CHAIMAA LKHAILI: “FAST FASHION DUMPING SITE: ATACAMA DESERT (CHILE)”

FAST FASHION DUMPING SITE: ATACAMA DESERT (CHILE) 

Chile’s Atacama Desert is a location of forsaken excellence. Traversing 41,000 square miles, it is one of the most fruitless places on earth, however across the stony territory, a new and unnatural element has grown.

Around 39,000 tons of disposed of fast fashion is left in refuse dumps in Chile’s Atacama, the driest desert on the planet. Consistently, around 59,000 tons of second-hand and unsold apparel, frequently from China or Bangladesh, arrives at Chile in the wake of going through Europe, Asia, or the United States, as indicated by a report by AFP.

Tonnes of clothing are shipped off the Iquique port in the Alto Hospicio free zone in northern Chile from where a portion of the clothes are exchanged around Latin America, however the greater part winds up in the desert since nobody pays the important tariffs to remove it.

A heap of disposed clothing expanding contamination made by fast fashion. “This clothing arrives from all over the world” Alex Carreno, a previous worker in the port’s import region, told the AFP news office. As per a 2019 UN report, worldwide clothing creation multiplied somewhere in the range of 2000 and 2014, and the business is “responsible for 20% of total water waste on a global level”.

Previously, material waste would have been given over, fixed, and reused before the last couple of scraps wound up in the container, however that doesn’t occur now. Never have consumers approached so many styles at such surpassingly low costs. Having these choices has nearly become natural, with huge shopping centres being filled continually with different new fast fashion stores. Indeed, this pattern isn’t simple incident: it is related to globalization’s effect on the fashion business. Basically, globalization is the financial and social cycle by which worldwide business sectors and societies progressively rule local markets and societies. In fact, since forever globalization has played a huge role in the fashion industry, the rapid changes we witness today on the industry are among the most significant effects of globalization.

Before globalization fashion has for some time been an image of status and class qualification depicting the high society from the lower class, since fashion houses spent significant time in high-design attire and extras and took care of first-class customer base, they ruled. Designer Charles Frederick Worth originally assigned the idea of the fashion house in Paris in the mid nineteenth hundred years. These powers have significantly altered how style is delivered, advertised, sold, purchased, worn, and thrown away. Globalization has in this way opened another dressing market with an enormous interest for stylish and in vogue garments, an interest that conventional design assortments and stores couldn’t stay aware of. Individuals needed trendier garments at lower costs; along these lines, fast fashion was born.

When you take all this into account, it is challenging to contend for fast fashion. It is unethical, inefficient and it has shady working circumstances. For example, in China, Bangladesh and India they pay the workers around half to a fifth of a living pay and most of the laborers, while possibly not all, are as of now impoverished ladies. These workers are compelled to work for 14 to 16 hours per day, each day. This is the aftereffect of wild capitalism. clothes get made exceptionally quick to fulfil need and latest trends, however the laborers are paid as little as conceivable with the goal that the organization can swell their income.

fashion industry is the second most polluting, after the oil business, and doesn’t represent the expense of regular assets — water for handling, land to develop fibber, poisonous synthetic substances to colour the textiles. You could contend that this industry creates job options, yet the expense and effect of unsafe synthetic compounds and gas discharges far offsets its advantages.

REFERENCES:

Chilean desert becomes dumping ground for fast fashion leftovers, The Independent,

 Photos: Chile’s desert dumping ground for fast fashion leftovers, Gallery News | Al Jazeera

Dumped in the Atacama desert, the mountain of discarded cheap clothes from the West, Daily Mail 

UN launches drive to highlight environmental cost of staying fashionable | | UN News, United Nations, 25 March 2019.

Glenn Schlossberg: The Effect of Globalization on Fast Fashion, Medium, September 24, 2019.

GLOBALISATION AND THE IMPACTS OF FAST FASHION, Center for Economic, Strategic and Political Discourse, 2 August 2020.

Wilfrid Laurier University Scholars Commons @ Laurier, Enlistment in the Canadian Expeditionary Force 1914-1918, 25 October 2017.

Fast Fashion: Consumerism, Capitalism and Waste, Eloquentiamagazine, April 09, 2021.

Fast fashion – The shady world of cheap clothing | DW Documentary, YouTube, February 11 2022.

The True Cost: Who Pays the Real Price for YOUR Clothes | Investigative Documentary, YouTube, February 07, 2021

World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/02/7-ways-to-break-the-fast-fashion-habit-and-save-the-planet/