The Invisible Illegal Dump: Environmental Salience and Territorial Proximity in Northern Chile

Global fast fashion has produced the world’s largest illegal textile dump in Alto Hospicio (Atacama Desert, Chile). This article examines a paradox: despite the physical scale of the problem and its public health consequences, residents of the Province of Iquique consistently rank it among their lowest environmental priorities. Using 1783 responses from three survey waves (CEMIT, Universidad de Tarapacá), we test the hypothesis that the illegal dump has low relative salience and examine its predictors. The dump consistently falls in the lower half of the environmental concern ranking across all waves (11th in MAM2, 12th in MAM3, and 9th in MAM4, out of 13 comparable items), with highly significant differences relative to dominant concerns. Logistic regression identifies residence in Alto Hospicio as the only significant predictor of salience; sex, age, educational attainment and general environmental knowledge show no statistically significant association. These findings contribute to sustainability governance: when citizen salience is structurally low, bottom-up regulatory pressure is unlikely to emerge, strengthening the case for supply-side instruments (such as extended producer responsibility) that operate independently of social demand.