‘Every day, someone loses a hand or a leg’: the brutal reality of India’s textile recycling industry
Clothes discarded in the US, Canada and Europe arrive in the city to be torn back into fibres and spun into yarn, feeding a textile recycling industry that supplies markets across the world.
Key points
- In Panipat, 1m tons of used clothing a year are turned into products for global brands, but dangerous machinery and few safeguards mean life-changing injuries are common For three months, Suraj Kumar’s job was to feed discarded clothes into shredding machines in Panipat, an industrial city in the north Indian state of Haryana.
- He hoped to earn enough to send money home to his parents.
Suraj, 19, had travelled from West Bengal state to work in Panipat’s factories, following his cousins and friends who had already found jobs there.
But in late August, an electrical short circuit in the machine propelled him into the shredding mechanism.
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