Post-consumer textile waste in India essentially goes into landfills or is incinerated. This includes all types of fashion waste from clothes, bags, jewellery, shoes, and other accessories. Some people do donate clothes to charities or other non-profit organisations however, most of this ends up in landfills again as they are not useful. In addition, in India, there is a cultural practice of ‘hand-me-downs’, where clothes are handed from one sibling to another, which is helpful in terms of sustainability. Though, largely, most post-consumer textile waste in India gets dumped along with the municipal waste as consumers ‘trash it’ and therefore, there is a lack of sorting of textile waste and other municipal waste.
In fact, most of the recycling that happens in India is done through clothes that are imported into the country from western places such as the United States and Europe. Post-consumer textile waste from European countries is sold as second hand clothing in developing countries. However, most of the second hand clothing is not actually worn but are sorted based on colour and material to be recycled. Every kg of cotton that is recycled saves around 65 kWh of energy and polyester around 90 kWh of energy. Therefore, generally speaking recycling is better than using virgin materials to make clothes. However, most of this post-consumer textile ‘waste’ does not end up as new clothes or accessories but is used for other purposes. They are used for insulation, as industrial wipes and as rags, to name a few such uses.
In India, post-consumer textile waste that is imported is sorted predominantly manually. There are new sorting technologies, however, they are expensive and not used on a large scale currently. The waste then goes for mechanical or chemical recycling. Mechanical recycling involves separating the fabric into fibres, which is easier for long-staple fibres such as cotton, wool, and cashmere. Mechanical recycling works predominantly for unblended fabrics and it needs large hundreds of kilos of the same fabric in the same colour to be effective. On the other hand, chemical recycling can create a high quality product, which is indistinguishable from virgin material, however, it needs a pure product. Finally, the non-recyclable waste is ‘recycled’ informally by waste workers known as “chindi-wallas”. Fabric scraps, surplus, cuttings, and defected fabrics can be finally recycled into handmade paper as the last step. The cost of recycling, and even downcycling (where a lower value product is produced), is expensive due to the labour intensity of the process and is therefore done in developing countries where labour is cheaper and there are less stringent environmental laws too.
There are problems with the recycling process because a lot of the post-consumer textile waste is made out of blended materials, uses dyes and has gone through finishing processes. In addition, the waste materials are not labelled which makes sorting harder. The type of dye used and finishing processes used on the material is not known and therefore the effect of the chemicals used are not always known. Recycling blended materials is a highly expensive process. The mechanical and chemical recycling process that is used for cotton or polyester does not work as different materials degrade at different levels and times and have different chemical properties. There are some experimental and lab based studies on blended materials, which have not been used at scale yet.
In India, most post-consumer textile waste ends up in landfills or is used for waste to energy processes that are not always sustainable. In fact, post-consumer textile waste is the third largest municipal solid waste material. There is a major need to deal with the post-consumer textile waste in the country for all materials, from polyester and cotton to other blended fabrics. If India imports post-consumer textile waste from other countries, why can’t India use its own post-consumer textile waste?
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