In Panipat, a textile town in Haryana, roughly a million tons of used clothing arrive each year and leave as something else: yarn, stuffing, felt, the raw material of products sold under global brand names.
The economics explain the neglect. Sorting and shredding worn garments is labour intensive, margins are thin, and the buyers are brands that have committed publicly to circularity while paying for a commodity.
Recycling has been sold to shoppers as the benign end of fashion’s environmental story. The assumption is that a garment collected for reuse leaves the ledger of harm behind.
The used clothing will keep arriving, in greater volume each year. The question is whether the towns that process it are treated as infrastructure or as an externality.
