India's textile waste problem

Akshara (0:04)

In today's episode, we'll do one deep dive and cover another story for the day. First, we'll talk about India's textile waste problem, and then we'll talk about India's telecom hardware problem. Welcome back to The Daily Brief by Zerodha, where we cut through the noise to help you understand what's actually happening in the most important stories from business and markets. I'm your host Akshara, and today is Tuesday, 22nd September. Coming to the first story.

So, India makes a lot of clot. Textiles and apparel are the country's second largest employer after agriculture, supporting around 4.5 crore people directly. It's the world's second largest vertically integrated producer after China, with the second largest spinning capacity anywhere, contributing roughly 2% of GDP and 7% of industrial output. Now, all that activity leaves crap behind. And the Ministry of Textiles, in a mapping exercise published in February, put the figure at 7,073 kilotons a year. And almost nobody talks about it. So, plastic waste has dedicated rules and a decade of headlines. And so does e-waste. Construction debris, biomedical and hazardous waste each have their own framework. But textile waste has none of that, despite being one of the largest streams the country produces. Now, that might shift this year.

Between the Ministry's report, A Fashion for Good Study, a CEEW analysis, and an Industry Coalition report, there's finally a proper picture of an ecosystem that's been running quietly for 40 years. And the first thing you learn is that it organizes itself around a single split. So, pre-consumer waste is everything shed while making the product before it reaches a shopper. Post-consumer waste is what gets thrown out after someone's used it. In India, the split runs 42% to 58%.

Now, pre-consumer waste piles up at every stage of making a shirt. Spinning mills shed short fibre and dust, though nearly all of that goes straight back into the same mill. Looms leave offcuts and defective rolls. Dyeing throws off rejects, but the stage that dominates is garmenting, where fabric is cut to pattern. That one step accounts for roughly 70% of all pre-consumer waste, and it comes from an industry doing nothing wrong.

You can't cut curbed pattern pieces from rectangular fabric without leaving scraps. Now, post-consumer waste needs less explaining. It's the shirt 3 years later, worn, thin, stained, out of fashion, or just replaced. And it's about 4,100 kilotons a year, and the larger of the two streams. Now, the labels sound like bookkeeping. What they describe is condition, and condition is everything here. So factory scrap has never been worn or washed. It arrives in ton lots from a known address, one fabric, often one color, no zips or buttons. But household clothing has been through a hundred washes, as elastic and a metal zip is usually a blend. And that difference decides everything that follows. Cut it and sew it into something else. This is upcycling, and it needs no technology at all. Just scissors, a sewing machine, and a market. Large leftover panels from garment factories get stitched into kids' wear and undergarments for local markets, and long-cutting strips get woven on handlooms into rugs, cushion covers, and tote bags. An unsold factory inventory goes straight to secondary retail. So technically, it isn't recycling at all. The cloth never stops being cloth. Shred it and spin it again, and this is mechanical recycling. You feed fabric into a machine that tears it back into loose fiber, then re-spin that fiber into yarn. So around 900 units in India run on it, mostly in Panipat and Thirupur.

So if you've heard of Panipat as India's blanket city, this is why. The blankets and cheap bedsheets it's known for are made largely from shredded waste. But this has two hard limits. Every pass shortens the fiber. So virgin polyester has to be mixed back in to hold the yarn together, and it can't separate a blend. Anything too weak or too mixed comes out as shoddy, cheap fiber that gets spun into coarse blankets at best, and at worst, never gets spun at all, ending up as mattress filling and wipes. Now, that last bit is downcycling, and it's a one-way door. Coming to another method where you could dissolve it and rebuild it, this is chemical recycling. So instead of tearing the fabric apart physically, you break it down to its raw molecular ingredients and build fresh fiber from those. And because the material is taken back to the start, it doesn't matter that it was a blend or dirty or worn. The output is near virgin quality. And that makes it the only route that can genuinely handle what India actually throws away.

So India's commercial chemical recycling capacity is zero. Not small. There is no operating plant. Now, Philatex has announced a 300 crore rupee facility slated for this year, but not producing yet. And Birla Cellulosis Leva Reviva comes closest, pulping cotton scrap into viscose. But it's capped at 20-30% recycled cotton and takes only clean white cotton from factories. And the reason is arithmetic, not science. So chemical recycling costs roughly 2.5 times what virgin fibre costs in Asia, and it's energy hungry on top of that. Now, India isn't uniquely behind either. The Swedish firm that built the world's first industrial textile-to-textile plant went bankrupt in 2024 because brands had signed letters of intent rather than purchase orders. So let's start with the government's headline number. Of the 2,615 kilotons of pre-consumer waste that isn't spinning soft waste, 97% gets recovered. Only 2% is landfilled or burnt. Against a global picture where only 12-15% of textile waste reaches a recycling facility at all, that is genuinely a good number. But the trouble is that recovered only means it didn't get thrown away. But it says nothing about what it became. Of that 97%, about 1,500 kilotons stays in the textile world. Some gets re-sown into new products, some gets shredded and spun into fresh yarn, the other, approximately 1,000 kilotons, becomes stuffing and wipes and never comes back. And that's nearly 2-fifths of everything Indian factories throw out, gone from the textile economy for good. Now what decides which pile of scrap lands in is how uniform it is.