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This collection has been built by a community of passionate researchers, students, and industry professionals as part of <a href="https://worldcirculartextilesday.com/" target="_blank">World Circular Textiles Day</a> (WCTD). 


World Circular Textiles Day takes place every year on 8th October.  Our vision is to galvanise the collective ambitions and goals of people, organisations and businesses to reach a fully circular textiles world by 2050. Our mission is to provide a framework for circularity stakeholders to develop and deliver a collaborative, evolving roadmap and to chart circularity’s momentum annually from the 8th of October until 2050.

What does fully circular by 2050 mean?
- Shared textile resources, in the form of products and raw materials, are kept in **continual circulation**.
- Virgin resources are **replaced with circular materials**.
- Dignity, equity, and equality for the **people** involved in all parts of the circular value chain.

We need to know where we stand today to chart how to get to 100% Circularity by 2050. What circular activity is currently happening in the textiles and apparel industry, and where in the world is it happening? The WCTD Collection aims to answer this question by building the world’s largest digital library of circular textiles case studies. 

World Circular Textiles Day is proud to be supported by our 2022-23 Circular Hero Partners:
[Lenzing](https://www.lenzing.com/), [Texaid](https://retailsolutions.texaid.com/), [Bank & Vogue](https://www.bankvogue.com/), [Usha yarns limited](https://ushayarns.com/), [The Conduit](https://www.theconduit.com/), and [Asia Pacific Rayon](https://www.aprayon.com/en/)

## Want to contribute to the WCTD Collection? Sign up and add your circular textiles activities.





World Circular Textiles Day

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Business case

Impact on the availability of resources as well as their effect on living organisms, ecosystems, and components of the environment.

Ecological Impact

Impacts on the social fabric of the community and well-being of the individuals and families.

Social Impact

Impacts on the financial condition of a company, as well as the the economicconditions of its stakeholders and on economic systems at local, national, andglobal levels.

Economic Impact

Impact on the quantity or quality of jobs, and shifts in the labour market

Jobs

Direct and indirect effects that increase revenues or the potential for new revenues, for example from new products, customer segments, partnerships or business models

Revenue Potential

Impact on the ease of innovation, and facilitating uptake of innovations

Innovation

Reduced use of virgin materials and/or an increase of the use of secondary and bio-based materials

Reduce Material Consumption (SDG12)

Minimise waste through diversion: Instead of sending waste to landfill, it is redirected into other industrial processes for handling, treatment, recycling, recovery, or reuse in various forms. 

Minimise waste through design: At the outset of a process of project, plan and design such that there is zero waste or minimal waste during production, use, and at end of life. 

Minimise Waste (SDG12)

Producing and providing business and consumer goods and services

Goods and Services

Producing textile and leather products and processing them into apparel and accessories

Fashion and Textiles

While resources are in-use, maintain, repair and upgrade them to maximise their lifetime and give them a second life through take back strategies when applicable

Stretch the lifetime

Utilise waste streams as a source of secondary resources and recover waste for reuse and recycling

Use waste as a resource

Give products and parts another life after their end-of-use

Maximise lifetime of products after use

Reuse, repurpose, and recycle waste streams within the same industry

Valorise waste streams - closed loop

Extraction and reuse of parts from end-of-life products for use in new products

Part recovery

Transforming waste products, materials for reuse within the same industry

Closed loop upcycling

VISION:
Products and services are designed for multiple use and material value retention, with maximum positive impact.

DETAIL: 
Imagine a time when…products flow via optimal collection and distribution streams into reusable and repairable product platforms. Reuse and access models are dominant, and products are designed for multiple recirculation before biodegrading (if designed to do so), or being broken down into reusable raw materials for production. People only consume what they need. Production and consumption wastes have been fully eliminated and multifunctional, season-less and timeless fashions are the norm, yet still fulfil our human need for expression and creativity without constraint. All business models, organisations, governments and citizens play a role in maintaining a healthy, functioning circular ecosystem.

Products and Services

VISION:
People are valued and supported in an equitable, socially just and resilient society.

DETAIL:
Imagine a time when…people and communities are at the heart of any sustainable and circular system. The planet thrives, enabling us to survive with balance and abundance. People are no longer passive consumers, but proactive participants. The ‘makers’ who design, build, reprocess and recirculate products throughout the value chain are treated equally and are equitable partners in shaping and benefitting from the system. Textiles/garments can be produced and repurposed locally as well as centrally. A blend of craft methods alongside more automated production provides regionalised, multi-faceted perspectives and fulfilling livelihoods, be they high- or low-tech. Wealth gaps are minimised and dignity, equity, equality is a reality for all.

People and Society

Impacts

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Industries

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The principles of a circular economy concern designing out waste, regenerating ecosystems and keeping items in use. Decoupling the economy from material flows—improving the rate of resource productivity faster than the economic growth rate—is also a consistent guide. By evolving with the growing number of applications of circular economy principles, and consolidating these strategies across thematic areas, Circle Economy’s Key Elements Framework (KE) renders the elements of the circular economy salient and serves as a basis to derive contextual strategies and interventions. 


The Framework consists of:
- Core Elements: Activities directly handling product or material flows; and uniquely,
- Enabling Elements: those that remove obstacles for core actors.


Key elements of the circular economy

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Circle Economy's framework of strategies and activities that define the circular economy

It is 2050.  Full systems change has taken place. This wouldn’t have been possible without the immediate action and radical steps taken from 2020 onwards. Many targets had to be identified in the early 2020s and achieved by 2030 to ensure that the 2050 goal happened in full. A sense of urgency, turbo stakeholder collaboration, supportive government regulation and clear, data driven targets enabled the mindsets and systems change needed to transform to a fully circular textiles ecosystem.

A circular economics model underpins what we have created. It reflects and supports a living organism made up of makers, users and restorers, interacting across vibrant and interconnected networks. Checks and balances, alongside transparency and accountability, ensure a healthy system. Financial, environmental, and social metrics have the purpose of serving communities and the planet. There is shared ownership of profit and loss – across all three metrics – throughout the value chain.

This is what we’ve achieved over the last 30 years:

WCTD Themes

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All of 25, Ashita Singhal is the creative director and founder of Paiwand Studio, a unique design studio that upcycles textile waste and turns it into fabrics for apparel and home furnishing. Paiwand collaborates with design houses and artisans to repurpose their textile waste into meaningful textiles. They upcycle through various handcrafted techniques like handloom weaving, patchwork, knitting, embroidery and felting.

Over the course of the last year, they have been able to repurpose more than 300 kgs of textile waste and produce approximately 700 metres upcycled hand-woven fabric.



( Deep Sea Sediments, A patchwork yardage from Paiwand Studio )
How it started
“Paiwand Lagana” is a common local phrase in India which means to repair or mend. However, it holds a deeper meaning. It also means hybridisation or connection. The social enterprise started taking shape while Ashita was pursuing a degree in fashion design. She had a clear vision that she wanted to work for a cause and believed working in collaborations. During her internships, she noticed that conscious designers were saving their textile waste so that it could be re-used or upcycled, however they did not have enough time or resources to do so. She saw this as a market gap and a business opportunity for her to explore.
In her graduation project, she explored weaving with textile waste. She worked closely with artisans of Weaver’s service center and produced yardages for apparel. This project was appreciated at large and she was encouraged to take the idea forward. 

Design Inspiration & Process 
Ashita conceptualises or composes yardages taking inspiration from artists like Van Gogh, Monet, Rothko, Mondrian, Raza. Hence, there is a huge impact of art on her work. She wants to create pieces, which have an aesthetic of their own and speak volumes of the inspiration and the final outcome.

"The final outcome, the tactless and visibility of color and texture breaks from the conventional weaving norms. Though our work is dependant on warp and weft, in a way we try to build an aesthetic, which is profound in its relation to the compositions." - Ashita Singhal

The weavers working with Paiwand, they work more like artists. For them every time there is a new challenge, surface, and textiles to deal with. The process in itself requires a lot of patience and the whole process is a meditative contemplation. 
At Paiwand, they follow an exhaustive process to upcycle textile scrap. Once the textile waste arrives at the workshop, it is assorted, washed and ironed, cut into strips and joined together as per a specific design. Then the pools or bobbins are prepared for weaving. On the loom, weavers insert the prepared textile waste bobbin as weft to create the desired new textile.
Each new textile is new life, being re-created.  
Collaborations 
Each collaborative project with a designer is unique, where Ashita and her team start from understanding the designer's aesthetic, sensibilities and their ethos. This also extends to the waste that they receive from the design house - the colours, materials, fabrics etc. Unlike conventional design processes the inspiration is the textile waste itself, posing challenges and constraints, but giving birth to new possibilities.
Find a visual representation of all the collaborations/ projects that paiwand studio has done since its inception below - 
   

 Paiwand also collaborates with artisans and small-scale industries. In the past, they have collaborated with Sufiyan Khatri from Ajrakpur to repurpose the Ajrak textile waste to create stoles and jackets. Similarly, they are working with defected sari waste. They retail such collections at various multi designer stores like Vayu-Design for living (Bikaner House, Delhi), Neel Sutra (The Oberoi, Gurgaon) and Dukan (Vana Retreat, Dehradhun).
Vision of the brand
The founder's vision is to make Paiwand a one place up-cycling/recycling solution for all the textile waste needs. They are aiming to build a collaborative moment within the textile industry. Seeing textiles everywhere, from a mop to an aircraft, which further means all these industries are generating some sort of textile waste.
In the near future, they would want to collaborate with more people, reduce the carbon footprint and help creating sustainable living space for future generations.  --
Find them on Instagram here.
Photo Credits- Paiwand Studio. 

The story begins over five years ago, when House of Wandering Silk began making clothing and we couldn’t bear to throw away even the tiniest scraps of our beautiful fabric. Over the years we collected every remnant, just waiting for the right opportunity to give them a second life.Around the same time, a young student named Ashita started design school and was having a similar intuition around the byproducts of the fashion industry. Over the following years, Ashita would meet Wajahat, a teacher at her school by day and a painter by night. Eventually he’d become her business partner and creative collaborator on her new business, Paiwand Studio.In early 2019 we began our collaboration with Paiwand by dropping several car loads of our scrap fabric, representing many different textile obsessions, to their studio. Under Ashita’s guidance, every piece was sorted by fibre into cohesive color families; painstakingly cut into strips and crafted into longer lengths of flat yarn; and then hand woven on simple wooden looms according to a very intuitive color mapping sequence envisioned by Ashita.No two pieces of fabric are, or ever will be, the same, just as nature favours. With one meter of fabric taking roughly a day to weave, it’s no wonder this project has extended over eight months. The result of this laborious process is far more beautiful and captivating than one could imagine.It’s a story of of rebirth. Of imagination. And the textile as the point at which they meet.On a humid day mid-monsoon I took a trip to Noida, a sprawling industrial suburb of Delhi, to visit Ashita and Wajahat at their studio. Over steaming mugs of Kashmiri kahwa, we talked about the genesis of Paiwand, the creativity of craftsmen, and working as collaborators in the fashion industry.The Beginnings House of Wandering Silk (HOWS) — So how did you get started with Paiwand? Ashita/Paiwand Studio — I’ve always enjoyed working with limited resource materials and that’s been a point of motivation for me. I started studying design and when any assignment required material, I would ask what is the easiest thing that’s available? And the easiest thing that was always available to us, living in Delhi, was trash. The first material I tried weaving was polythene plastic bags. This was the first iteration of Paiwand.I remember in design school, we had a lot of students who weren’t from Delhi, and in conversations they would talk about the mountains, the beaches, about beauty. About growing up in a forest. And I used to think, what stories do I have to share with them and I would think about going to the malls. They would say, ‘oh we used to take baths in the river,’ and I used to think, ‘I’ve never had that sense in my life of being close to nature’. I had to ask myself what am I really close to? It’s garbage. Delhi is surrounded by garbage. You see it, you see the pollution. And that really started to make me anxious about things. I started to think this is not the life I want to be in. It really upset me and I kept thinking this shouldn’t be my story, I don’t belong here. As I was studying design, I started questioning myself, asking ‘why am I doing this?’ So whenever we came up with a new design - no matter how aesthetically pleasing it was - I’d always have to ask, ‘what is the reason behind this and what’s the cause?’ It felt like there were so many designers in the market and I decided I didn’t want to be another of the same, so I started to look for the answers to the questions that troubled me - ‘what am I doing? What is my contribution as a designer? As a Delhi-ite?’At the same time, textiles started interesting me a lot. Because fabric and textiles are the basis of fashion, I began noticing I’d base all my projects in school around textile and art. I started working on very basic and classic elements but redefining it in my own language. Giving it my own expression.HOWS — Your sense of self-awareness is really compelling and very inspiring to hear you questioning the ideas you were being presented with in school. Paiwand — We were really encouraged to ask questions. I think it’s good to be confused at times. And to be in self doubt. Not everything can be answered in one moment. But if you’re going back and reflecting on those questions and thoughts, I think that’s how you grow in life and you start finding the path you want to be on. I’m also a business graduate and we were taught about maximising profit - if you want to compete in the market at the current price level you either mass produce or reduce the cost of production. And suddenly I started to ask, ‘do I really want to be doing this after seeing what really happens to the people working behind the scenes in the fashion industry?’My answer was no. No, this is not the way I want to build a business for myself. I think whatever you’re doing, if you’re doing it for a cause, it makes you feel better and it helps you grow. Maybe there is less money, but then there is so much more satisfaction and happiness. A lot of people are making beautiful clothes. So we had to ask how can we set ourselves apart from this model.Scrap is sorted by fibre type, then into colour families and cut into narrow strips.The strips are combined with fabric glue to make long, flat yarns. These become the weft of the cloth.On Sustainability & HandloomHOWS — It feels important to me that new brands are asking and leading with questions about their values and ethics. Like Paiwand, starting from wanting to address the problems that you don’t like - in this case fabric wastage - and inventing a solution for it. Paiwand — Sustainability is a term that has been over exploited nowadays. It’s thrown around because that’s what suppliers think the consumer wants to hear. But also the problem is that the definition of sustainability is so complex to understand and even more difficult to trace what the process has been, starting from the raw material to the finished garment hanging in a store. Sustainability is about the ethics of the people running the brand. If they’re ethical then the products have a better chance at being ethical, and in turn sustainable. I think the best part about starting Paiwand is reviving handloom weaving. A lot of people told us it would be very difficult to create the kind of business we wanted: there are many weaving colonies in Delhi that have shut down. The looms are lying in shambles. Piles of dust and debris. And most of the weavers have shifted to other jobs - maybe selling fruit, working in restaurants - because they can make a better wage doing that. The weavers we have right now were either not working or had been forced to shift to other lines of work.I remember when I initially went to the weaver’s colonies to ask them to do this work, they would treat me as if I was a crazy lady who had just come up with a hobby job and someone who didn’t take herself very seriously. As if I didn’t have anything to do. They wouldn’t take me seriously. And I’d just be like okay just do it. It’s okay if it takes a day. I’ll pay, I just really want to see what happen. It requires a lot of patience for a weaver to weave this fabric.The flat yarn made from textile waste is then hand woven onto a warp of white and black cotton yarn. The warp creates a grid upon which Ashita creates intuitive and organic, yet highly precise, colour maps.HOWS — So you found it hard to convince the weavers of this idea?Paiwand — Well that’s one aspect, but for the longest time there’s always been the middle man. Weavers want to innovate, they are creative people, but they’re not usually given creative space. They’re treated like labourers rather than creators. The weavers will now tell us when ideas we have aren’t working and share their ideas for new colour selections. We take their suggestions and often times it turns out to be great for us. Our brief is always whatever you’re creating, just remember you have to use textile waste.We are satisfied because everyone who works here says it’s a happy place to work. You can see it, they’re smiling when they walk in in the morning. They’ll come up with ideas and say, ‘what if we did this?’ We always encourage it - we think why not try it, let’s see how it goes. And some of those ideas have been brilliant. Like last week one of our weavers came up with an idea to make the fabric stronger, sturdier and we said try it. We said you’re the master. We’re learning from you. It’s a participatory approach rather than us sitting on a pedestal dictating orders to them. It’s energising rather than depleting. We are not empowering them, they are empowering us. If they weren’t here, Paiwand wouldn’t be here. I think they are the backbone.HOWS — There is so much beauty contained in these textiles. After the weaving, do you ever have waste? Paiwand — We do actually. We’ve been thinking of what else to do with the smaller bits that can’t be woven. We want Paiwand to be one studio, a place where we won’t just have one idea about up-cycling but a place that has multiple techniques for recycling scrap. One of them so far, is shredding the smaller bits into yarn.The Artistic VisionHOWS — When you’re composing the scraps is the process intellectual and calculated, or intuitive and compulsive? Paiwand — Both. I haven’t studied art professionally. You may not believe it but there was a time when I used to fear colour. I felt I was not good with it. That’s why my initial work was purely black and white. It felt safe. So I started there, and eventually I even started seeing colour in black and white. I think I’ve metamorphosed, in that now I can easily work with colour.Initially, since we collaborate with other designers and weave their scraps, we wanted to work with fashion labels whose taste in colour and aesthetics we liked. But now what happens, and it’s very surprising, is that we may not like some textile but when we finish weaving their scraps, a lot of times they’re so excited, they say ‘something like this has come out of our waste’.Since we've worked so heavily with kantha fabric over the years, our Rebirth Collection - which is crafted exclusively from our scrap fabric - naturally utilises a lot of kantha waste. This adds a further textural element to our cloth: story is layered upon story. Can you see the small Kantha stitches inside the weave?HOWS — There’s something about your process of transforming scraps that could almost make even what one may subjectively feel is an “ugly” textile and make it beautiful. Part of it is certainly your skill for colour mapping, but I almost wonder if the form - the warp being a mathematically determined grid and the weft being the abstraction, the mosaic of colour - grounds the variation, the abstraction into something everyone can recognise and appreciate for it’s intrinsic beauty.Paiwand — Yeah, I think so. When you were talking about art being an influence, I would say Mondrian has been a huge influence. As well as Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Monet. Having a more post-impressionistic mindset towards the weaving.I think painting has been one of the major influences actually. And most early on, I think it was a process, an evolution, I don’t think we really had an idea what we were doing. Slowly, everything started making sense. When we started weaving we said okay let’s try using a flat strip, let’s try to keep a sense of the textile waste alive.For us aesthetics play a major role. We understand that following a sustainable business model is not going to help if, at the end of the day, the final textile is not exciting or beautiful. We’re a team of weavers, artisans, artists, designers working in synergy. I think the biggest challenge is being an artist and then having to do the business side of it.HOWS — What have you learned about that? How do you keep your creativity intact while managing all the logistics?Paiwand — It’s only been eight months, I think that question would be better answered five or six years down the line. We are on a continuous journey of learning. Learning from partners like House of Wandering Silk. I think it’s been a wonderful journey so far.Every time we collaborate with a designer there is a new set of aesthetics that we learn about. We have to learn about their brand philosophy and sensitise ourselves to the techniques they use. Again we aren’t the ones who know all about the textile crafts in India, we haven’t worked with all of them. But there could be one designer specialising in ikat, or another specialising in weaves, or like House of Wandering Silk which works so closely with kantha.There’s a lot of excitement to understanding and learning about the textile. Paiwand means “to connect"Paiwand — Sometimes people ask me why I’m collaborating with the designers instead of having my own label and even though I have a fashion design degree. They want to know why we collaborate and share our ideas. That’s been one of the biggest discussions for us. Why do we want to be a collaborator in the industry? When it comes to business, fashion is very competitive and in some way I wanted to break that scene. Paiwand, the word, means ‘to connect’. We’re trying to connect to as many people as we can who share an appreciation for slow fashion and recycling. It never made sense to us to participate in the fashion industry as a competitor. The aim is to get more people, more artisans on board. Paiwand wouldn’t be able to survive the independent production demand that comes out of so many looms, we wanted to bring people on board with us, where they can meet their own sustainable dreams for their own clientele and maybe see how it works for them. When we first started Paiwand, we had our own apprehensions about whether designers would want to collaborate with us. We needed designers to believe in the idea. Like House of Wandering Silk, to say, ‘hey, I’ll support it. Let’s do it’. We’re very thankful to all the people who’ve been a part of it and shown their trust in us.HOWS — It feels good to challenge the current business models in fashion and continue to questions why it has to work in just that one way? Ask why there can’t be multiple ways to be “successful”. To challenge those old business models from a successful standpoint is about the most creative thing I can think of.Paiwand — I believe the happiest part is when we give the yardage back to the designer and they’ll recognise all the textiles from past collections woven together. For them it’s nostalgic to see the fabric. Because it speaks to their journey, how they’ve grown or changed as designers and played with different fabrics. It becomes very exciting to go back to the designer and show them the final cloth.HOWS — I know it really excites us; every time I spot fabrics I recognise it feels really satisfying and good to see it again. Paiwand — And who says designers can’t work in collaboration, that they have to be competitors? We can always learn from our peers instead of competing with them. If someone is thinking at that level of long term value, it challenges you to become better in your own work. And as a society also. If we’re sharing our ideas, we’re building a larger ecosystem. With every collaboration we’re growing. No one can believe its only been 8 months. HOWS — It’s amazing! You guys are amazing!Paiwand — It makes me so happy that people are understanding the value of what we’re doing. People are appreciating our work for its aesthetics. For its cause. The philosophy we follow is to not necessarily buy clothes because they’re sustainable or because they’re art. You don’t have to buy something just because it’s sustainable, especially if you’re not in love with it aesthetically. You have to fall in love with a piece; and this helps our clothing last longer because it is worn for a longer time, worn with confidence and treated with love.Shop The Rebirth Collection here.

Uttar Pradesh

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Launched in 2018, Paiwand is a upcycling textile studio in Noida, India that repurposes textile waste into fabrics for apparel and home furnishing. 

Paiwand Studio

<p>Paiwand Studio is an upcycling textile company based in the Indian city of Noida. The business collaborates with different designers and textile entrepreneurs to acquire their cloth waste which they repurpose into new textiles.</p><p>Formed in 2018, they have repurposed more than 1500 kg of textile waste till date. The aim of the company is to develop a collaboration within the textile industry for those who appreciate slow fashion, while supporting local artisans and handloom weavers.</p>