India

Waste entrepreneurs, waste workers in India’s Silicon Valley have been brought under the aegis of the H&M Foundation to enable textile waste collection, sorting, and selling to generate revenue for waste pickers, as also create a circular B2B textile service model, starting with the hotel industry.

When a practising lawyer decided to start a rent-your-clothes service in India way back in 2016, in a market where rental is still quite a taboo, she slogged at all levels—from the warehouse to the retail store and even home-delivered orders to customers. Her company, valued at ₹500 million, today rents out 300 garments each day. Aanchal Saini, Chief Executive Officer of the country's first and largest fashion rental company, Flyrobe, recounts her journey.

A collaborative Platform for Safety in Apparel and Footwear Industry (PSAFI), launched in India by the Life and Building Safety Initiative (LABS), aims to provide a trusted, neutral space for industry stakeholders to exchange insights on addressing safety issues in the sector.

Indian fashion conglomerate Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Limited (ABFRL) and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) have launched the ‘Circularity Innovation Challenge 2023’  — a platform for innovators to introduce sustainable and impactful solutions, and raise awareness about textile circularity. 

Better Cotton is piloting innovative traceability technologies through India’s cotton value chain to provide end-to-end visibility. The new traceability framework will allow greater flexibility and visibility of the physical flow of cotton through supply chains as the network grows.

As the textile-apparel-fashion industry oscillates from greenwashing to greenhushing and greenblushing, a critical component of the backend is the dye. While it is becoming increasingly critical for manufacturers to shift to natural dyes, what also needs to be done is make them as popular as their synthetic counterparts and educate the customer about their basic goodness, mechanise dyeing and grow more raw materials so as to reduce the cost of the dyed product.

While the world scours for makers of natural dyes, here’s someone in India quietly greening the planet one step at a time in a low volume, high value business. The textile-apparel-fashion industry may stand up and take note, not just to source earth-friendly dyes but also pitch in with funding to help them do more for the people and the environment. texfash.com talks to the Co-Founder-Director of BioDye India Pvt Ltd, Dr Bosco MA Henriques, to bring you his voice from the Konkan region of the Western Ghats.

Buoyed by increasing affluence and discretionary spending, the fashion and apparel segment is set to become the biggest segment of online retail in India in the next two years, elbowing out the mobile devices category which had been the biggest in the past decade.

In a landmark victory for the Khadi and Village Industries Commission (KVIC), the Delhi High Court has passed an interim order restraining two private entities from using the ‘khadi’ mark.

Functional healthcare wears just got a shot of audit and sustainability with the introduction of the Healthcare Textiles Processing Facility Certification Scheme for laundries that process them for reuse.