BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
A used clothing story
December 11
Recently, a Chilean friend told me that for a beautiful experience that touches the spirit, I should visit the Atacama desert, especially in spring.
Also the dry air apparently makes viewing the billions of stars at night especially beautiful and breathtaking.
I immediately filed it away in the part of my brain labelled “Experiences that are “must do” for the future.
However today I saw an article in The BBC news today describing the Atacama as the #1 used clothing dump in the world. This is how it looks now.
Clothes are trucked in by the container load and just dumped. One of the officials of one of the small towns near a dump says that only about 15% of the clothes are ever sold to the people who live in the area. The rest are left or burned. Burning the synthetic materials creates a toxic smoke that smoulder on for days.
My question is…well, I have a couple of questions…but one is why can’t the countries that ship in the old used clothing pay a premium to subsidize an environmentally safe way of disposing of this stuff?
Surely if we can build the James Webb Telescope
And all those megaton missiles and planes that can fly around the world bombing everyone as they go, we can build a smokeless incinerator to protect the Atacama and places like it. We really are fiddling while the planet burns.
What are we doing?
THE CHALLENGE
I, for one, promise myself that I will buy only one or two pieces of needed clothing a year and will personally destroy what I don’t need. I’ll figure out how to do this in a responsible way over the winter.
