Panipat turns discarded clothes into yarn and exports - but figures vary. Read a data-driven look at volumes, supply sources, second-place hubs, pollution, jobs and what needs to change.
You’ve probably seen the headline: "Panipat recycles 1 million tonnes of textile waste a year". That figure is contested. Reliable reporting shows wide ranges - estimates span roughly 100,000 tonnes → 1,000,000+ tonnes annually, depending on whether you count imported rags, local factory offcuts and informal trade routes. What’s not disputed: Panipat is the largest textile-recycling cluster in India, handling a very large share of the country’s recycled feedstock and supplying yarns, home-textiles and export markets.
How Panipat became the world’s “cast-off capital”
The cluster grew from local spinning and handloom traditions into a recycling economy in the 1980s–90s, when cheaper virgin inputs and global second-hand flows made down-cycling profitable. Over decades a network of sorters, shredders, mills and weaving units crystallised around Panipat — sorting imports and domestic discards into grades and down-cycling most low-grade material into yarn, blankets and mattress stuffing. This informal-industrial system is why Panipat is globally famous (and controversial).
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The Numbers — What different sources say
- Lower-end estimates (~100k tonnes/year): Multiple industry profiles and cluster studies report figures around 100,000–150,000 tonnes processed per year by Panipat’s formal mills. These numbers reflect documented shipments and registered units.
- Higher estimates (250 tonnes/day → ~90k t/yr to 1M+ t/yr): Local reporting often quotes 200–250 tonnes/day passing through Panipat’s markets (which annualises to ~73k–91k t), while newer investigative pieces and aggregate trade-flow analyses suggest much higher totals — some recent investigations cite 1 million+ tonnes when informal, undocumented flows and re-exports are included. That’s why you’ll see both “one lakh tonnes” and “one million tonnes” claims in different outlets.
Why so much variance?
Because part of the trade is informal: donated, sorted and re-shipped bales often never pass standard customs codes or are aggregated with other scrap categories — so measured trade ≠ actual material handled on the ground.
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Where do these Rags come from?
Panipat’s feedstock is a mix of:
Imported second-hand/used clothing from the US, UK, Western Europe, Canada and parts of East Asia (trade and investigative reports repeatedly name the US, Netherlands/Europe, UK and Canada as major exporters).
Regional factory offcuts and rejects (Bangladesh, India’s own supply chain, and regional garment hubs). Some months shipments from Bangladesh have been crucial to Panipat’s throughput.
Domestic post-consumer collections and donation drives (smaller share but growing with formal collection schemes).
Trade-data snapshots (short windows) also show the US, Canada and UAE as visible exporters to India in certain years; EU member states — notably the Netherlands — are major traders in used textiles which then filter into Indian recycling chains.
Who’s second?
Inside India, Tirupur (TN), Amroha (UP) and Bhojpur are the other major recycling clusters — Tirupur is strong on knit/synthetic recycling, Amroha on sorting and low-grade rags; Bhojpur and Ludhiana handle wool/synthetic streams. Globally, historical hubs like Prato (Italy) and processing centres in Pakistan and Poland remain important in the international second-hand network. So if Panipat is #1 in India (and arguably Asia), the “second place” depends on the metric: Tirupur/Amroha for volume of processing, Prato for historical industrial recycling expertise.
Environmental & social metrics (what the reports flag)
- Employment: cluster studies estimate tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of livelihoods tied to the value chain (direct + indirect).
- Pollution: multiple investigations show untreated dyeing/bleaching effluent, heavy dust and microplastic emissions; health surveys find respiratory problems among workers.
- Climate & CO₂: recent cluster analyses estimate substantial CO₂ and water footprints (switch-Asia estimated Panipat’s impacts in recent reporting), highlighting the carbon/water cost of low-technology down-cycling.
Panipat demonstrates circular-economy value (cheap yarn, exports, livelihoods) and classic “waste-colonisation” problems: richer countries offload consumption problems to low-cost centres; local gains are matched by health, environmental and governance costs. The policy answer is formalisation + tech upgrade: better sorting (higher-value textile-to-textile recycling), effluent treatment, worker safety and traceability so that imports are legal, clean and auditable.
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