The project brings together industry players
including Adidas, Levi Strauss & Co., PVH Corp.,
NCJohn & Sons, Arvind Limited, Birla Cellulose and
Welspun India. A key technology partner for the 
project is Fashion for Good innovator Reverse
Resources that provide the analysis of the pre-

consumer textile waste streams in addition to
designing and running the pre-consumer pilot. The
project is supported through catalytic funding
provided by Laudes Foundation.

“India is a critical hub, not only for textile production
and consumption, but also as a global post-
consumer textile waste destination. This project is 
pivotal to understanding the size of this considerable
market and providing the incentive, tools and measns
for the industry to benefits from the wealth of this
untapped resoource.”- Katin Ley, Managing Director at
Fashion for Good

India’s position as a manufacturing and consumption
market of textiles, provides for large streams of pre-
consumer as well as domestic post consumer waste.
Pre-consumer waste is only partially recycled, with the
remaining portion mostly downcycles to products of
inferior quality. Domestic post-consumer waste on the 
other hand is exceptionally difficult to trace, with limited
data available to understand the waste, quantities,
composition and other factors key to its recycling. India is
also one of the largest recipients of global post-consumer
textile waste. wit millions of tonnes, to the value of more
than €100m, of discarded textile imported and manually
sorted through various hubs. Similar to domestic waste,
limited information on this imported waste exists.

NC John & Sons location in Tirupur is an ideal location to 
take a leading role in this Textile Waste Mapping project,
as Tirupur accounts for more than 75% of India’s knitted
garment exports.

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“The project makes perfect sense for our business as 
we have been purchasing recycled yarns for some 
time now, and sorting our post-industrial fabric
waste. So to have a traceability system in place to 
enable us to purchase back recycled yarn from the
pre-consumer waste we have collected and returned
to fabric recycling mills would enable us to realise
our dream of completely closing the loop on our
production process”. - Alexander Job, Chief Executive
Officer at NC John & Sons

BUILDING A NEW STRUCTURE TO SCALE TEXTILE RECYCLING

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The Sorting for Circularity India project aims to address these challenges and build an 
accessible infrastructure for manufactures, sorters, collectors, waste handlers and recyclers in
India. Over 15 months, the project will demonstrate a new textile value chain across three
phases. Firstly, by obtaining an overall understanding of the textile waste supply chain of pre-
and post-consumer textile waste in India. Secondly, by identifying and piolting technologies that 
enable the trceability of textile waste and its accessibilities to existing recyclers. And finally,
providing recyclers with access to textile waste feedstocks that meet the quality parameters of
advanced recycling technologies, giving these thechnologies an incentive to scale in India.