In early March of 2024, our founder, Marina Chahboune, embarked on a field trip to Panipat, India. Kindly invited by Kakkar Spinning & HSN Group the mission was to gain firsthand insights into the company’s outstanding efforts of recycling textile waste into new fibres and open-end yarns and to explore the unique, decades-old recycling eco-system of the city of Panipat.
Panipat, known as Asia’s largest textile and recycling hub hosts an estimated 150-200 micro to medium-sized entities that process both post-consumer and post-industrial textile waste, sourced from imports and locally. Panipat receives approximately 250 tonnes of textile waste daily. Upon arrival, the waste undergoes manual sorting by different categories and then either goes into preparing for resale or recycling into a variety of products.
What makes the city’s set-up so unique is that there is a large variance between the entities which adopt both traditional methods as well as the incorporation of the latest technologies. Although the current recycling ecosystem in Panipat is thriving, there is still room for improvement regarding capacity building for bringing higher value to waste and matching it with the right recyclers, ensuring environmental and social compliance and especially the formalizing of the current often informal value chains. An interesting observation is that there is a push towards innovation in the recycling industry in Panipat, but effective innovation can only be met when the underlying basic sourcing system is robust and functional, ensuring continuous access to needed amounts of raw material feedstock.
While visiting, Marina was kindly hosted by Mr. Harshit Kakkar, CEO of HSN Group and Kakkar Spinning and had the chance to inspect the company’s impressive establishment of extensive segregation and recycling procedures of textile waste into staple fibers and open-end yarns.
Throughout her visit, Marina engaged in meaningful discussions with Mr. Harshit, exchanging ideas on how to elevate reuse, further usage applications for textile waste and localized recycling eco-systems. We are looking forward to working together with Kakkar Spinning as we jointly embark on the project “Textile Waste Improvement Programme For Circularity (WIP4C)” which aims to introduce textile waste management systems at 21 factories in Cambodia. Click here to learn more about the project!
