From Atacama's clothing dumps to building insulation: a small factory wrestles with a global textile spill

In Chile’s Atacama Desert, vast piles of unsold and secondhand clothing dumped from abroad persist because most fabrics are synthetic and non-biodegradable; only about 1% is recycled while fires and toxic smoke from dumps are common. A tiny Alto Hospicio factory, EcoFibra, turns shredded textile waste into insulation panels for affordable housing, recapturing value from waste, but the scale of imports and dumping far exceeds what the plant can process, underscoring the need for upstream changes in how disposal material is shipped and managed.