Inside Bengaluru’s quiet recycling revolution

Stories from the alleys and gullies of India

- Shrabonti Bagchi

Textile waste entrepreneur Kumudha (centre) at a dry waste collection centre.

A pilot project aims to change the way we see old clothes, while generating income for waste-pickers

It’s 10am and Kumudha is at the Dry Waste Collection Centre (DWCC) in south Bengaluru’s JP Nagar, separating bundles of old clothes from other garbage. Kumudha is a former waste-picker turned entrepreneur who operates the DWCC in JP Nagar (although DWCCs come under the city corporation, they are often managed by waste pickers or self-help groups).

“Every three days, we go around the ward collecting textile waste. We have educated residents to keep it separate from other dry waste, because sometimes people throw things like milk packets in dry waste and this soils the cloth and then it cannot be used,” she explains. Kumudha made the shift to entrepreneur with the help of Hasiru Dala, a social impact organisation working in solid waste management since 2013. The bundles of old clothes she collects are sent to a textile recovery facility on Bengaluru’s outskirts, where they are sorted and sent for down-cycling, recycling, or resale.

This collecting of post-consumer textile waste door-to-door as part of regular waste collection is a model being tested here. Post-consumer textile waste is notoriously difficult to gather at scale in a pristine condition—most collection drives depend on consumers to drop old clothes off, and if they are mixed with household waste, they end up in landfills or as fuel at brick and cement kilns.