How India’s Fast Fashion Boom is Fuelling a Textile Waste Crisis

A cross several wards in Bengaluru, Krishna sorts through piles of discarded clothing. Most are almost new. A third-generation waste picker-turned-waste entrepreneur, Krishna collects textile and other forms of waste from households in Bengaluru. The clothes are segregated and sold at second-hand markets or sent for recycling to Panipat.

There is also a third way of handling discarded clothes, says Krishna. “Mounds of clothes are dumped in landfills, which in turn are incinerated by informal waste workers.” The result? Rising carbon emissions and cascading effects on the heath of workers and on the environment.

Lives like these are emblematic of a broader national trend: the expansion of fast fashion, mirroring global patterns of accelerated consumption that comes at a steep ecological and human cost.

The textile sector is now the third-largest dry-waste stream in India’s municipal systems, trailing only plastics and construction waste. It generates annually nearly 7,800 kilotonnes of waste, much of it from discarded clothes.

Water, Waste and Carbon

Producing a single cotton T-shirt can consume up to 2,700 litres of water. Synthetic garments, increasingly popular due to their lower cost, shed microplastics with every wash. These pollutants embed themselves in rivers, fields and eventually, food chains.

“An average consumer does not wear a garment more than 10 times in its entire lifecycle,” says Mou Sengupta, programme manager, solid waste management and circular economy at the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a research and advocacy organisation.

Around 41% of textiles in India are incinerated, landfilled or discarded after just one or two uses. This pattern is not incidental but integral to the fast-fashion model, which thrives on obsolescence. E-commerce platforms have magnified this churn, pushing the latest trends at prices that mask the real costs.

Globally, the picture is even bleaker: 85% of all textiles end up in dump yards annually, and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, an international charity, estimates that $500bn in clothing value is lost each year due to underuse and lack of recycling.

The fashion industry is also a major environmental culprit beyond waste. It is the world’s second-largest consumer of water and contributes between 2% and 8% of global carbon emissions.

Its value chain guzzles an estimated 215trn litres of water annually: equivalent to 86mn Olympic-sized swimming pools. In India, the industry ranks among the top polluters and water users, a fact routinely overlooked in growth projections.

Toxic runoff from dyeing units affects more than just aquatic life. It leaches into groundwater, disrupting agriculture and causing chronic health issues in communities nearby. The World Bank estimates that globally, around 20% of industrial wastewater pollution originates from the fashion industry.

In regions where informal textile waste is burned, the air becomes its own kind of poison. Communities routinely complain of wheezing, chronic cough and headaches, symptoms increasingly tied to microplastics and volatile compounds in the air.

A 2023 study of textile workers in Mumbai published in the Indian Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology revealed that 68.4% of the workers displayed respiratory disease symptoms, with a majority suffering from breathlessness.

The study also revealed that only 8.6% of the workers used face covers and 11% never read the labels pasted on containers and were thus unaware of the chemicals they were handling. About two-thirds of the participants perceived that the chemical they were handling was harmful to their health.

An expert in the textile waste-management sector said workers sift through mounds of synthetic clothing at informal textile waste markets in metropolitan cities. “These clothes don’t burn properly and the smoke chokes workers,” she adds.

Discarded pieces from fast-fashion collections such as polyester shirts, plastic zips and kurtis with sequins arrive in tonnes. In the absence of a formal recycling infrastructure, waste pickers have no option but to burn, bury or manually strip the clothes for resale.

Far removed from this landscape is 19-year-old Richa, a university student, who shared her love of new clothes with Outlook Business. “I just bought four new dresses from Shein, their collection is so cheap and trendy that I just can’t stop myself. All my friends stay updated with the latest fashion trends and it’s anyway no more in fashion after I wear it twice or thrice.”

Threadbare Solutions

The demand side of fast fashion is not just about trends, but also aspiration and aggressive marketing. Consumers, especially in Tier-II and Tier-III cities, are being drawn into the fold through digital storefronts, influencer campaigns and discount cycles. The result is a generation of buyers that is buying more frequently but wearing less.

But despite the odds, slow fashion pioneers are gradually emerging. Start-ups such as Doodlage, The Summer House and No Nasties show that circular fashion—clothing made from upcycled or organic materials—can attract both critical acclaim and a loyal customer base. These brands rely on transparent sourcing, ethical wages and minimal waste. Still, they represent a niche, not a norm.

Talking about No Nasties’ customer base, founder Apurva Kothari says, “Over the years, we’ve seen that our customer database is a blend of conscious folks who come for the story and then buy the product.” However, he adds that in the last few years, especially with Gen Z and the explosion of social media, people are making conscious choices.

But Kothari admits that fast fashion’s price advantage continues to trump sustainability for the vast majority. Despite changing choices, slow fashion brands face significant challenges in terms of balancing sustainability ideals with the commercial realities of pricing, margins and scale.

“I don’t think fast fashion is cheap because of the product cost. It’s cheap because you’re not paying the true cost of the product. Somewhere someone somewhere is getting exploited and it’s definitely not the CEO of the fast fashion company,” says Kothari.

Then there is greenwashing, that is, deceptive eco-friendly marketing claims under which major brands tout capsules as “eco” collections while maintaining core lines that are environmentally damaging. “Greenwashing is getting so sophisticated and slick that I have to research for hours before I know whether a new material is actually good or not,” says Kothari.

Quantitatively, there is evidence to suggest that greenwashing is a significant problem. According to a survey by market-research firm YouGov, 71% of Indian consumers said they had come across greenwashing and 60% said they were concerned about it.

Policy Void

At present, the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) framework for textiles is still a draft. Ideally, a robust EPR framework for textiles should start by clearly defining what constitutes textile waste and assigning clear responsibilities to producers and brand owners.

Experts in waste management say a framework must establish collection and recovery targets linked to the quantity of textiles in the market, covering every stage from collection, sorting, processing, reuse and recycling.

In addition, there should be dedicated investment in research, development of textile recovery facilities and modern machinery and technologies that can handle different fabric types. Equally important is incentivising the informal sector, which currently manages a large share of textile waste.

But the government is yet to bring in textiles under the ambit of EPR. According to CSE’s Sengupta, there are multiple factors for the omission.

Recent studies plastic waste EPR reveal a huge gap between what producers and brand owners claim and what actually happens on the ground. This occurs because companies often report compliance and get credits without real accountability. “The same challenges are bound to play out in the textile sector as well, especially when textiles are not even recognised yet as a separate waste category,” Sengupta says.

“Unlike metals, glass or paper which already have EPR frameworks, textiles remain outside the system. One major barrier here is the absence of reliable data, which makes it difficult for the government to acknowledge the scale of the problem.”

Ultimately, India’s fashion sector must reimagine its value chain, not as a race to the bottom in costs, but as a global leader in sustainable innovation. This means consumer awareness in terms of consumption, integrating climate goals into textile planning and building a regulatory framework that treats fast fashion’s externalities not as acceptable by-products, but as urgent liabilities.