The ball boys and ball girls at the recently concluded Australian Open sported ‘sustainable’ clothes manufactured in the textile city of Tiruppur, in Tamil Nadu. According to news reports, the garments had been made using recycled PET bottles. While the story of an Indian hand in such an initiative could attract attention the city certainly deserves, the manufacturer’s claim to environmental sustainability is suspect.
For starters, the recycled yarn was imported from Taiwan, knitted and dyed in Surat and finally tailored in Tiruppur. Such a wide footprint across countries can hardly qualify as anything green; more importantly, the long-term environmental record of the city’s textile industry is a cause for even more concern.
