Chilean startup shreds Atacama textile waste into building insulation

Key points

• Chile imports approximately 59,000 tons of secondhand clothing annually, with roughly 40,000 tons ending up in landfills in the Atacama Desert.
• EcoFibra, founded by engineer Franklin Zepeda, sorts, strips, and shreds textile waste to press it into dense insulation mats for buildings.
• The resulting panels are primarily used in low-cost social housing to improve thermal efficiency and noise reduction.
• Only about 1% of imported textiles are currently recycled, with the rest often burned or buried due to synthetic materials and chemical treatments.
• The factory processes close to eight tons of waste per day, a fraction of the total volume arriving from Europe, Asia, and the United States.

Background

The Atacama Desert has previously been the site of major scientific endeavors, including NASA’s Mars rover life-detection rehearsals and the construction of the European Southern Observatory’s Extremely Large Telescope. Recent environmental shifts, such as unprecedented snowfall in August 2026, have also impacted the region, but the textile waste crisis remains a persistent structural issue driven by global import patterns.

Why it matters

The story illustrates the disconnect between local recycling efforts and the scale of global waste imports. While EcoFibra provides a viable use for toxic materials that cannot be biodegraded, the volume of incoming waste outpaces processing capacity, suggesting that upstream regulatory changes are necessary to address the crisis effectively.

What to watch

Expansion of recycling capacity is unlikely to match the influx of imported textiles without changes in shipping volumes. Environmental lawyers continue to pursue legal action against authorities regarding the dumps, while the focus remains on whether upstream policies can reduce the flow of unsold and secondhand clothing into Chile.