India recycles textiles at a scale few countries can match, and its recycling market is projected to reach USD 3.5 billion by 2030 (Fibre2Fashion, 2025). Yet most of that capacity is mechanical, and the blended cotton–polyester streams that matter most for circularity are precisely the ones conventional processes handle worst.
The article looks at where that value is lost. It reviews the main recycling clusters — Panipat, Tirupur and Coimbatore, Amroha and Bhojpur, Surat and Ahmedabad — and sets out the barriers that stand between them and the European market, from traceability and certification to the informality of collection and sorting. Its central argument is that technology transfer alone does not produce replication: advanced recycling performs only as well as the feedstock it receives, and deployment works by building on existing clusters rather than beside them.
It is the first in a series of outputs from the PLASTICE replication studies, and was presented on 10 September 2026 at the 24th edition of the ECOSYSTEX Insights Series.
Read the full article — Watch the ECOSYSTEX Insights Series #24 recording
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