Ease of Doing Business for MSMEs: Mumbai-based Kapil Bhatia has been in the textile sector for more than 20 years, still he hardly knew about ways to reduce carbon emissions by the clothing industry. According to the World Economic Forum, the fashion apparel industry worldwide produces 10 per cent of all humanity’s carbon emissions, dries up water sources, and pollutes rivers and streams. It was only in early 2019 when Bhatia dug deeper into the problem and realised how recycled plastic could be one of the ways for the sector to shed some emissions or waste generated every year. 

Most plastics live forever. They break down into millions of tiny particles but never gets decomposed. According to the UK-based Allen Macarthur Foundation, which works on ideas of building a circular economy, there could be more plastic than fish in the oceans by 2050. It stresses on changing the way humans design, use, and reuse plastics. 

“I had heard about recycled synthetic fabric but didn’t have much idea about it. In 2019, during a uniform and corporate wear expo in Mumbai, a visitor asked me about making T-shirts, track pants, trousers and blazers out of recycled plastic. While I told him that we could look at manufacturing them but I had to first figure out what it entailed. I found that if you recycle a PET bottle, it goes back to its raw form of plastic pellets. From plastic pellets you can make recycled polyester fibre,” Bhatia, who has been making uniforms and corporate wear since 2000, told Financial Express Online. 

To cater to the opportunity of recycled synthetic fabric, Bhatia launched his direct-to-consumer (D2C) recycled fabric brand UNIREC under the parent entity Cambridge Textiles India to manufacture blazers, trousers, sleeveless jackets, and T-shirts from recycled PET bottles. The company focuses on stitching the apparel and have outsourced the recycling part. The recycled fabric is sourced from third-party manufacturers who procure yarn from yarn manufacturers who are further connected to multiple recyclers of plastic bottles into the recycled fibre.

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Every garment made by UNIREC helps recycle 8-10 PET bottles of one litre, said Bhatia as he explained the size of the problem. “In India, around 1 lakh PET bottles are used every minute, of which up to 90 per cent bottles are recycled while around 10,000 bottles end up at landfill sites and water bodies. A pile of these waste bottles would take less than 21 minutes to grow taller than Statue of Unity which is 182 meters high,” said Bhatia. 

While these mountains of trash should cause panic among stakeholders, Bhatia claimed awareness to be the biggest challenge restricting the recycled fabric segment from becoming mainstream and thereby helping in reducing the carbon emissions of the garment sector. 

Apart from retail, UNIREC has started supplying recycled fabric uniforms to corporates. It is currently working with IDBI Bank for a section of its employees while orders from a pharma company and a sports body are in pipeline. Bhatia has also pitched the fabric to its existing over 150 customers – Indian Navy, PVR, Starbucks, McDonald’s, and others — in its traditional fabric business. “If businesses adopt recycled fabric, then the least they would do is offset their daily consumption of plastic in their offices such as disposables,” he added.

While UNIREC was launched right before Covid struck in early 2020, it wasn’t operational until late last year. The company currently makes 2,000 recycled garments every month that are retailed via its online portal. UNIREC would now expand through the e-commerce channel. On the corporate side, it aims to add over 150 brands to its portfolio. “This year we are targeting to sell at least 1 lakh garments. As of now, the revenue is less than a crore but we would easily be ramping up to around Rs 4 crore by end of 2022,” said Bhatia. 

In order to phase out single-use plastic by 2022, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change had notified the Plastic Waste Management Amendment Rules, 2021, in August last year. The rules prohibited single-use plastic items with low utility and high littering potential. These items included earbuds with plastic sticks, plastic sticks for balloons, plastic flags, candy sticks, ice-cream sticks, thermocol for decoration, plates, cups, glasses, cutlery such as forks, spoons, knives, straw, trays, wrapping or packing films around sweet boxes, invitation cards, and cigarette packets, plastic or PVC banners less than 100 micron, and stirrers.  

According to a statement by the ministry, India had piloted a resolution on addressing single-use plastic products pollution in the 4th United Nations Environment Assembly held in 2019. The Indian textile and apparel market was pegged at $100 billion in FY19 and is likely to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 12 per cent to reach the $220-billion mark by 2025-26, as per India Brand Equity Foundation.