The global textile industry is responsible for roughly 92 million tons of waste. Approximately 8.5 percent of that waste ends up in India, with only 59 percent finding its way back into the industry through reuse and recycling, with a “mere fraction” hitting the global supply chain, per data from Fashion of Good.
This is why clean-tech resource recovery startup ReCircle has launched Project Extra Life: to tackle India’s textile waste problem and build a more circular future.
“Consumers and brands need confidence through traceability and accountability, tracking the lifecycle of donated clothes and ensuring they are responsibly recycled and not diverted to landfills,” said Rahul Nainani, co-founder and CEO of ReCircle. “Project Extra Life is an attempt to do just that, by building value potential of textile waste, creating a transparent technology-driven value chain, all while focusing on capacity building for waste workers and enabling a more circular textile waste value chain.”
Through the project, ReCircle aims to collect, sort and sell at least 570 metric tons of textile waste over the next 12 months, in addition to its regular waste management service offerings. The startup hopes to reach more than 100,000 institutions and individuals—like fashion houses, textile businesses, brands and factories on top of its existing clients within its corporate program—to help close the loop on textiles.
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Since launching the project two months ago, ReCircle said it has garnered more than 50,000 Instagram followers, collaborated with various businesses to recover textile waste and organized Mumbai-based textile waste collection drives for consumer participation.
Regardless of a company’s size and scale, ReCircle offers “tailored solutions” to efficiently handle an organization’s textile waste. The solutions include offering nationwide participants custom plans for bulk contributions (more than 10 tons of waste) that can be delivered directly to ReCircle’s advanced material recovery facility in Mumbai. The startup can also assist institutions in organizing textile waste collection drives. Fashion houses can reach out to ReCircle to manage their production waste and set up take-back programs for customers as well. Project Extra Life will focus its efforts on this part of the value chain for the next few months, the company said.
Cotton, wool, polyester, acrylic, synthetic fibers, nylon, silk and denim can all be collected. Once those fibers are collected, they are sent to the material recovery facility to be assessed for reusability by ReCircle’s waste workers. Regarding the waste beyond repair, ReCircle’s recycling partners in Surat and Panipat bail and shred the waste before turning it into recycled yarn. Based on this, the company said, the garments begin their Extra Life “journey” via one of four channels: rewear, revamp, recycle and relife.
“With our optimized textile reverse logistics, we offer a solution to the existing long drawn and expensive process by leveraging data which adds an advantage and provides better supply chain visibility to businesses, leading to benefits such as cost and waste reduction as well as improved brand sentiment,” Gurashish Singh Sahni, co-founder and COO of ReCircle, said. “We are positive that we can empower various stakeholders to participate in the formalization and mainstreaming of the textile waste value chain and eventually create a closed-loop textile industry.”
The goal of Project Extra Life, the innovation firm said, is to build the value potential of textile waste, create a traceable and transparent value chain, leverage technological interventions for waste segregation and sorting, improve efficiencies through capacity building and foster an “enabling environment” to “pave the way” for a more sustainable and efficient textile waste value chain.