Worldwide there is a lot of end-of-life textile waste. Formal infrastructure and processes to recycle sufficiently have been hardly available up to now. Consequently, the waste ends up in a landfill, leading to environmental challenges everywhere.
Since India is considered a global textile hub, it can also become a hub for recycling, according to Narayanan Raghavan – Rent-A-Towel India’s CEO. He states that textile recycling can turn textile waste into value and create a sustainable and profitable new industry. An estimated 5 million tons of textile waste is processed by recyclers in India annually; the majority is post-consumer waste imported from Europe and the US. In 2013, India was considered the largest importer of used clothes worth $182 million – a heavy burden on the country’s textile waste ecosystem.
Apart from immediate economic benefits, scaling up textile recycling creates various environmental and social benefits, such as new employment opportunities and considerable reduction of carbon dioxide emissions. Studies show a holistic impact of approx. $10-12 billion can be achieved across the country when several other impact dimensions such as secondary effects from jobs creation, GHG emission reduction and water and land use reduction are being quantified into monetary terms.
