alto Hospicio, one of the poorest cities in Chile, and the site of the country’s non-authorized textile dumping and burning.
