India’s domestic textile and apparel industry contributed nearly 2% of gross domestic product and accounted for 14% of industrial production in 2018
When Nitya Chandrashekhar’s mother decided to throw away her old Banarasi silk saree, Nitya decided she wanted to reuse it. “The sari had silver work on the edge and I didn’t want to give it away,” she said. sari for her brother’s wedding, and it lasted for another decade until 2019, when the sari was torn beyond redemption. . If you’re fed up with a saree, why throw away the fabric when you can always change the design, “Nitya told IndiaSpend. Nitya is the founder of Mumbai-based Anya Designs which recycles waste sarees to create new clothes. More than a million tonnes of textiles are thrown away in India every year. For Nitya, we produce and buy too much, so she has incorporated a zero waste approach into her work to minimize waste in the production of Like her, several designers have explored ways to transport the upcycle h textile into fashion items, to change people’s attitudes towards fashion consumption.
This is important for India, among the top five manufacturing markets garments and one of the world’s leading manufacturing centers for fast fashion garments which are exported to Europe and the United States.Fashion demand in India is also growing. The greenhouse gas emissions of the global textile industry are higher than those of international shipping and air transport combined. The fashion industry produces around 53 million tonnes of fiber each year, 70% of which ends up in landfills or is incinerated. Fiber production is expected to reach 160 million tonnes by 2050, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a UK-based charity that works to promote circular economies, which seek to balance production and consumption by reusing products. . Less than 1 According to the foundation, the% fiber is reused to make new clothes, which represents the loss of billions of dollars of clothes, which are not reused and discarded, with a negative impact on the environment. The global fashion industry is also the second largest consumer of water,
According to the United Nations Environment Program. It takes 3,781 liters of water equivalent to the amount of water a person drinks over a three-year period to make jeans, from cotton production to retail delivery of the final product, according to the report. In India, 1 million tonnes of discarded textiles each year are produced domestically and accounted for 14% of industrial production in 2018, according to a report co-produced by the Indian Chamber of Commerce (ICC). In addition to exports, domestic demand for fashion is growing exponentially.Per capita clothing spending is expected to reach Rs 6,400 by 2023, up from Rs 3,900 in 2018, with rising incomes for middle-class consumers being a key factor, according to the ICC report. India is on track to become one of the most attractive consumer markets for clothing outside of the West, with more than 300 international fashion brands slated to open stores in India in 2022-23, according to McKinsey. As we said, in India more than a million tons of textiles are thrown away each year, most of which comes from sources, according to the Indian Textile Journal. Textiles represent about 3% of the weight of a household trash can. also the third largest source of municipal solid waste in India.
The central government launched the SU.RE project in 2019, aiming to inspire the textile industry to move towards fashion that contributes to a clean environment. Around 16 of India’s leading retail brands, including Lifestyle, Shoppers’ Stop, Future group and Aditya Birla Retail, have committed to source / use a portion of their total consumption using sustainable raw materials and processes. ‘by 2025. But the rapid growth of fashion in India is set to increase textile waste produced in India, according to experts from Sustainability Initiatives. Designers like Nitya want to be part of the solution.We contacted the Ministry of Textile on December 17 to get their response on measures taken to minimize textile waste and promote sustainable fashion.
We’ll update the story when they respond. Why fast fashion is not sustainable Previously, the fashion industry operated two seasons a year, during which new collections were released: fall / winter and spring / summer. Manufacturers and designers would have worked months in advance to plan the collections for each season and predict the styles they thought customers would want. In the 2000s that changed, as international fashion brands Zara and HandM launched a business model that introduced 52 “micro-seasons” per year, meaning a new collection is introduced every week. Since then, the term “fast fashion” has been used, especially in the context of these brands, to describe the high rate of fashion consumption that fuels
