Dressed to Kill

In India's fast-fashion economy, the price tag may read ₹299 but the real bill is paid in a mounting trail of textile waste no one wants to own

- Aditi Ray Chowdhury

Across several wards in Bengaluru, Krishna sorts through piles of discarded clothing.

Most are almost new. A third-generation waste picker-turned-waste entrepreneur, Krishna collects textile and other forms of waste from households in Bengaluru. The clothes are segregated and sold at secondhand markets or sent for recycling to Panipat.

There is also a third way of handling discarded clothes, says Krishna. The result? Rising carbon emissions and cascading effects on the heath of workers and on the environment.

Lives like these are emblematic of a broader national trend: the expansion of fast fashion, mirroring global patterns of accelerated consumption that comes at a steep ecological and human cost.

The textile sector is now the third-largest dry-waste stream in India's municipal systems, trailing only plastics and construction waste. It generates annually nearly 7,800 kilotonnes of waste, much of it from discarded clothes.

Water, Waste and Carbon

Producing a single cotton T-shirt can consume up to 2,700 litres of water. Synthetic garments, increasingly popular due to their lower cost, shed microplastics with every wash. These pollutants embed themselves in rivers, fields and eventually, food chains.

"An average consumer does not wear a garment more than 10 times in its entire lifecycle," says Mou Sengupta, programme manager, solid waste management and circular economy at the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a research and advocacy organisation.

Around 41% of textiles in India are incinerated, landfilled or discarded after just one or two uses. This pattern is not incidental but integral to the fast-fashion model, which thrives on obsolescence. E-commerce platforms have magnified this churn, pushing the latest trends at prices that mask the real costs.