Established by Canopy, Fashion for Good, IDH and Laudes Foundation, the Re-Start Alliance seeks to address the complex challenges of commercialising textile recycling technologies and creating a supply chain for textile waste feedstock.

This effort follows Fashion for Good’s seminal Sorting for Circularity India Project, which kicked off in 2021 with the goal of studying the textile waste landscape of India, and piloting collection, sorting, and pre-processing innovations with local waste management enterprises. The project brought together different players from the textile and apparel industry such as Levi Strauss & Co., PVH Corp., Target, Arvind Limited, H&M, Primark, Birla Cellulose and Welspun India.

The focus of the project was to organise textile waste in India – both industrial and post-consumer – through a three-stage approach. It involved identifying opportunities and challenges in the Indian textile waste landscape, leading to the creation of two significant streams: post-industrial and post-consumer textile waste. The result was the identification of 7.7m tonnes of textile waste – the amount that India receives each year that could be valorised and used as potential feedstock for new fibres. Following this, the project developed a toolkit providing valuable insights and guidance for advancing recycling in India’s textile industry.

Although these efforts demonstrated the potential for a circular textile economy, they also highlighted the need for more extensive industry-wide actions.