What happens next? Old clothes cycle.

We all have so many clothes in our wardrobes; sheets and towels in our cupboards that we don’t need or we are not using as they are old fashioned or they have passed their life, some get damaged while most of them get faded up with time. So to get rid off these old clothes generally we donate it, or reuse it to meet with another purpose. If we want to deal with anything without affecting the environment too much we generally adopt three measures of R’s:

1. Reuse 2. Recycle 3. Reduce

In India we never think to dump any of the clothes, we always find different ways to use the used clothes, but this is not the case of western countries generally the bigger outlets are facing the problem to clear their rack of old stocks, so generally they dump these clothes or giving these as charity or sold these clothes at minimal prices, but who is going to buy the old clothes even at low prices? What do they do with these old clothes?

They are brought to India from western countries, to join the second-hand global trade the people who are in this business have the ideology that damaged and used clothes aren’t garbage – they can recycle to have a second life as new products. The Panipat in Northern India located in the state of Haryana is the hub for such old clothes, hundreds of tons of clothes are brought here from all over the world including UK and US. Recently India listed as NO.1 importer of such clothes. The process starts as follows: First, the clothes are classified as per their colours so it would be easy for further process. Workers are bent over large blades, shredding clothes. Where their first task is to remove buttons, zippers, and labels for further processing. This is then fed into a bigger machine in which all clothes get to mix with silk, wool etc. From the used fabrics, new yarn is extracted as per data three tons of fabric can produce 1.5 ton of yarn.

This yarn is woven back into what's called "shoddy" fabric. The shoddy fabric is then used largely to make blankets. These are also used to make wiper industry or as carpet padding.

The blankets are used as relief material distributed during natural calamities - so at anywhere in the world, these type of blanket are very common to see". Even if the cost of importing such clothes are very low yet this industry is facing challenges in India as in adding value to these used clothes the process is not cheap as it includes transportation, storage, electricity and labor costs in addition to this they have to pay high custom duties, so once it was a lucrative business soon seems to have an end. Just because of this Industry piles of torn and used clothing that would have otherwise ended up as landfill get a new life.