texfash.com: India generates several distinct textile-waste streams, including factory offcuts, rejected garments, imported used clothing and blended post-consumer waste. Which streams will the pilot address, and which will remain outside its scope?
Asha Singhal: India generates an estimated 7.8 million tonnes of textile waste annually, and the accelerator is built around a specific slice of that: low-value, mixed and contaminated waste with no currently viable end-of-life pathway, material that can't be resold, reused or mechanically recycled through existing channels. That definition spans several of the stream types you mention rather than settling on one. It's likely to include pre-consumer waste such as factory offcuts and rejected garments, given the sheer scale of India's own textile manufacturing base, as well as post-consumer and blended waste once it has moved through India's existing sorting and resale networks and has nowhere further to go.
What falls outside scope is more straightforward. Higher-value materials that already have a workable resale, reuse or recycling pathway aren't the focus. The accelerator exists for the fraction those channels can't reach, not to duplicate what's already working well.
Which specific streams the cohort will actually work with will be defined through the discovery work Upaya will lead.
This is the Nature of Fashion initiative’s fourth decomposition pilot. Which findings from the work in Ghana, the Netherlands and Germany are relevant to India, and which assumptions will need to be reconsidered for Indian conditions?
Asha Singhal: This is the fourth pilot in the network, and it builds upon findings from the other three, though not all of them travel unchanged. Nature of Fashion's work is fundamentally about decomposition, and it's deliberately locally attuned: each pilot starts by responding to the specific challenges of its own region and looks for solutions that fit there, rather than applying one fixed method everywhere.
From the Netherlands, the clearest transferable lesson is systems design. Circle Economy's pilot linked enzymatic hydrolysis into fermentation and gasification, so that each process picks up what the one before it leaves behind, and found that this cascade recovered more from mixed waste than any single pathway on its own. That logic has the potential to shape how the India cohort is assembled, as a set of complementary enterprises rather than a single technology expected to do everything.
Germany brought the scale of the contamination question into focus. Beneficial Design Institute's work on what it calls the ‘stubborn ten per cent’, the textiles that existing recovery routes struggle to reach because of their dyes, finishes and blended fibres, closely describes the market gap the partnership's concept note lays out for India.
In Ghana, The Or Foundation’s research looked at how decomposition behaves with actual post-consumer textiles rather than idealised samples. With pure, undyed polymers, decomposition moved faster than anticipated, an encouraging early signal. Introducing the dyes, finishes and fibre blends found in real garments changed those results, and that distinction has been useful: it tells us the chemistry a garment carries matters as much as its fibre content, and that any pathway is worth testing against the waste it will actually meet. It also affirms the value of doing this work in place, alongside people who hold the knowledge of place, which is very much the approach we're carrying into India.
The questions most worth revisiting for India are less about biology and more about context. Waste composition, climate, infrastructure and processing systems here differ from the Netherlands, Berlin or Accra, and adapting technologies to those conditions, rather than importing a fixed model, is the accelerator's starting point.
The release describes India as a terminus for global fast-fashion waste. What evidence will the project use to distinguish the effects of imported textile waste from the much larger question of waste generated within India’s own textile and apparel economy?
Asha Singhal: The pilot is at an early stage and very little about its design is settled, so we'd rather share how we're currently thinking about this.
The 7.8 million tonne figure at the centre of this work describes textile waste generated in India. India is also one of the world's largest textile and garment manufacturing hubs, with a fast-growing domestic market alongside it, so a substantial share of what this pilot is built around comes from within India's own production and consumption system.
On separating the two effects, our expectation at this point is that we won't be able to. Neither the accelerator nor the enterprises in the cohort are likely to have the sorting priority or the capacity to distinguish imported textile waste from India's own. The evidence this pilot generates is therefore more likely to centre on what the waste is composed of and how it responds to the pathways being tested, rather than on where it originated.
