Used tires, remnants of used clothing, and ash bear witness to what was once one of the world’s largest textile landfills, located in Alto Hospicio, northern Chile, which caught fire in 2023 coinciding with the filing of a legal complaint against the municipality and the Chilean government for not addressing illegal dumping. “The lack of traceability of uncontrolled landfills is one of the most urgent issues in the region,” explain Adriana Sanz Mirabal and Aina Planas Carbonell, coordinators of the “Tarapacá Circularity Scanner” project, which aims to make this territory circular and thus contribute to optimizing the value of the resources entering and circulating in the region.

Sanz and Planas had the opportunity to visit it during a stay this January as part of the project, in a trip that aimed, on the one hand, to firsthand understand the issues and peculiarities of the territory and, on the other hand, to present the project’s progress to key agents in the territory and prioritize sectors with the most potential for implementing circular strategies.

Once this prioritization is done, the next step will be to analyze the metabolism of the key sectors in the territory. That is, studying how these sectors use resources such as water, energy, metals, and minerals, and how they manage the waste they generate. “This analysis will provide us with a view of the magnitude and nature of the resource flows circulating in the territory, allowing us to understand and identify opportunities to optimize their use,” say the project coordinators. The result will be a set of insights that will guide the definition of circular economy strategies.

One conclusion from the stay in Chile, according to Sanz, is that “in Tarapacá, there are sectors with great potential for circularity, but little is being done yet; there are few ongoing initiatives, few active infrastructures, and little collaboration among key actors.” For the Inèdit expert, “we have much to do, but we are still far from actual implementation, despite regulations pushing for these changes.”

Regardless, understanding the reality of the territory has provided the Inèdit team with a valuable perspective to advance in defining circularity strategies: “It will be essential to outline circular strategic lines with a social and economic perspective because addressing the challenge of the circular economy purely from environmental and technical aspects would place a significant part of the population in situations of poverty and vulnerability,” says Planas.

The “Tarapacá Circularity Scanner” project is commissioned by CircularTec, the first technological center in Latin America and the Caribbean dedicated to promoting the transition to the circular economy, with which Inèdit has a collaboration agreement. It is expected that the project can be scaled to other Chilean regions.