Do you see cloth dumps around cities? Ever wondered why they exist if garments can be recycled and reused?
Honestly, most of these garments are in fact being recovered and reused. However, the journey is more linear rather than circular. Garments in India are often reused, recycled or downcycled once or twice before they eventually become waste. According to the latest data from the Ministry of Textiles, India generates about 70.73 lakh tonnes of textile waste annually, 42% of which is pre-consumer waste generated during manufacturing, while 58% is post-consumer waste. More than 70% of the total waste is recovered through recycling, reuse, upcycling or downcycling.
But recovery does not necessarily mean that the material returns to the textile industry or remains in circulation indefinitely.
Garments are not always returning to textiles
The biggest challenge is post-consumer waste. According to the Ministry, around 55% of post-consumer textile waste is diverted from landfills and sent back to the textile industry for recycling, reuse or downcycling. This means a significant share of post-consumer waste is still not recovered through these channels and ends up in dump yards.
The situation is very different for factory waste/ pre-consumed waste. Nearly 95%of pre-consumer textile waste is collected and reused, while the spinning sector achieves almost complete in-house reintegration of its waste. This waste is easier to recycle because its composition is already known and is often available in a relatively clean and consistent manner.
Post-consumer waste is far more complicated. A discarded garment may contain cotton, polyester, nylon, elastane, dyes and other materials, making it much harder to process.
A large part of recycling is downcycling
Recycling does not always mean that a garment will eventually become another garment. In textile recycling they use the process of downcycling, where discarded textiles are converted into products of lower value and quality.
For example:
T-shirt → shredded fibre → blanket → stuffing → disposal
Ideally, the material should remain within the textile production cycle:
T-shirt → fibre → T-shirt → fibre → T-shirt
The difference is important. Downcycling may extend the useful life of a textile, but it does not create a truly circular system. Eventually, the material loses its quality and ends up as waste. This is why the government itself has identified the need for higher-value textile-to-textile recycling, particularly through better material separation. Panipat, one of India’s major textile recycling hubs, handles an estimated amount of 3,500–5,250 tonnes of textile waste per day, but the Ministry sees scope for moving towards higher-value recycling.
India’s dominant textile recycling technology has a limit
India’s established recycling system relies on mechanical processes:
sorting → cutting → shredding → opening fibres → re-spinning
The problem is that the shredding part can shorten and weaken fibres. Recycled fibres may therefore need to be blended with virgin fibres to achieve the required quality. This makes it difficult to repeatedly recycle the same material without eventually losing quality.
The bigger issue is blended fabric.
Blended fabrics make true textile recycling difficult
A T-shirt made from cotton and polyester may be stronger, cheaper or more durable, but that same blend becomes a problem at the end of its life.
Mechanical recycling cannot easily separate different fibres once they have been blended. Fashion for Good’s post-consumer sorting pilot found that India’s textile waste stream was dominated by cotton (43%) and polyester blends (27%), highlighting both the scale of the opportunity and the challenge of sorting materials for high-quality recycling.
The irony here is that these blending fibres are used to make the product durable, strong and cheap but it eventually makes the garment harder to recycle.
Can chemical textile recycling close the loop?
Chemical recycling uses chemical processes to break fibres or polymers down into their basic building blocks, which can then potentially be used to produce new fibres. Unlike mechanical recycling, some chemical processes can separate or recover components from blended fabrics and, in certain cases, produce material closer to virgin quality.
But it is not a silver bullet. Chemical recycling can be expensive, energy-intensive and dependent on specialised infrastructure and chemicals. Many technologies are still at laboratory or pilot scale, and different materials require different processes. The answer, therefore, is not simply to recycle more. India needs better collection, accurate sorting, recyclable garment design and greater investment in textile-to-textile recycling.
