It’s 10am and Kumudha, whom everyone calls Kumudha Ma, is at the Dry Waste Collection Centre (DWCC) in the JP Nagar area of south Bengaluru, separating bundles of old clothes from the other garbage. Kumudha is a former waste-picker who was supported by Hasiru Dala, a Bengaluru-based social impact organisation that has been working in the solid waste management space since 2013, to become a waste entrepreneur. She now operates the DWCC in JP Nagar (although the DWCCs come under the city’s municipal corporation, they are often managed by waste pickers or self-help groups).

“Every three days, we go around the ward collecting the textile waste. We have educated residents to keep it separate from the other dry waste, because sometimes people throw things like milk packets in dry waste and this soils the cloth and then it cannot be used,” she explains. The bundles of old clothes are then packed off to a textile recovery facility on the outskirts of the city, where they get further sorted and are then sent downstream for downcycling, recycling, or resale.

This system of routinely collecting post-consumer textile waste door-to-door, as part of regular municipal waste collection, is a new model being tested here. Post-consumer textile waste is notoriously difficult to gather at scale in a pristine condition—most collection drives depend on consumers to make the effort to drop old clothes off, and if they get mixed with household waste, they get soiled and are difficult to retrieve, ending up in landfills or as fuel at brick and cement kilns.

The programme was developed by Hasiru Dala in 2018. “When we did a survey (in 2015) of the DWCCs that are supported by Hasiru Dala, we saw that 1 tonne of cloth waste was being generated by each DWCC. We also realised that the main recycling units in India in Panipat (Haryana), and Tirupur (Tamil Nadu) were mostly using textile waste from other countries, which is being dumped in India, because it is cleaner and well segregated—even as we are generating so much textile waste ourselves,” says Nalini Shekar, co-founder and director of special projects at Hasiru Dala. “So we realised that we needed to set up a pipeline, because one of the main challenges was that the lack of systematic collection of textile waste as a separate stream makes it very difficult to find a market for reusable textiles. It is not enough to collect the material—we needed to be able to send it to processors who would bring it back into the circular economy.”

A fabric mountain

The first thing you see as you enter the warehouse in Cheemasandra on Bengaluru’s outskirts are piles of cloth bundles reaching up to the ceiling in a jumble of colours and patterns. We are at a Textile Recovery Facility (TRF) run by 46-year-old Indumathi (she uses only one name). She has travelled the world and spoken at global recycling conferences, highlighting the contribution of her community to the circular economy. Earlier this year, she attended Bharat Tex, a textile exhibition and conference organised by the Union textile ministry, where she spoke about the “Bangalore Model” of textile waste recovery, and spoke to prime minister Narendra Modi for three minutes. “I told the PM about the problems faced by waste-pickers and how some of us have become business owners thanks to recycling textile waste. I told him textile waste should be seen as a resource, and how this also helps the environment as we prevent it from ending up in landfills,” she says, standing in the ,5,500 sq. feet TRF, which she owns, runs and manages since it came up last year.

Indumathi squats down in front of the fabric mountain, directing a group of women sorting through bundles of clothing and tossing them into large bins behind them. “These are all the whites, later they will be separated into cotton, polyester, mixed fabrics, etc,” she explains. “These are the coloured cottons, and this pile is clothes that can be reused. Altogether, we sort the clothes we get into 10 categories. Some people throw away nice clothes—sometimes they even have their tags on. Those sell really well.”

As India stares at over 7 million tonnes of textile waste a year—most of it destined for landfills—Bengaluru has become a test case for developing an inclusive, circular textile economy. With the EU’s Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) rules (a policy framework that holds producers, importers, and sellers responsible for the environmental impact of their products throughout their lifecycle) for textiles kicking in next year, the global demand for sorted, traceable waste is set to rise sharply. That positions India to become suppliers of high-quality sorted, reusable textile material, which is needed by manufacturers globally to produce new yarn. Indumathi’s TRF, which came up last year, has already diverted over 575 metric tonnes of textile waste, increased incomes for 300 plus waste pickers, and been recognised by UN-Habitat as one of the world’s top circular textile practices in March 2025.

At the centre of this shift are a bunch of civil society organisations, including Saamuhika Shakti (which literally means “collective force” in Kannada), a collective of 12 non-profits working in the environment and livelihoods space formed in 2020. The collective includes organisations like Hasiru Dala and Circular Apparel Innovation Factory (CAIF), a Mumbai-based organisation working towards creating systems and infrastructure for circularity in the textile industry. Other key partners include Bengaluru-based Enviu, which grows markets for recycled textiles, Sambhav Foundation, which focuses on skilling waste pickers, and Social Alpha, which incubates startups in textile waste management and tech innovation.

Connecting the dots

“Our job has been to connect the dots (of textile waste collection, segregation and recycling) and build these capacities and capabilities in a way that eventually it ends up solving for the industry,” says Venkat Kotamaraju, partner and director, CAIF. While the CAIF has been working towards building this model for the past few years through its Closing the Loop programme, its partnership with Saamuhika Shakti in Bengaluru helped it choose the city as ground zero, says Kotamaraju, adding that CAIF is taking the learnings from this initiative to 10 other Indian cities, beginning with Bhopal, where they are launching an awareness campaign.

The momentum is building. Saahas Zero Waste, a Bengaluru organisation that also works in the waste recovery space, has been running a circular textile model since 2023. “We need to scale up textile recovery urgently, and these cannot be run as one-off projects. These are systems that have to be built for the city, and be part of a systemic change that involves the consumer, brands and city governments,” says Shobha Raghavan, CEO of Saahas Zero Waste. Saahas Zero Waste also works with thrift stores like EcoDhaga in Bengaluru, offering pre-loved clothing retrieved from their collection drives, and runs Circle Up by Saahas Zero Waste, which hosts periodic thrift and swap events at their TRF.

The idea central to all this activity is that textile “waste” is not waste but a valuable resource. By setting up collection routes, running campaigns that nudges residents to part with old clothes responsibly, and establishing dedicated recovery facilities, the initiative is creating an end-to-end pipeline for textile waste that also profits waste-pickers, who can now earn by selling textile waste ( ₹3-5 per kilo), a material that previously earned them nothing.

Indumathi talks about an independent waste-picker, Anitha. “After we gave her some basic training, she started looking at textile waste and bringing it to us to sell. Last month, she told me she had made ₹28,000 from textile waste alone, something she had never thought possible. I feel that we are slowly making some real progress,” says Indumathi.

It’s 10am and Kumudha, whom everyone calls Kumudha Ma, is at the Dry Waste Collection Centre (DWCC) in the JP Nagar area of south Bengaluru, separating bundles of old clothes from the other garbage. Kumudha is a former waste-picker who was supported by Hasiru Dala, a Bengaluru-based social impact organisation that has been working in the solid waste management space since 2013, to become a waste entrepreneur. She now operates the DWCC in JP Nagar (although the DWCCs come under the city’s municipal corporation, they are often managed by waste pickers or self-help groups).

“Every three days, we go around the ward collecting the textile waste. We have educated residents to keep it separate from the other dry waste, because sometimes people throw things like milk packets in dry waste and this soils the cloth and then it cannot be used,” she explains. The bundles of old clothes are then packed off to a textile recovery facility on the outskirts of the city, where they get further sorted and are then sent downstream for downcycling, recycling, or resale.

This system of routinely collecting post-consumer textile waste door-to-door, as part of regular municipal waste collection, is a new model being tested here. Post-consumer textile waste is notoriously difficult to gather at scale in a pristine condition—most collection drives depend on consumers to make the effort to drop old clothes off, and if they get mixed with household waste, they get soiled and are difficult to retrieve, ending up in landfills or as fuel at brick and cement kilns.

The programme was developed by Hasiru Dala in 2018. “When we did a survey (in 2015) of the DWCCs that are supported by Hasiru Dala, we saw that 1 tonne of cloth waste was being generated by each DWCC. We also realised that the main recycling units in India in Panipat (Haryana), and Tirupur (Tamil Nadu) were mostly using textile waste from other countries, which is being dumped in India, because it is cleaner and well segregated—even as we are generating so much textile waste ourselves,” says Nalini Shekar, co-founder and director of special projects at Hasiru Dala. “So we realised that we needed to set up a pipeline, because one of the main challenges was that the lack of systematic collection of textile waste as a separate stream makes it very difficult to find a market for reusable textiles. It is not enough to collect the material—we needed to be able to send it to processors who would bring it back into the circular economy.”

A fabric mountain

The first thing you see as you enter the warehouse in Cheemasandra on Bengaluru’s outskirts are piles of cloth bundles reaching up to the ceiling in a jumble of colours and patterns. We are at a Textile Recovery Facility (TRF) run by 46-year-old Indumathi (she uses only one name). She has travelled the world and spoken at global recycling conferences, highlighting the contribution of her community to the circular economy. Earlier this year, she attended Bharat Tex, a textile exhibition and conference organised by the Union textile ministry, where she spoke about the “Bangalore Model” of textile waste recovery, and spoke to prime minister Narendra Modi for three minutes. “I told the PM about the problems faced by waste-pickers and how some of us have become business owners thanks to recycling textile waste. I told him textile waste should be seen as a resource, and how this also helps the environment as we prevent it from ending up in landfills,” she says, standing in the ,5,500 sq. feet TRF, which she owns, runs and manages since it came up last year.

Indumathi squats down in front of the fabric mountain, directing a group of women sorting through bundles of clothing and tossing them into large bins behind them. “These are all the whites, later they will be separated into cotton, polyester, mixed fabrics, etc,” she explains. “These are the coloured cottons, and this pile is clothes that can be reused. Altogether, we sort the clothes we get into 10 categories. Some people throw away nice clothes—sometimes they even have their tags on. Those sell really well.”

As India stares at over 7 million tonnes of textile waste a year—most of it destined for landfills—Bengaluru has become a test case for developing an inclusive, circular textile economy. With the EU’s Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) rules (a policy framework that holds producers, importers, and sellers responsible for the environmental impact of their products throughout their lifecycle) for textiles kicking in next year, the global demand for sorted, traceable waste is set to rise sharply. That positions India to become suppliers of high-quality sorted, reusable textile material, which is needed by manufacturers globally to produce new yarn. Indumathi’s TRF, which came up last year, has already diverted over 575 metric tonnes of textile waste, increased incomes for 300 plus waste pickers, and been recognised by UN-Habitat as one of the world’s top circular textile practices in March 2025.

At the centre of this shift are a bunch of civil society organisations, including Saamuhika Shakti (which literally means “collective force” in Kannada), a collective of 12 non-profits working in the environment and livelihoods space formed in 2020. The collective includes organisations like Hasiru Dala and Circular Apparel Innovation Factory (CAIF), a Mumbai-based organisation working towards creating systems and infrastructure for circularity in the textile industry. Other key partners include Bengaluru-based Enviu, which grows markets for recycled textiles, Sambhav Foundation, which focuses on skilling waste pickers, and Social Alpha, which incubates startups in textile waste management and tech innovation.

Connecting the dots

“Our job has been to connect the dots (of textile waste collection, segregation and recycling) and build these capacities and capabilities in a way that eventually it ends up solving for the industry,” says Venkat Kotamaraju, partner and director, CAIF. While the CAIF has been working towards building this model for the past few years through its Closing the Loop programme, its partnership with Saamuhika Shakti in Bengaluru helped it choose the city as ground zero, says Kotamaraju, adding that CAIF is taking the learnings from this initiative to 10 other Indian cities, beginning with Bhopal, where they are launching an awareness campaign.

The momentum is building. Saahas Zero Waste, a Bengaluru organisation that also works in the waste recovery space, has been running a circular textile model since 2023. “We need to scale up textile recovery urgently, and these cannot be run as one-off projects. These are systems that have to be built for the city, and be part of a systemic change that involves the consumer, brands and city governments,” says Shobha Raghavan, CEO of Saahas Zero Waste. Saahas Zero Waste also works with thrift stores like EcoDhaga in Bengaluru, offering pre-loved clothing retrieved from their collection drives, and runs Circle Up by Saahas Zero Waste, which hosts periodic thrift and swap events at their TRF.

The idea central to all this activity is that textile “waste” is not waste but a valuable resource. By setting up collection routes, running campaigns that nudges residents to part with old clothes responsibly, and establishing dedicated recovery facilities, the initiative is creating an end-to-end pipeline for textile waste that also profits waste-pickers, who can now earn by selling textile waste ( ₹3-5 per kilo), a material that previously earned them nothing.

Indumathi talks about an independent waste-picker, Anitha. “After we gave her some basic training, she started looking at textile waste and bringing it to us to sell. Last month, she told me she had made ₹28,000 from textile waste alone, something she had never thought possible. I feel that we are slowly making some real progress,” says Indumathi.