Bengaluru, like all cities in India, is facing a massive influx of textile waste. According to the Indian Textile Journal, it is estimated that more than 1 million tons of textiles are thrown away every year, with households discarding the highest proportion.
In 2018, Hasiru Dala piloted an initiative titled ‘Hasiru Batte’ (Green Cloth) to find alternatives to textiles that were discarded. Our survey of 15 DWCCs that are supported by Hasiru Dala (submitted to the BBMP) from wards with a robust source segregation and a fully functional DWCC, shows cloth waste comprises 7-12% of the total dry waste collected.
Management of textile waste, especially at DWCCs, need holistic solutions such as destinations with appropriate technologies, need to improve economic viability through better cost coverage and streamlined segregated collection systems. For this to be a reality, textile waste needs to be treated as a separate stream; with necessary investments in infrastructure and investments to scale operations. Most stop-gap methods such as landfilling or incineration end up displacing work for the informal sector, and cause serious environmental problems of air, water and soil pollution.
Challenges
Hasiru Dala’s challenge during the process of integrating textile waste management as a stream of collection and handling in established DWCC processes was a complex and time-consuming exercise.
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 en ough to collect the material – we needed to be able to send it to processers who would bring it back into the circular economy.
Textile Waste mixed with dry waste collection streams further compounds the problem, as even usable garments are further soiled and are dirty, and often end up in waste dumping yards.
The diversity and heterogeneity of textiles makes it difficult to process or dispose and ends up as Refuse-Derived Fuel (RDF) in co processing units or is dumped in landfills.
As well, Bengaluru had a long tradition of a barter system for cloth waste. The itinerant buyers would go door todoor and collect reusable clothes, sarees with zari borders and in exchange would earlier give steel kitchen utensils, later moved to plastic utensils. As the housing pattern changed from individual homes to housing complexes access to consumers reduced for the itinerant buyers. Now, they go to known areas, DWCCs and buy clothes per garment or by weight. These are sorted, cleaned and sold. The markets that are available to the traders are flea markets, also called Sunday markets in BVK Iyengar Road. If they get a large consignment they sell the clothes on pavements at these markets. One of the largest markets is construction workers camps. Traders go from one camp to another on Sundays to sell their cleaned garments.
Almost all post-consumer non-reusable textile waste ends up either in landfills or as part of RDF (Refuse Derived Fuel) that works as a small percentage of replacement for coal or natural gas. This is economically not feasible as the cement kilns are far from Bengaluru. Clothes are mixed with other combustible fragments from waste like non- recyclable (difficult to recycle) plastics, multi-layered plastic (MLP), rexine, old furniture etc. In reality, clothes are not efficient for co-processing because of their low calorific value compared to other combustible fragments. A sustainable circular economy strategy such as investments in technology to recover yarn from garments and reuse it in textiles would be a preferred method.
Our conversations with textile waste recyclers and associations of recyclers indicate their general preference for input feed from imported clean segregated cloth waste, post-production waste, post-consumer clean reusable waste. Small and medium entrepreneurs pick up post production waste that is used for filling for beds and pillows. They are reluctant to use post consumer waste for the fear of customers’ non acceptance of once used clothes and the changes in their own production system. This in turn results in no takers beyond the landfills/ dump yards, the incinerators. Most recyclers require cloth that is clean and free of contamination so as to not stress their processing streams, effective source segregation and handling of textile waste that comes a natural input into the recycling streams. The better the quality of input feed, the more cost effective it would be to convert it to recyclable and reusable material. Participation in the circular textile cycle would also incentivise waste pickers into collecting and handling of textile waste without sending it to the landfill/ dump yards.
Our Approach
Our approach is centered around dignity in labour for waste workers. As a new initiative our work is centred around finding and designing workflows that will have the maximum reach for reuse and recycling, and exploring markets which will accept textile waste for recycling.
Our Initial Efforts at Textile Waste Collection and Management
At the DWCCs
At the present, the Hasiru Batte project works in 8 DWCCs across Bengaluru. 40 waste pickers are now working on textile waste in these centres. e have provided 12 different types of training on sorting, use of machines (such as a cloth cutting machine for removal of disruptors).
Information, Education, Communication
As with all waste management, continuous awareness and consciousness raising with the residents of the ward is a foundational need for proper textile waste management.
Residents are made aware of the need for keeping a separate stream of textile waste which is clean and dry. (Proper methods of collection intimate garments are also explained.)
We saw an almost immediate increase in the amount of useable, re-useable and recyclable cloth material coming to the centres.
Expansion
We are exploring the possibility of setting up these streams of textile waste collection in other cities across Karnataka.