The summer sales have just started, so encouraged by so-called "clothing hauls" from TikTok, you buy a garment from a chain store. Let's say it's a T-shirt. In the best-case scenario, you wear it for maybe a couple of months, but after that time and a few washings it gets worn out and falls apart. You then decide to throw it away.

You might say that T-shirt is now famous. Why? Because it most likely ended up in Chile's Atacama Desert, home to one of the world's largest textile waste dumps. The mountain of clothing waste is already so large that it can be seen from space.

The Atacama Desert in Chile is the driest place in the world, with an annual rainfall of less than 1 mm. However, the place is not only famous for this. The desert is also home to one of the largest clothing dumps in the world.

This is where both used and brand new (!) textiles that have been lying around in warehouses are sent from the United States, Europe and Asia. In total, this amounts to roughly 40,000 to 60,000 tonnes of unwanted clothes every year. Now they can be seen from space.

According to the Jam Press website, the SkyFi app has published satellite images that prove the scale of the said dump. We should add that most of these clothes are probably made of polyester and acrylic, and such substances take hundreds of years to decompose.

What can be found in a clothing waste visible from space? Christmas jumpers, among other things. Why am I writing about this? Because this is one piece of garment that quite often ends up in the trash after we have worn it two or three times in a given season. Do you remember the situation with the T-shirt I mentioned in the introduction?

If someone had bought it on a momentary whim, influenced by current fashion, a TikTok video or just to celebrate, it would most likely have been worn only a few times before it ended up in the trash. Need I remind you that it takes 2,500 litres of water to produce one T-shirt?

We have written about the harm of fast fashion more than once. So before you go to the sales, remind yourself of what the actual cost of the clothes you buy is. Also, check the labels and consider whether you really need something.

This doesn't mean you have to give up on sales altogether. Take a look at the guide where we explained how to buy clothes on sale and be eco-friendly. Not only will the Atacama Desert thank you for it, but the entire planet will too.

Source: WP, The Independent