FASHION'S DIRTY LITTLE SECRET

Marie Richards
Feb 2
2 min read

HOW OUR CLOTHES ARE POISONING GHANA AND CHILE

Fast fashion loves to sell the fantasy: cheap, trendy, disposable. What it doesn’t show you is where those clothes go when we’re “done” with them — or what it takes to make them in the first place.

SPOILER: It’s devastating real people, real ecosystems and entire countries.

Ghana: Drowned in our Discards

Every single week, an estimated 15 million second-hand clothing items arrive in Ghana.

What’s sold as “donations” has become an environmental and economic crisis. Local markets are overwhelmed with low-quality garments that cannot be resold, destroying local textile businesses and forcing communities to manage the fallout.

Much of this clothing ends up:

dumped in landfills
burned in open air
clogging waterways and coastlines

This isn’t generosity. It’s exported waste with a conscience-free label.

Chile: The Atacama Desert Is Becoming a Wardrobe Graveyard

Chile receives around 60,000 tonnes of discarded clothing every year — and roughly 40,000 tonnes of it is dumped in the Atacama Desert, one of the driest ecosystems on the planet.

Synthetic fabrics don’t biodegrade. They sit. They leach. Or they’re burned, releasing toxic fumes into the air.

A desert turned dumping ground — all so trends can change faster.

The Dye Problem No One Wants to Talk About

The textile industry uses approximately 800,000 tonnes of synthetic dyes every year.

These dyes:

contaminate rivers and groundwater
destroy aquatic life
cause long-term health issues for textile workers

In many manufacturing regions, dye wastewater is discharged untreated — turning rivers unnatural colours and making them unsafe for drinking, farming, or fishing.

That colour pop? It came at a cost someone else is paying.