Polyester Landscapes

Human relationships with objects and matter are the very fundament of traditional archaeology. Throughout my studies, I have gained insight into how past humans materialised their understanding of existence, their technologies of survival, and their urge for expression. Humans have formed different matter since the beginning of their time, and through different materials, its restrictions and possibilities, different objects appear. Revealing vital information beyond their physical formation, an insight into human interactions with the world, and the individuals who formed the objects. 

Archaeology is also traditionally focused on the processes of exposing and protecting, finding and managing, uncovering and covering - artefacts. The excitement and engagement of finding long lost objects and conserving them for a forever, has made me gain questions about how we relate to our “stuff” today. In a world full of mass production and an abundance of persistent products, how do we experience this intense overgrowth of things? What do we do with it, how do we take care of it, what does it say about us, and what does it mean for the world of nature? This is where the central paradox of this discussion takes place; archaeology depends on the endurance of objects through time, but today, the same durability has become a defining feature of the environmental crisis associated with the Anthropocene (Lax, 2021:1-2, Crutzen 2002).

In this thesis, my curiosity is pointed towards discarded clothing and its appearance and accumulation in concentrated landscapes. Approached through contemporary archaeology theory, this essay will use the term polyester landscapes, a term I created during this essay, while researching how synthetic garments resist to decompose and actively reshape its surrounding landscape. The term will work as a red thread which, while being defined through the thesis, simultaneously helps answer the main question of the thesis: what does synthetic clothing reveal when approached through contemporary archaeology, and how does it reshape our understanding of value, waste, heritage, and time?

(Ad)dressing the anthropocene

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The beginning of wearing what is recognized as clothing began around 200,000 years ago, according to Nowell & Skala (2024). They underline how clothing communicates important information, such as social status and group, or individual identity (Nowell & Skala, 2024:237). The earliest evidence of fiber technology is from a neanderthal site dated back to around 50,000 years ago (Nowell & Skala, 2024:238). Since its invention, clothing production has undergone profound transformations. Okamoto and Kajiwara (1997) express how humans seem to have a natural instinct of challenging nature, which usually involves mimicking it. This is the case within fibers and textile-production (Okamoto, M., & Kajiwara, K 1997:1).

Weaving became mechanized during the industrial revolution, allowing quick production of inexpensive clothes (Styles 2020:1). Artificial fibers emerged in the nineteenth century, when the attempt to imitate silk (rayon) was achieved (Okamoto & Kajiwara 1997:1). Since then, synthetic fibres have transformed the textile industry, and by 2020, artificial fibre made up about 62% of global fibre production (Textile Exchange 2021:9). One year later, polyester alone made up 54% of all produced fibers, far surpassing natural fibres such as cotton and wool (Smelik 2023:280, Baloyi et al 2024). 

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The emergence of fast fashion as a business model is traced back to the late twentieth century, when globalised production and fast distribution of inexpensive garments spread (Baloyi et al 2024). The model normalized low prices and rapid trend turnover (Mair 2025e:20, Mariko 2023:16,93). Changing clothing production from ready to wear, to what we recognize as fast fashion (Dzhengiz et al. 2023:23). Smelik (2023) describes this model very precisely; “Fast fashion points to the enormous overconsumption and overproduction of textiles” (2023:282). Today, a new term has developed; ultra-fast fashion. Dzhengiz et al. (2023) describes it as clothing that has an extremely short process period from design to consumer (just a few days). Aiming clothing to respond rapidly to consumers' rising expectations of immediate availability and constant development of new trends (Dzhengiz et al. 2023:13-14).

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How does the intensification of this ultra-fastness restructure the social and cultural meaning attached to waste and value? Value has traditionally been linked to durability, where the longevity of a material contributed to its perceived worth. Even though synthetic material in the beginning of its production was designed for increased durability, it is commonly associated with cheapness (Hawkins 2023:584, Dennis 2025:240). The ability to massproduce garments at high speed reduces the unit prices and leads consumers to associate the material with little value. Dennis (2025) argues that the value of an item has been linked to the visible labour of the human hand, the aura of the object (Dennis 2025:230, 232). Because synthetic clothing is manufactured with machines, consumers arguably feel a spiritual breakage from the object, making it easier to discard. The ultra-fast mass-production industry holds the consumer one step away from the investment of human time and action (Dennis 2025:230, 233, Hawkins 2023:581-584). Contemporary ultra-fast fashion is undeniably a low quality vision, prioritising fast waste rotation, just like the fast production, designed to fail quickly for accelerated consumption, over quality or longevity.

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The intense production of synthetic clothes leaves a deep climate impression. The fashion industry is actually considered the second most polluting sector after oil extraction (Dzhengiz et al. 2023:1). Knowing how our choices of consumption influence the global climate - why do we keep buying and discarding? Mair (2025) has one suggestion, the gap between knowledge, attitude, and practice, (the KAP-gap) where consumers are aware of the environmental harms, but the awareness does not translate into a changed behaviour. Instead, people continue to buy due to psychological reward systems and low prices (Mair 2025f:150). But what follows consumption and disposal? Where do the material aftermath of these ‘rewards’ end up, how do they materialise in the world, and what do they reveal about the values and imaginaries of contemporary societies?

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Part 1) Polyester Landscapes; What, Where, When

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1. Waste is a place

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What makes clothing particularly fascinating, but also deeply problematic, is the fact that it is a part of everyone's everyday life, but the consequences of its disposal is not equally shared. The massive production of clothing, combined with the intense consumerism and fast shifting trend-culture, cause over 80% of the clothes being made to end up as discarded (Environment+Energy Leader, 2024). For people in wealthier regions, clothing simply disappears when discarded, but for others, particularly people in lower-income countries, this is not the case. Instead, they are left with what Franklin Zepeda (leader of a circular economy company in Chile) describes as“the textile dump for developed countries”((National Geographic,) Bartlett 2024). This has led to the term waste colonialism (Mariko 2023:120), where massive quantities of unwanted textiles are exported to countries like Ghana, Chile, and Bangladesh.

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The combination of the continuous grasp for more, in the northern regions, the high production of synthetic textiles, and the shipping of what is recognised as clothing waste to other countries, leads to the accumulation of the huge, concentrated landscapes of synthetic clothing hills in specific regions. This is what I describe as polyester landscapes. One striking example of this is the clothing waste landfill hills of the Atacama Desert. The Chilean port of Iquique has unintentionally turned the Atacama Desert into a dumping ground through a duty-free trade zone. This was initially created to help the local economy by allowing goods to enter without taxes, it was working fine on a small scale, but over time, the volume grew far beyond the locals' capacity, creating what is described as textile graveyard mountains in the landscape ((National Geographic,) Bartlett, 2024). To imagine the scale of this landscape, picture a football field of discarded clothes and then multiply it by 580 (Romeo,2023). This example leaves a powerful impression of this massive geological process.

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One way to approach the landscape forming force of the polyester landscapes is by examining how economic systems materialize in the environment. Abourahme & Jabary-Salamanca (2016) presents, in a conversation with Timothy Mitchell, how infrastructures are not just social systems or abstract spheres, instead, they are durable physical structures, a part of our physical world (Abourahme et a 2016). The mountain formations expose an image beyond itself, on how western societies organize resources, distribute power, and define value and worthlessness. They become manifests of the western mindset, revealing the great acceleration of human consumption and a culture of planned obsolescence. Becoming material archives, or monuments of the western economy. The thought of waste as a place also contributes to changing the fundamental understanding of clothing waste as an ending point.

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Mary Douglas (1966) conceptualises waste as “matter out of place”, suggesting that waste (in this case, textile waste) is a socially constructed phenomenon rather than an existing objective category. Douglas also describes how this matter out of space represents a byproduct of a system (Douglas, 1966:36). In this way, polyester landscapes represent more than the waste itself. It becomes an echo of a western modern system of import, consumerism, production and socio-political-frameworks, in line with the work of Abourahme, this is what is initially engraved in the landscapes of foreign countries. The ghosts of our choices create new formations in far away places. The previously invisible, distant systems and desires become immediate and personal. With these theoretical frames, synthetic clothing is not objects in a wrong location or items defined by a category; it is place. 

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2. How they came to be, a part of the stratiegraphy 

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The term Anthropocene (Benner et al., 2021:13) is a proposed term to describe the stratigraphic geological layers where humans are “leaving their signature in the fossil record” (Lorimer 2015:1, Lax 2021:xiv). Meaning our everyday objects are actually becoming a part of the Earth's geological history (Steffen et al., 2016). Neal & Nicoll (2025) discuss how plastic specifically has infiltrated the geological record, “marking a distinct transition and fresh phase in Earth’s stratigraphy” (2025:70). Where polyester landscapes fall into this, is when the consumption of nondegradable, synthetic clothing becomes a marker of human existence in the stratigraphic layers of the earth, under, as much as over, the ground. 

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This can also be argued by how synthetic clothing compose; one might assume that clothes decompose quickly, especially if partly made from natural fibers like cotton or wool. But, most modern clothing contains synthetic fibers, which are far more durable. Also, in landfills, limited oxygen, sunlight and moisture prevents microbes from breaking down the fibers. Therefore, organic material can last for decades or centuries together with the synthetic textiles (Edgeworth 2025:57-58, Fashion & Land 2024:27, Ge 2020).

In this way, landfills act as time capsules preserving both organic and synthetic materials. Its extreme durability and ability to carry information, like logos or production details, make it a key stratigraphic marker that future archaeologists might use to date our era. This gradual form of environmental formation of the waste landscapes will outlast the humans who created it, shifting the perspective of plastic clothing from rubbish to a stratigraphic record (Edgeworth 2025:51-52, 57-58).

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The artist Minga Opazo illustrates this exact issue in her artworks “Core Sample” and “Terron” (2020), where clothing and soil is pressed together in layers and cut out in squares illustrating the stratagraphic layers of the future. The artwork pushes the archeological point of view from a historical find focused lens, to a future related problem within archeological artefacts. This material and visual presentation presents the paradox of the crossing between traditional and contemporary archeology. Where the remains and finds of humans in the soil changes from a rare find, to a picture of human consumption and climate destruction. Opazo creates an understanding of stratigraphy as a historical archive one can read. The synthetic clothing in these layers becomes not only a natural science subject, but a cultural and socio-political subject, quite literally creating an image of both polyester landscapes, and what Neal & Nicoll are arguing. 

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From an archaeological perspective, these works can be understood as future excavations, where clothing, with its extreme durability and information, will function as key temporal markers of our epoch. Polyester landscapes are very closely related to the Anthropocene in the sense of strategraphy, both visually and technical, a literal force in the geological soil, which is also the very concept of the anthropocene.

3. Waste of (a) time

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But, waste is not only a place, it is also a time. This is discussed by William Viney in his book Waste, a philosophy of thing (2014), where he challenges Douglas' phrase of dirt/waste as “matter out of place”. Wang Kun and Raymond Yu Wang (2025) also discuss Douglas` framing of matter as a socio-spatial phenomenon, and how this actually comes too short, they believe that waste does not only fall out of its context when out of place, but it simultaneously belongs to a time (Kun & Wang 2025:286). Usually objects move with a clear timeline, but when discarded, this timeline breaks, this is described by Viney with the term waste-time; a condition where objects are released from the demand of usefulness and a linear progress, but the matter is still present (2014). It falls into a state of in-between, where its functional future is gone, and instead of continuing its existence, it lives without a clear direction. Waste is then not only discarded matter, but a material state where time becomes uncertain (Viney 2014). 

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François Hartog describes the “tyranny of an unending now,” where society becomes obsessed with constant present experience, leaving little room for deeper reflection on the past or long-term responsibility for the future (Hawkins 2024:90). Araújo and Seymour (2025) present ephemeral archaeology, focusing on objects and materials that are used briefly, but leave long-lasting traces. It is a paradox that challenges how we think about temporality, consumption, and materiality. It highlights the tension between the short-lived use of objects and their long-lasting presence in the world (Araújo and Nicole Seymour 2025). 

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Araújo and Seymour (2022) use the ideology of Zoe Todd to portray plastic objects as ancient material embodying a past life, this perspective can also be used when discussing polyester landscapes. Synthetic clothing is commonly made of ancient fossils (polyester), but is being transformed into usage for our everyday life in contemporary time. The fossils from beyond our timeframe then shape the experience of the present, and form a kind of material memory through which we encounter materials we have never directly experienced before (Seymour 2022:186). This binds the immediacy of daily life to deep time (Bryning 2025:364), turning polyester landscapes into carriers of a living, time-bending archive (Seymour 2022:186-187).

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Polyester landscapes do not necessarily illustrate Viney's waste-time or Hartog's tyranny of an endless now alone, rather, they expose the social failure of both these terms. Polyester landscapes showcase how the illusion about presentism and garments only existing within the horizon of our personal present, falls flat. Displacing waste to distant spaces, removed from our immediate perception, cultivates the illusion that the objects we consume exist only for the ephemeral pleasure of the now. Once it is out of our life, it seems to dissolve from our responsibility, as if its past and future belong to no one. But, in polyester landscapes, the same garments stubbornly exist, remaining long after their social life is over. Staying in a waste-time; released from usefulness, but unable to exit the world.

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Together, by placing what (synthetic clothing), where (concentrated landfill), and when (waste-time and deep time), the term polyester landscapes is presented and situated. With this term I am creating a base for discussing the landfills as more than a dead clothing waste situation somewhere far away. Instead, the term presents a broader view, global economic systems, social practices of consumption, temporal illusions and socio-spatial phenomena into one single analytical frame.

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Part 2) Polyester Landscapes: Anti 

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When discussing polyester landscapes, the term Anti-Landscape is particularly interesting. The term is laid out by Nye (2014) in the book “The Anti Landscape” (2014). The Anti landscapes are described as spaces that do not sustain life, being a result of a long lasting process of, for example pollution, creating dystopia and environmental destruction, often taking place around cities (Nye 2014:13-14). Gardner (2020) presents the term artificial landscape, meaning landscape created by humans as a by-product of other production processes, amplifying how this form of landscape has grown rapidly since the industrial revolution (2020:21). 

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As mentioned earlier, synthetic textile production had its spike after the industrial revolution, and textile wastelands, such as the Atacama desert landfill in Chile, represent a by-product from the intense, fast-growing demand of modern society's fashion and trend culture. While the Anti Landscape seems to have its focus on whether humans can survive in this space, artificial landscape focus on the aftermath of human distribution and industrialisation. Polyester landscapes can be understood simultaneously as Nye`s anti-landscapes, and Gardner`s waste modified landscape; it is spaces that no longer sustain life in any conventional way, and is densely and intensely structured by industrially produced layers of synthetic matter. 

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Also, anti-landscapes hold a negative connotation as something destructive and possibly dangerous. Gardner is interested in how the waste modified landscape sites can gain value and new meanings. Polyester landscapes can in some ways hold this tension, being both an environmental destruction, while also, from an archeological view, include a huge potential for material information about human society, distribution and value. Though I must feel the need to underline that these landfills are particularly destructive, as people and nature experience extreme suffering (Smith 2022). Polyester Landscapes is not only material pollution, but also a particularly vivid example of both this anti-landscape, artifical landscapes, and the vivid and demanding costs of the Anthropocene. 

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Anti-aesthetics 

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Nye discusses the anti-landscapes further, introducing Werner Bigels ' (2014) thoughts on how the anti-landscapes have an aesthetically appealing way. With this, we can understand, as Bigell puts forth, how the anti landscapes are not only whether or not humans can survive in these spaces, but also how humans understand them and give them meaning. 

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When the projections of our expectations does not align with the landscape we see, anti-landscapes are created (Nye 2014:22-23). Meaning that the anti-landscapes are not only unappealing, but a way of making the failure of our human inventions visible. Polyester landscapes refuse to be turned into a pleasing view for the human eye, yet something about them seems to be visually powerful. The waste-modified landscapes stand out as monuments from modern society (Uni­versity of Edinburgh 2024, Dalzero 2016, Harrison 2015). These places evoke fear and disgust, whether through visible decay or through invisible threats (Nye 2014). Bigell (2014) describes anti-landscapes as haunting beauty or strange allure, representing a space where the limits of human control are made evident (Bigell 2014). He describes this as material transcendence “a sense of awe or aesthetic power that comes from realizing (that) the world is larger and more persistent than our efforts to control it” (Bigell 2014:129). 

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This is where Christian Boltanski's installation “Personnes” (2010), and Kari Steihaug, «Ruin» (2007) comes to mind. Personnes involves a machine digging in a mountain of discarded clothing, while Ruins is quite literally a pile of clothing, looking like a fallen ruin. The reason for me bringing up these artworks is because they visually represent something deeper within these waste mountains when it comes to our bodily experience and acknowledgments with the exposure of these landscapes. 

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The installations are overwhelming, the clothing is anonymous, and the piles are messy, still they represent something intimate, personal and systematic. The artworks showcase how these wastelands have both a deep civil and social meaning, standing tall and proud in the landscape, creating a perception of a robust, everlasting construction. The installations, like the polyester landscapes, confront the viewer with this crossroad of confusion between awe and disgust. This is what Myra Hird (2021) describes as anti-aesthetics; when human perception can no longer fully grasp what they face. For example, pollution from cities could in old paintings be understood as having power over nature (Hird 2021:151-153).

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Today, artwork indicating industry and nature, rather brings connotations from defeat to surrender around humans and nature, showcasing how humans are destroying their very own planet. In this way, anti-aesthetics exposes what conventional beauty (and the fashion business) hides; social inequalities, ecological consequences of capitalism and overproduction (Schaag 2020, Wolfe 2021). The installations and the term anti-aesthetics point out the very discomfort of the polyester landscapes in the time of anthropocene, something is off, we see it, we know it, but we lack to address it. 

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Anti-heritage

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Natural heritage has often been associated with beauty, the picturesque, or the sublime, typically seen as valuable and needing to be preserved for future generations (Edensor 2022, Harrison & O’Donnell 2010). UNESCO defines heritage as “our legacy from the past, what we live with today, and what we pass on to future generations” (2026). But, with the anti-aesthetics of the Anthropocene, where we must live with the unintended remnants of the past, what are we really passing on to the next generations? 

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When discussing polyester landscapes and heritage, I would like to introduce the term involuntary heritage from Venovcevs and Bangstad's article “Living with Heritage: Involuntary Entanglements of the Anthropocene – An Introduction”, portraying a different way of thinking when it comes to heritage from something humans can control, to something to live together with (2022:1-2). Cornelius Holtorf (2025) presents this same radical shift from static or still, to something active, a process that shapes the future, rather than preserving the past. This means that heritage landscape is not heritage-saving, but rather heritage-making (Harrison 2015, Holtorf 2025).

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Polyester landscapes are material traces of a lifestyle and an economic system that have taken place somewhere else, but leave a physical manifestation in the landscapes of developing countries. This makes the piles of textile waste fit very well with the idea of heritage as something we live with rather than something we choose and conserve. These landscapes are actively being produced through global consumption patterns and function as live archives of materiality, economy, and politics. 

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Polyester landscapes break with the expectation that heritage should be beautiful and proudly handed down to the next generation, instead they visually show how we would rather conceal our patterns of poor and irresponsible behaviour, over nature, human well-being and fair labour conditions. What happens to the concept of “heritage” if we include such landscapes? Could they possibly be preserved as warnings or as monuments for the future to learn from our time?

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UNESCO emphasises “our” shared heritage for future generations, but the distribution is highly uneven. Wealthy countries consume, while poorer countries receive the waste and must live with the long-term consequences. Landscape heritage in the Global South is shaped by decisions made in the Global North. This creates a paradox; some parts of nature are assigned high value as heritage, while others are turned into dumping grounds, but all places will eventually become part of a future heritage landscape.

If polyester landscapes are part of our landscape heritage, what does that reveal about the values of our time? Can recognising polyester landscapes as a part of our shared heritage be a way of taking responsibility for future generations?

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Conclusion  

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This thesis explores how synthetic clothing reshapes our understanding of value, waste, heritage, and time. Through developing the term polyester landscapes, I describe concentrated accumulations of discarded synthetic clothing that act as terrain, archive, and symptom of our contemporary relationship to matter and time. The term has worked both as an umbrella and as a sharp needle, poking into human psychology and behavior, while discussing the broad and complex societal and environmental concerns, always through an archeological lens. 

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Synthetic clothing reshapes our understanding of value by showcasing how economic value is detached from material endurance. The way society deems valueless can, in fact, become some of the most consequential traces of our time. Synthetic clothing reshapes our understanding of heritage by challenging heritage as something conventionally beautiful and wished to be preserved, to an involuntary heritage of toxic, synthetic remains, that we must live with and answer for in the future. And it reshapes our understanding of time, arguing that discarded garments are a paradoxical temporality; designed for short-term use, made with ultra-fastness, still, it endures for centuries. Collapsing deep time and everyday time, binding fossil origins, contemporary consumption, and future archaeology into one single material phenomenon.

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With the polyester landscapes, human desire collides with the reality of materiality. Our wish for control is exposed precisely through our failure to manage its consequences; the blunt urge to master and conquer nature and time becomes visible. Revealing the achievements and existence of human culture and our incredible inventions, but also our diminishing capacity to experience time and space beyond our own circuits of production and consumption.

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In total I argue that digging deeper (pun intended) into the sources and meanings behind the landfills of clothing, reveals how these polyester landscapes are an uncomfortable, but crucial heritage of the Anthropocene. They function as involuntary monuments to overproduction and overconsumption, forcing archaeology and heritage studies to reckon with landscapes that are neither chosen nor beautiful, yet inevitably a part of what we leave behind. They force a rethinking of value, waste, heritage, and time, Uncovering that what we imagine as disposable, will become lasting scars from a civilization built on extraction, exploitation, and denial.

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Limitations and future research

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This thesis has focused on the material, temporal, and heritage dimensions of polyester landscapes, and has therefore not examined in detail the labour conditions, the immense human suffering especially under ultra-fast-fashion, or the often gendered exploitation taking place in fast-fashion production. Also the full climatic and damaging effects of synthetic textiles is too immense to be covered in this thesis. These choices are due to the word-limits in this assignment, and to an analytical choice to focus on the archaeological perspectives. Future research could combine and immerse this material approach, with labour studies, feminist- and postcolonial- analyses, and environmental science for instance.