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 commonFor 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. Clothes discarded in the US, Canada and Europe arrive in the city to be torn back into fibres and spun into yarn, fe…
‘Every day, someone loses a hand or a leg’: the brutal reality of India’s textile recycling industry
November 06, 2026