Fashion For Good to build a new textile waste value chain
Today, Fashion for Good has launched the Sorting For Circularity India Project, a consortium project to:
- Track pre and post-consumer textile waste streams through India
- To trial mapping solutions
- To pilot sorting
- To build an infrastructure for stronger circularity
The project brings together Fashion for Good’s partners: Adidas, Levi Strauss & Co., PVH Corp., Arvind Limited, Birla Cellulose and Welspun India who are keen to see more sustainability in the fashion supply chain.
Technology partner Reverse Resources will provide the analysis of the pre-consumer textile waste streams and design the pre-consumer pilot. The project is financially supported by the Laudes Foundation.
A stylish supply chain for post-consumer waste
India is one of the largest recipients of global post-consumer textile waste, with more than €100mn discarded textiles imported and manually sorted through each year.
In India, post-consumer waste is difficult to track, with limited data available to understand the quantity.
Another barrier to growth includes the fact that there is no technology available to organise, categorise and sort materials to ensure quality textile waste is accessible for recyclers.
India’s sustainable fashion innovation
“India is a critical hub, not only for textile production and consumption, but also as a global post-consumer textile waste destination”, said Katrin Ley, Managing Director at Fashion for Good. “This project is pivotal to understanding the size of this considerable market and providing the incentive, tools and means for the industry to benefit from the wealth of this untapped resource.”
“Fossil-fuel based synthetic materials will continue to dominate fashion unless innovations are scaled up, there’s buy-in from the market, and the supply chain infrastructure is developed”, said Anita Chester, Head of Materials at Laudes Foundation. “We’re pleased to see Fashion for Good and Reverse Resources collaborate to drive forward the creativity and ingenuity needed to unlock the potential of circular materials within the industry.”
“Sorting for Circularity is a very relevant project for the entire textile value chain”, said Umasankar Mahapatra, Group Head at Innovation & Sustainability at Welspun India Limited. “I see a lot of incremental value that can be captured by properly sorting the various waste streams and bringing them back into circularity. It will require multi stakeholder participation to reach the desired scale. We are happy to be a part of this project and contribute towards this great initiative to preserve the national capital while reducing dependency on fresh resources. Wishing great success for the project.”