India Textile Waste Statistics

From thirsty cotton fields and ever-shorter wardrobes to landfill fires, river-staining dye mills and trillions of microplastics, India’s textile story is an expensive paradox: recycling could slash water and carbon footprints, but cheap landfilling, scant take-back and under-resourced informal workers—mostly women—leave pollution, disease and groundwater contamination as the true cost of fast fashion.

India has quietly become the world’s thrift store and recycling workshop, importing over $100 million and more than 100,000 tonnes of used textiles through hubs such as Panipat and Kandla, where permissive scrap rules, restrictive wearable policies, smuggling and duty structures simultaneously feed a booming shoddy wool industry, create lucrative re-export flows and squeeze the margins of domestic recyclers.

India's position as the world's second-largest textile manufacturer and producer of one third of global recycled cotton turns a vast waste stream into a USD 650 million domestic opportunity and a piece of an $8 billion global market, and while Panipat's nearly INR 1,000 crore recycling hub employs over 20,000 people and supplies 70 percent of the low-cost relief blanket market with SMEs accounting for 80 percent of units, thin 5 to 8 percent margins, 40 percent conversion losses, cheaper domestic virgin polyester, 15 percent logistics drag and low-value sorting keep profitability tight, which means policymakers and investors must stop treating textile waste like an embarrassment and start treating it like capital.

India's textile recycling system is a sprawling, informal patchwork stitched by manual sorters and rag‑pickers who divert thousands of tonnes daily, funneling 90 percent of discarded wool into Panipat's over 900 recycling units where mechanical processes mostly produce downcycled shoddy and stuffing so that less than 1 percent is reborn as high‑quality fibre while chemical recycling and upcycling startups remain negligible, leaving the sector optimized for downcycling rather than true circularity.

India is stitching together about 7.8 million tonnes of textile waste each year, with slightly more than half generated before garments even leave factories and roughly 42 percent coming from consumers, which makes India responsible for about 8.5 percent of global textile waste and exposes a tangled supply-chain problem where spinning mills lose six to fifteen percent, fabric mills three to five percent, and garment cutting wastes ten to twenty percent of fabric—producing some 650,000 tonnes of domestic cutting scrap and around 1.2 million tonnes of spinning waste—while deadstock in export houses, poly-cotton blends that dominate unmanaged streams and roughly thirty percent synthetic content complicate recycling, and urban clusters like Delhi-NCR together with knitwear hubs such as Tirupur and institutional sources like hotels concentrate the problem into urgent hotspots that demand practical, scalable solutions.