Nagpur Oranges for Ferragamo?
Some of the building blocks of a new economy being fashioned across the world’s textile industry, are in India. Rethinking our role in this new global order would be beneficial.
Happy Republic Day India. It’s a good day for positive reflection on how far we have come while mulling over the challenges and opportunities ahead.
History tells us we have had a spinning and weaving industry since the Harappan era but we are now in 2020 and in the midst of a health crisis in a country that exported $36.6 billion worth of textiles & apparel in 2018–19. This has implications for global supply chains in the sector and time will tell how volatile the year turns out to be.
Mitigating risks are therefore incumbent for businesses for factors within their control. Like, say, water consumption.
In 2019, Arvind, India’s largest denim producer, installed a plant that allows its entire operations to run with reclaimed water using membrane bioreactor technology. The chemical free process will treat domestic water drawn from the surrounding community. A newly constructed pipeline will draw wastewater from the local municipal pipeline. That’s 8 million litres per day or 2.5 billion litres of water saved annually.
Arvind has mitigated the risk to production in times of water scarcity.
But is this one-off? No.
A new textiles economy based on the principles of a circular economy is taking shape around the world . It aims to keep textiles and apparel production and consumption at peak value during use, regenerate natural systems and design out waste and pollution.
The cornerstones of this new economy as laid out in a report brought out by the Ellen Macarthur Foundation* are :
a. Use resources effectively.
b. Radically improve recycling.
c. Increase clothing utilisation.
d. Phase out substances of concern.
a.
While Arvind’s is an effort towards regenerating natural resources, the SaaS platform of the Estonian company Reverse Resources is an attempt to use produced materials efficiently by allowing manufacturers to share their off-cuts data with buyers to enable them use these production leftovers as details on other garments, in internal sections like pockets etc. This approach is estimated to be useful for ~20% off-cuts.
This “system” is in use in India by local darjis but scaling it up to mass produced garments would be an effective use of all produced goods.
b.
India’s raddi collection culture makes measures to extensively recycle pre used fabrics and apparel a lot easier than perhaps for other countries .
Currently <1% of textiles produced globally for clothing are recycled into new apparel. Implementing clothing collection at scale, using technology to improve the quality of recycling and stimulating demand for such recycled clothes are doable in the Indian context.
Typically recycling is restricted to conversions into cleaning cloth (that old tee is the new duster), mattress stuffing or insulation material.
Optical sorting of garments using Near Infrared and Visual Spectroscopy is being piloted in Sweden. Garments are sorted based on the majority fibre type and then plucked out from the pile using compressed air.
The clothing brand Eileen Fisher has set up a factory to create new garments from clothing not suitable for resale. Innovations such as dissolvable yarns speed up the disassembly process.
c.
Increasing clothing utilisation is a lot more than passing down that out-of-fashion kurta to Kanta. Globally, the numbers of times a garment is used has reduced 36% in the past 15 years. In China use is down from 200 to 62 wears per garment.
In markets overseas, resale of unblemished, highly durable clothes, short term rentals, clothes on subscription are some of the models in play to increase the number of times a garment is worn . This includes maternity (Borrow for your bump) and babywear (Five families use Vigga babywear before they go for recycling).
Now that Kanta can buy herself a new kurta for Rs 200 online, India needs to look for other solutions to extend apparel use.
We have a complex relationship with clothes. I bought 3 sarees on a recent trip because they were hand loomed, they used natural dyes and they draped beautifully. I will never reach the use-so-much-they’ll-shred stage for more than a dozen sarees but get tempted to buy more anyway.
It is this sort of excessive shopping coupled with virtuous “ doing my bit for the economy/for the artisan/for the struggling weaver” thinking that presents a dilemma for an industry which needs to keep growing but has to defend itself against charges of unsustainability as well. The sustainability paradox is most evident among millenials who cover the spectrum from I Saw It First to FI/RE .
The intersection between the three elements
- effective resource consumption
- recycling garments and
- increasing clothing utilisation
presents an unique opportunity to rethink our entire handloom and powerloom value chains.
One of the longest running disagreements with the Indian government has been the hank yarn obligation on textile mills to provide yarn on skeins to handloom weavers. While it may have made some sense in 1973, it is a policy long past its expiry date in 2020. The government has whittled down its applicability for some sections of the industry but it is still obligatory on others thereby straining productivity and product mix.
So what can be done ?
A matchmaking platform that brings together municipalities, NGOs that work with rag pickers, women’s SHGs, skill development centres, garment factories with under utilised capacities, design studios and clothing brands, would help India create a virtuous and enduring assembly line for textile recycling.
Boutique sized spinning units of ~10000 spindles to produce only hank yarn by blending cotton/cellulose/polyester with fibres from shredded fabrics using both manual and automated processes, could make the hand loom or power loom fabric truly sustainable. This would also stimulate demand for recycled materials across the textile value chain.
And the place to do this? The handloom clusters and mega handloom parks of course. Germany has plans to set up industrial scale recycling centres. Our headstart lies within the framework of the Comprehensive Handloom Cluster Development Scheme (CHCDS) .
Rethink. Reimagine.
It is the fourth element of the circular economy — phasing out substances of concern — that likely presents the biggest challenge to India in the medium and long term.
The R&D in this area is dominated by firms in the US/UK/EU and projects funded by governments there. For one, all standards like the Global Recycled Standards, the Restricted Substances List, the EUs REACH regulation, the Natural Capital Protocol, the Higg Index etc are established in these countries . The Global Fashion Agenda’s call to action involves 143 brands across 64 companies and with revenues of $133 billion. One of their commitments is to increase share of garments made from recycled textile fibres.
The benefits of such exacting standards have no doubt led to some welcome developments. When the French Navy set guidelines in 2010 to procure 1.5 lac cotton jerseys they specified that organic cotton be used and prohibited formaldehye and azo dyes in the production process ( Formaldehyde has been known to be used in the production of crease resistant shirts). Public Procurement processes in Europe are being tailored to meet these standards.
Another development is the decision of Arcelik that owns 12 home appliance brands to make its micro-fibre filtering technologies available to competitors. The company’s washing machine, due to roll out this year, has a built-in synthetic micro-fibre filtration system which claims to ensure micro-fibres do not get flushed down the drain when clothes are washed.
While in the short term, measures are required to bump up our annual TAC exports by scaling up, improving labour markets, doling out incentives, absorbing welfare costs etc, it is not hard to see norms on phasing out substances of concern and release of microfibres becoming part of major buyers’ demands. Such non tariff barriers may worry many in the Indian textile industry and its exporters in particular.
As some have noted , the circular economy is “not a silver bullet for employment, sustainability and prosperity”. It’s hard to say if jobs generated by circular innovations will be better or what strain there will be on other resources even as waste is reduced . Wouldn’t reduced consumption create havoc for entire economies?
This requires second order thinking and an unprecedented commitment from India’s policymakers, academia and industry.
Orange Fiber, QMilk, Agraloop , Ecoalf are churning out new fibres from oranges, from coffee seeds, from agri and dairy waste and haute couture designers are working with some of them. Meanwhile banana and pineapple fibres developed here languish in anonymity.
Our clusters, our centres of excellence, our textile parks, our labs, our farms need to be able to draw in talent to collaborate and innovate at scale and at size. There is no point giving the Nagpur Orange a GI tag if we have only one Dhiraj Junghare , for we need a lot of orange peel waste to produce citrus cellulose and turn it into a silky yarn.
California orange or Nagpur orange? What would we want Ferragamo to use?
*I read these so you don’t have to. References, images and some text material in this post are verbatim from :
www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/assets/downloads/publications/A-New-Textiles-Economy_Full-Report.pdf
www.whichplm.com/the-intersection-of-2020-and-the-future-of-textiles
