Ground Circularity / Denim Deal / PART III Feature

Wireframe: A Twin Deal: Making of Circular Denim

From Waste to Wear: India Shows Circular Denim Fashion at Industrial Scale

India has taken circular fashion from pilot to production. In less than a year, its denim ecosystem has stitched recyclers, spinners, and manufacturers into a single operational loop. The result, helmed by Denim Deal, is a functioning, traceable supply chain turning waste into wear—and positioning India as the first manufacturing base to industrialise circular denim at scale.

Subir Ghosh

7 November 2025

9 minutes

Long Story, Cut Short

India’s denim network has transformed fragmented supply chains into a unified, traceable system linking recyclers, mills, and manufacturers.
Circular fashion here is no longer a trial; it’s functioning at scale through data-backed recycling and verifiable fibre recovery.
The model proves that complex, high-volume economies can lead global circularity when collaboration replaces fragmentation across the value chain.

The Denim Deal’s arrival in India transformed fragmentation into focus, linking recyclers, mills, and makers through shared data and trust rather than imported procedures.

India Focus The Denim Deal’s arrival in India transformed fragmentation into focus, linking recyclers, mills, and makers through shared data and trust rather than imported procedures. Denim Deal

NOTE: This is the last in a three-part series on the new Denim Deal collection. The first part appeared on Monday and the second on Wednesday.

When the Denim Deal blueprint reached India, it encountered a landscape that was at once vast and fragmented. The country’s textile ecosystem stretches from industrial spinning parks to street-corner repair shops, from exporters supplying global brands to collectors handling discarded garments by the kilo. Translating a European-designed framework into this diversity required less of copying procedures and more building trust.

Denim Deal's vision aligned with Indian player Enviu's vision as well of having a circular and inclusive textile industry. Regional Programme Manager Devansh Peshin cuts it: “India has the uniqueness of being a large consumer and producer of textiles, with a strong denim economy. With Enviu's focus on systems change and sustainable business solutions, Denim Deal offered a strong base and an opportunity to bring international perspectives, learnings and experiences to build a circular textile industry in India. Our partnership with GATS ensured that Panipat's production muscle is brought to bear to make this change happen.” Panipat city is one of India’s recycling mainstays.

At GATS, the challenge looked different. “We’ve learned that the biggest barriers are mindset and misalignment—not machines. For decades, India’s textile industry has been linear by design—built for volume and cost efficiency, not for material recovery. At GATS, we found that almost every player wants to integrate circularity, but the supply chain is fragmented and poorly synchronised.” That observation became the starting point for a national conversation on coordination. GATS, or Global Alliance for Textile Sustainability Council, is an industry-led organisation dedicated to advancing sustainability and circularity within the textiles industry.

Enviu and GATS discovered that organisation itself was a form of innovation. Recyclers needed predictable demand before investing in machinery; mills demanded proof that recycled fibres could meet brand specifications. Enviu acted as a neutral broker, converting dialogue into deliverables, as GATS built data templates that allowed transactions to be trusted. The process turned scattered good intentions into an operational chain—one that could be measured, financed, and repeated.

By mid-2025 the Indian Hub had established its backbone: Recyclr for fibre recovery, GATS for standards and traceability, Enviu for orchestration, and Raymond UCO with Bhaskar Denim for final production. Each partner accepted a distinct role yet shared a single conviction—that India’s size, informality, and diversity could become its competitive advantage once coordination replaced improvisation. The Hub’s early months were less about technology than choreography, teaching an enormous industry to move in rhythm without losing its pace.

What emerged from that exercise was not a replica of Europe’s order but an ecosystem shaped by Indian realities. Circularity here depended on relationships as much as systems, on trust travelling faster than fibre. The Indian Collection became the experiment that asked whether collaboration could function amid complexity—and in proving that it could, offered a glimpse of how the global denim economy might finally balance scale with responsibility.

That vision could only succeed if the entire chain was mapped and measured. The next step, invariably, was to turn collaboration into a working diagram of who did what and where.

Drawing India’s Circularity Map

Once the framework took root, the task was to draw the map. India’s denim value chain was never designed to flow in circles. It sprawled across clusters of spinning mills, dyeing units, stitching hubs and recycling yards that rarely spoke to one another. The Indian Hub’s challenge was not invention but connection—to link the people who already made denim to those who could help unmake and remake it.

GATS began by establishing a shared language of traceability. Its experts worked with recyclers, mills and brands to define what “verified” meant in practice. “Sorters often don’t understand the fibre content or quality specifications required by mills. Recyclers traditionally produce fibres suitable only for open-end spinning and struggle to meet ring-spun standards. Spinners and mills provide limited feedback loops, and standardised benchmarks or certifications are largely absent. This disconnect creates hesitation, misinformation, and inefficiency—even among willing participants. To address this, GATS is building alignment through data, demonstration, and dialogue.”

Recyclr handled the physical side of the equation. In the words of Parvinder Singh: “Recyclr was created to reimagine how denim is made—from waste to wear. We collect post-industrial textile waste from production units and post-consumer denim waste from brands and sorters, recycle it into high-quality recycled denim fibres, and then supply these fibres to spinners and denim mills. These partners integrate at least 20% recycled cotton into their yarns and fabrics, which then return to our Recyclr facility to be transformed into jeans.” The loop he described was as ambitious as it was literal—waste entering one gate and leaving another as a new product.

Being based in Panipat—the global capital for post-consumer textile waste—"gives us unique access to consistent, large-scale material streams, we are encouraging Indian brands to start their take back programmes. Recyclr operates both at the start of the process (fibre production) and at the end (garment manufacturing), ensuring traceability, transparency, and complete control over the circular loop,” underlines Singh.

The team at Enviu orchestrated these moving parts. Its coordinators matched recyclers with mills, connected spinners to garment makers, and ensured that every actor recorded their contribution. The lessons came even as work was on. “One of the key learnings has been the willingness of various ecosystem stakeholders to experiment and collaborate under the established umbrella of Denim Deal. The experiences of Denim Deal and its vantage point in the international denim community brings a confidence factor and precedent that enables Indian players to take this leap forward.” His team’s first task was to translate global vocabulary—traceability, verification, material loops—into terms that factory managers, spinners, and recyclers could act upon.

Raymond UCO and Bhaskar Denim provided the finishing. They demonstrated that garments made with post-consumer recycled content could meet mainstream quality and fashion expectations. Indian mills had long supplied the world’s denim; now they were being asked to supply proof that sustainability could be built into that same capacity. Both companies responded with characteristic pragmatism, aligning production cycles to absorb recycled yarns without slowing throughput.

The network that emerged was far from symmetrical but remarkably functional. Waste collectors and recyclers operated at one end; premium manufacturers worked at the other; and between them stretched a living corridor of data, audits and design briefs. For the first time, India’s denim industry could describe itself as a system rather than a sequence of isolated steps.

By late 2025, the chain no longer looked experimental. Each transaction—fibre bale, fabric roll, garment batch—carried both commercial and circular value. The Indian Hub had achieved what once seemed improbable: it had drawn order from fragmentation, proving that complexity is not the opposite of coordination but the reason for it.

The Indian Hub’s strength lay in choreography, not machinery—partners learning to move together across India’s immense, informal textile ecosystem. Denim Deal

Testing the Loop at Scale

The Indian Hub was building systems, not garments. The real proof would come when the process left PowerPoint decks and entered production lines. Could the recycled fibres from Recyclr match the strength, hand feel and consistency of virgin cotton? Could data flow from recycler to mill to brand without breaking? By mid-2025, the answers were finally taking shape in fabric, not just files.

Recyclr’s operations had grown into a model plant for textile recovery. “The key to recycling lies in two things—access to quality-sorted waste and expertise in fibre regeneration. If either side fails, the loop breaks. Our focus has been to build both capacities together, so that quality becomes predictable rather than accidental.” What sounded like a circular manifesto was now measurable throughput: tonnes of discarded denim converted into yarn that could be traced back to its origin.

At GATS, the focus shifted from persuasion to validation. Its auditors followed every bale of recycled cotton from collection to spinning, logging weight, composition and blending ratios. “We’ve learned that the biggest barriers are mindset and misalignment—not machines,” the spokesperson had said earlier, and that insight shaped their fieldwork. The team trained suppliers to document processes, showing that transparency was not bureaucracy but insurance against doubt. Every audit built confidence in both the data and the fibre.

The mills, too, had to unlearn habits. Recycled cotton behaves differently under tension and dye. Technicians at Raymond UCO and Bhaskar Denim adjusted spinning speeds, blending ratios and wash recipes until the fabrics met export-grade standards. By the end of the first production run, the output looked indistinguishable from their conventional lines—a quiet triumph that turned recycled fibre into a viable commercial material.

There was a reason why the denim collection had currency. From the GATS point of view: “The beauty of denim has always been in its imperfection, aging, and evolution —and that spirit aligns naturally with the story of recycled fabrics. Fortunately, denim as a product category offers unique advantages for circular design. Most post-consumer and post-industrial denim waste is blue, primarily used in warp yarns, which are dyed again during production—meaning colour limitations are minimal.”

Enviu saw in this transition a cultural turning point. “The experiences of Denim Deal and its vantage point in the international denim community brings a confidence factor and precedent that enables Indian players to take this leap forward.” Confidence, Peshin argues, was the missing infrastructure—the belief that performance and responsibility could share the same machine.

That belief began to circulate through the network itself. Recyclr’s engineers started exchanging blend data with spinners hundreds of kilometres away; GATS analysts trained mill quality teams to capture numbers with audit precision. What had started as a pilot partnership began to behave like an ecosystem. Each success triggered another experiment, and every participant became both contributor and verifier. Circularity stopped being a headline—it became a habit.

The GATS certification reports that followed became the most persuasive marketing material the project ever produced. Each verified figure replaced a slogan; each certificate replaced a promise. The Indian Collection did not rely on narrative—it relied on proof. For an industry accustomed to declaring sustainability, that subtle reversal of burden was revolutionary.

When the final garments were unveiled, they carried more than labels—they carried evidence. Every button, seam and fibre was traceable; every yard of fabric linked to a verified loop. For the Indian Hub, success was not measured by applause but by adoption. Circularity had crossed the line from principle to practice, and India had stitched that transition into denim itself.

With proof on the board, the conversation naturally shifted to permanence—how to turn a successful pilot into an enduring system that could grow with demand.

Building the Loop

The initiative created India’s first traceable, closed-loop network linking recyclers, mills, and garment manufacturers end-to-end.
Recyclr’s Panipat facility processed both industrial and consumer waste, producing high-grade recycled fibre for spinning mills.
GATS introduced verification templates ensuring that all recycled cotton bales were traceable through each production stage.
Enviu coordinated operations and translation, aligning global frameworks with India’s informal recycling realities.
The collaboration established a repeatable circular workflow capable of scaling within the country’s vast manufacturing landscape.

Proof in Production

Circular denim achieved industrial performance benchmarks, matching the tensile strength and aesthetics of virgin-cotton garments.
Continuous audits and certification trails provided numerical evidence instead of marketing promises, ensuring factual reporting of results.
Raymond UCO and Bhaskar Denim validated that recycled yarns could integrate seamlessly into export-grade production lines.
GATS audit reports replaced slogans with measurable proof, tracking fibre movement from waste to finished jeans.
The outcome confirmed that developing markets can lead on circular manufacturing when structure and traceability coexist.

India’s Next Chapter in Denim

Soon enough, India’s experiment had evolved into a movement. What began as a framework imported from Europe was now a working system shaped by Indian realities—messier, faster, and far more inclusive. The partners had proved that circularity could thrive in a context defined by volume and variability. The next challenge was to sustain that rhythm as demand and scale grew.

For Enviu, the objective had always been longevity rather than headlines. Peshin views the India Hub as a template for building permanent capacity. “The experiences of Denim Deal and its vantage point in the international denim community brings a confidence factor and precedent that enables Indian players to take this leap forward.” That confidence, he believes, was what would keep the ecosystem expanding even after the initial excitement faded.

GATS, meanwhile, turned its attention to policy alignment. Its experts began consulting with Indian ministries and state textile clusters to integrate Denim Deal methodologies into national sustainability frameworks. “We’ve learned that the biggest barriers are mindset and misalignment—not machines,” their spokesperson reiterated. “Our work now is to align that mindset—helping suppliers see that measurement is not inspection, it’s collaboration.” The group saw legislation not as constraint but as scaffolding for industry-wide consistency.

Says Singh, “The economic viability of recycling in India is already proven—the task now is to scale and structure it. India is a signatory to EU WSR, making it one of the few manufacturing economies to receive textile waste. Apart from this, we’re working closely with the Textile Committee in India and social development organisations to make waste truly closed-loop by establishing an India-wide network of textile recovery facilities (TRFs) to collect waste from municipalities and Brands. These TRFs will integrate collection and sorting, and Brands to run their takeback programmes which will bring waste into the loop.”

Nevertheless, what’s still missing is trust and transparency at scale. “That’s what the India Denim Deal Hub is here to build—a platform where circularity isn’t a pilot, but a protocol; where recycled cotton isn’t an exception, but a standard. We are changing this by our proof of concepts by way of circular collections with complete data and transparency.”

The Indian Hub’s deeper legacy, however, went beyond logistics. It redefined what circularity meant for a developing economy. In Europe, the focus had been on precision; in India, it was participation. Thousands of small suppliers, traders and recyclers—many from the informal sector—had entered a verified chain for the first time. Each new audit represented not just compliance but inclusion, a bridge between survival and sustainability.

As data accumulated, so did ambition. Enviu and its partners began designing a cross-sector roadmap for 2030: integrating denim with other cotton-based industries, expanding into knitwear, and establishing India as a regional recycling hub for South Asia. The plan aimed to multiply both impact and employment, proving that circular growth can scale without exclusion.

What emerged from the India Collection was not a footnote to Europe but a complement. Where the EMEA phase perfected processes, India demonstrated adaptability—the ability to hold together contradiction and complexity. The Denim Deal had travelled far from Amsterdam, but in India it found what every global framework eventually seeks: validation in diversity. The circle, finally, was complete.

The India Collection’s success was proof in cloth: every button, seam, and fibre traceable, every garment representing data turned into design. Denim Deal

Subir Ghosh

SUBIR GHOSH is a Kolkata-based independent journalist-writer-researcher who writes about environment, corruption, crony capitalism, conflict, wildlife, and cinema. He is the author of two books, and has co-authored two more with others. He writes, edits, reports and designs. He is also a professionally trained and qualified photographer.

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