Fashion’s ugly face

The dubious distinction aside, say experts, what’s more worrying is where this waste goes and who ends up dealing with it. “There isn’t any one single destination where textile waste ends up,” says Rahul Nainani, CEO and co-founder of ReCircle, a waste management and recycling solutions provider.

“Some unsold inventory is pushed into discount markets or exported to secondary markets in other countries. Manufacturing scraps often enter informal recycling streams and get downcycled into low-value products. But a significant portion, especially mixed or low-grade textiles, eventually ends up in landfills or is sent for waste-to-energy. At that stage, most of the material value is already lost. So while parts of the system do recover value, a large chunk still leaks out,” Nainani adds.

Globally, the fashion industry generates about 92 million tonne of textile waste annually, according to the United Nations Environment Programme, with only about 1% of it currently being recycled into new products. Abhishek Jain, fellow and director, green economy and impact innovations, Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), a policy research institute and think tank, says: “Synthetic materials like polyester take up to 200 years to decompose.”

Jain adds that the long-term environmental impact of textile waste on the population can cause systemic health issues. “The industry also contributes to massive water contamination, with trillions of microplastic particles and toxic dyeing effluents containing heavy metals spreading waterborne illnesses.”

Priyanka Khanna, innovation director at Fashion for Good, a global platform for collaborative innovation to build fashion as a regenerative industry, speaks of how ‘forever chemicals’ are present in almost all our clothes and textiles, which make it even more difficult to recycle these items. For effective recycling, dyes, chemicals, oxidants and accessories like buttons and buckles have to be removed from the garment when it is sorted for recycling. As Khanna says, this is a process that requires a massive infrastructure to be in place for it to adequately function.

“The challenge is that India has a very good ecosystem for the textile and fashion business, but the processing of textile waste is still expensive,” she adds.

Ineffective by design

One of the largest polluters and generators of textile waste is fast fashion. With its rapid production and low-quality clothing model, it accounts for up to 10% of global carbon emissions. It is also the second-largest consumer of water globally, requiring roughly 2,700 litres to make just one cotton shirt, as per reports.

Globally, fast fashion brands such as H&M, Zara, Primark, and Marks and Spencers have repeatedly come under the scanner for their wasteful practices when dealing with excess stock and leftover items.

Luxury brands are no exception. In 2024, British luxury fashion brand Burberry was criticised for destroying thousands of pounds worth of unsold merchandise to maintain brand exclusivity. A spokesperson for the brand, however, later reportedly clarified that the disposing was done in an environment-friendly fashion.

Global fashion brand Coach and lingerie maker Victoria’s Secret have also received backlash for throwing out unsold handbags and undergarments from their end-of-season leftovers to prevent copies and maintain exclusivity of their products. Athletic wear brand Nike was also accused of slashing and throwing away several pairs of shoes in 2021.

Gucci, Prada, Chanel and Hermes have also been hit with similar allegations, reportedly outed by activists and former employees, who claimed that massive unsold stocks are destroyed and disposed of by the brands. Most of these brands subsequently released statements claiming that the activities were taken out of context, and that the brands take measures to limit destruction of products or environmentally conscious destruction of unsold goods internally.

According to ReCircle’s Nainani, it’s less about individual brands and more about the fast fashion model itself. “High volumes, low prices, short usage cycles. That combination almost guarantees waste,” he explains, adding: “Even if individual brands improve certain practices, the overall system still produces more than it can recover. Until that equation changes, waste

will remain a byproduct of how fashion operates.”

Management & responsibility

Despite the worrying situation, the conversation around textile waste, sustainability and recycling are seeing an improvement. Several leading global fashion brands run take-back programmes, under which people can drop off old clothes that they had purchased earlier, and the brands pick up the baton to repurpose or recycle those items.

H&M, for instance, has gathered over 172,000 tonne of preloved clothing and textiles since 2013, as per reports. “Through collecting, sorting, reselling, repurposing and recycling, we can give many of these items a second life,” reads its website. Similar programmes are run by Zara, Mango, Levi’s, and The North Face, among others, where they take back used clothing for upcycling and repurposing later.

Referring to the initiatives being taken up by fashion brands, ReCircle’s Nainani says, “You’ll see take-back programmes, recycled collections, and ESG (environmental, social, and governance) reports. That shift is real.” However, “If you look closely, most of these are still at the edges of the business, not at the core of it. Recycled lines are a small percentage of total production. Take-back programmes don’t always guarantee what happens after collection. And there’s limited transparency on actual recovery rates.”

According to Khanna of Fashion for Good, even with these collection programmes, the recycling infrastructure itself is still being built in India, and may take another five to ten years to function as a well-oiled machinery.

“Step one is collection,” she says, “But does that mean the rest of the supply chain is settled? No.” Once collected, the composition of the textile must be examined — the technology for which is not yet available to all brands in a widespread manner, she points

out. “In the waste hierarchy, you always want to go into reuse first, because that’s the way you keep the material in the market longer. Then you look at recycling and what can and cannot be recycled. Then you look at upcycling, downcycling, secondary uses, waste to energy, etc. So, once you collect something, unlike other materials, textile waste cannot be treated like a homogenous stock.”

Nainani blames the culture of fast fashion for the volume of waste generated. “The fashion industry doesn’t just contribute to textile waste. It shapes how quickly waste is created. Earlier, clothing had a longer life; however now, trends move so fast that garments are almost designed for short-term use. A lot of waste is created even before a product reaches the consumer,” he explains. “Cutting waste in factories, rejected batches, and unsold inventory. Then comes post-consumer waste, which is growing rapidly as usage cycles shrink.”

“In India, though the numbers for the fashion industry’s impact on global carbon emissions are less documented, the inefficiency is visible. You’re using water, energy, labour, logistics, all to create products that are worn a handful of times and then discarded,” he points out.

The India story

According to a report released in February by the Union Ministry of Textiles, titled Mapping of Textile Waste Value Chains in India, India has a relatively active waste management ecosystem. According to government data, over 70% of textile waste is recovered and diverted into reuse, recycling, or upcycling streams.

One of the leaders in this waste management journey is textile manufacturer Arvind, which has 18 manufacturing units spread across Gujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Jharkhand, and includes spinning, fabric mills, and garment units. “We produce 300 million yards of fabrics, and 50 million units of apparel out of these units annually,” says Abhishek Bansal, senior vice president, corporate sustainability, Arvind.

Speaking of their waste management system, he says, “Textile and apparel manufacturing generates different waste streams based on the stage of production. At Arvind, we put value to each type of waste, and more than 95% of the waste generated during production activities is put to recycling or reuse either within Arvind facilities or at third party vendors.”

Arvind also manufactures denims for various brands, which are known to be a particularly water-heavy process. However, the company has had sustainability agendas in place for 15 years to reduce their environmental footprint. “Due to sheer scale of business we generate upwards of 20,000 tonne of waste per annum, which is put to recycling and reuse,” says Bansal. “Textile manufacturing entails various processes which generate wastes like cotton waste, yarn waste and fabric/cut waste. Over the years, a recycling value chain has been developed for each type of waste, and none of these waste categories is disposed of without effective utilisation.”

Arvind recycles more than 25 million litres of water every day, and does not use any freshwater in textile production. “This leads to a saving of more than 9 billion litres of water every year,” explains Bansal, adding, “We work with 100,000 cotton farmers in our upstream supply chain, and have transitioned these farms to sustainable cotton farming, thereby minimising environmental impacts of farming.”

Further, Arvind has also undertaken a decarbonisation mission, under which the company has reduced their greenhouse gas emissions by more than 50% by 2025, from a 2015 baseline. “We are actively working to reduce our emissions by 80% by 2030. We have a renewable energy portfolio of more than 100 MW, and are actively exploring other advanced technologies like torrefaction, gasification and biogas production,” says Bansal.

The road ahead

India is at an inflection point of setting up a circular textile economy estimated at $3.5 billion by 2030. It also has the potential to generate around 1 lakh new green jobs through policy shifts such as Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) and Solid Waste Management Rules (SWM). “This shift is further accelerated by global mandates such as the EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles, which pressures primary sourcing regions like India to reach net-zero emissions and eliminate waste leakage through traceable supply chains,” says Jain of CEEW.

As an alternative to fossil fuel based synthetic fibres, Jain says there is also a long-term solution in bio-based alternatives that fashion brands and manufacturers can take up. “Biofibres — derived from agricultural residues such as banana stems, pineapple leaves, and bamboo — are non-toxic and biodegradable. Since production of these fibres often involves converting crop residue, they can address air pollution and waste simultaneously by reducing environmental damage from practices such as open burning, while creating additional income streams for farmers as well as higher-value uses for underutilised biomass.”

“With India currently producing around 8.4 million tonne of biofibre, with a potential to scale this to around 24 million tonne by 2047, CEEW estimates that the emerging biofibre value chain could generate approximately 540,000 green jobs while reducing the environmental footprint of the textile sector. The global sustainable fashion market is projected to grow from $7.8 billion in 2023 to over $33 billion by 2030, creating strong demand-side pull for alternatives such as biofibre.”

Nainani of ReCircle adds, “Production needs to become more intentional, and recovery systems need to scale in a way that materials don’t exit the system after a single use. Right now, we are still operating in a largely linear model where disposal is the default.” He says that moving towards circularity is about keeping materials in use for longer through reuse, repair and recycling where possible, so that waste is reduced before it even becomes waste.

ReCircle has diverted over 650 metric tonne of textile waste so far. The material comes from a mix of sources, brands, schools, hospitals, hotels, NGOs, and households.

Waste management systems have been in place for more than 30 years but the strategy and technology are evolving to put waste to better use than before, says Bansal of Arvind.

“Since 2014, we have started recycling cotton and reusing it to make fresh fabrics, and this is the increasing focus going forward. There is also a growing demand for textiles made using recycled materials, which is prompting evolution of better technologies in this direction.”

Khanna of Fashion for Good echoes this, adding that the only material that can be properly recycled in the Indian waste management infrastructure is 100% cotton, which can then make it back into the global supply chain. Mix materials, which are dumped and managed at Roha and Panipat textile waste recycling hubs, are repurposed into home textiles, or going into couches and cushions as fillers.

“India is now becoming very lucrative and is attracting all these technologies because of investments, because of the government, textile parks, subsidies, etc. We still have to see it being realised, but the ecosystem is primed,” says Khanna. “But until we sort out our waste management and create some government mandates around it, it will not be enough,” she adds.