Atacama Desert turned to trash

Mountains of second-hand clothing, cars and tires from around the world pollute the vast Atacama Desert in northern Chile, a fragile ecosystem that has become the planet’s garbage dump.

Among the beautiful landscapes, debris clusters appear in various parts of the desert, which is more than 100,000 square kilometers.

Patricio Ferreira, mayor of Alto Hospicio, where tons of used clothes are found, regrets that “Unscrupulous people of the world come to throw their garbage here (…) We are no longer the backyard of the neighborhood, we are the backyard of the world, this is even worse”, remorsefully thrown into the hills surrounding the community.

Thousands of car and tire carcasses are piling up in neighboring Iquique as well. There are so many of them that they have been used to build the walls of houses.

Clothing and vehicles enter Chile through the Iquique Free Trade Zone (Zofri), one of the most important duty-free trade centers in South America.

According to the National Customs Service, 46,287 tons of used clothing worth $49.6 million CIF (product value, plus shipping and insurance) entered Chile last year.

Thousands of used cars also come to Chile via Zofri, most of which are left-hand drive adapted here.

A significant portion of the cars are re-exported to Peru, Bolivia and Paraguay, but many are abandoned in the streets and valleys of Atacama.

8,400 vehicles have been removed from the streets at the Los Verdes municipal warehouse north of Iquique.

lack of global awareness

The fragility of the desert and its environs prompted 34-year-old lawyer Paulín Silva to sue the State of Chile for environmental damage.

“It seems to me that we need to find those responsible,” he told AFP on a pile of used clothing discarded at Alto Hospicio’s La Pampa section.

There are shirts, some new and with tags – baby clothes, pants and shoes. Also piles of tires in a recurring post-apocalyptic image in various parts of what is now one of Chile’s poorest areas.

A quarter of its 160,000 residents have no drinking water.

“There are too many immigrants, too much poverty, too many drug addicts and no one to coordinate (environmental) actions,” Silva says.

In the process, he added satellite images showing the exponential growth in clothing bedding.

“This is not a product of the population of Alto Hospicio or northern Chile. It is a problem of lack of global awareness, lack of ethical responsibility and environmental protection,” denounces Mayor Ferreira.

More than half of the used clothing entering Chile is thrown away and ends up in the desert. It is burned and buried to hide it, which creates an additional environmental problem of toxic fumes.

The mayor of Alto Hospicio said, “The question is how to end the cause of this problem. What is the world doing with it? What is Chile doing with it?”

According to the lawyer, the State of Chile has a responsibility to allow these mountains of garbage to exist: “There is an imperative to be careful,” he says.

Judge Mauricio Oviedo, owner of the First Environmental Court in Chile, where the case was heard, advocates a comprehensive solution for the destruction of clothing.

“It seems to me that the State of Chile, together with other departments (…) should systematically look at this problem as a whole,” he told AFP.

“Not So Desert Desert”

Atacama has been the driest desert in the world for at least eight million years, with less than 20 millimeters of annual precipitation in its driest region, where rain is a rare phenomenon.

“It’s a type of desert where the rain level is extremely low. There are very few extreme arid deserts on the planet,” explains Pablo Guerrero, a botanist at the University of Concepción and a researcher at the Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity. .

In some areas close to the coast, the effect of the fog allowed a “very fragile” ecosystem to flourish; Several cacti species have long since disappeared here due to pollution, climate change and human settlements.

“There are species of cacti that are considered extinct. Unfortunately, this is something that has been seen on a very large scale in recent years and has been systematically degraded,” adds Guerrero.

But there are other sources of risk for the desert: copper and lithium mining, which is very concentrated in the use of scarce water and emissions of waste.

“They only see the desert as a mining area where the mine is run and where they can extract resources or fill their pockets,” complains Carmen Serrano of the Raíces Endémicas organization from the city of Antofagasta, considered the mining capital. world.

“There is no awareness that what is not a desert is a desert,” he adds.