Chile's Atacama desert has dumps where huge quantities of unsold and second-hand clothing end up, and a small factory nearby now shreds textile waste from that pile and presses it into insulation panels for buildings

Chile's Atacama desert has dumps where huge quantities of unsold and second-hand clothing end up, and a small factory nearby now shreds textile waste from that pile and presses it into insulation panels for buildings

Picture a mound of clothing so large you can see it from orbit. Jeans, fleece jackets, cheap party dresses, some with the tags still on, piled across the driest desert on Earth. This is real. It sits in northern Chile, in the Atacama near the cities of Iquique and Alto Hospicio, and it keeps growing. What interests us is what happens to that pile next, because two very different futures are already playing out on the same ground. One future is f…