The price of cheap fabric is often paid by everyone.
A few weeks ago, early one morning, I came across this pile of fabric waste behind Commercial Street in Bengaluru.
Commercial Street wakes up to shoppers, food, fashion and the familiar promise of getting a garment stitched to your measurements, sometimes in an hour. Choose your fabric. Explain your design. Pay. Walk away with something new.
By the next morning, only garbage remains.
Little bits of fabric, colourful enough to look like confetti but with none of the joy. This was just one pile, on one street, on one morning. Imagine the same scene repeated across the city every day.
Bengaluru generates around 220 tonnes of textile waste daily; that's a staggering 10 lorry-loads of fabric waste. According to available data, BBMP spends 4-5 rupees a kilo to collect, transport, and discard this waste; that’s 8 to 10 lakhs a day! And we all pay for it.
The irony is, people buy polyester because it’s cheap. But cheap is the price at the billing counter. The real bill arrives later, addressed to the land we stand on, the air we breathe, and the city that has to clean up after us. Cheap polyester fabric remnants never die, even after burial or burning.
Cheap is a loan. Nature charges interest.
Now, before I sound too holy, let me confess. Khadi gets wasted too.
Walk into a Khadi Bhandar. A customer spots a small stain and asks for that part to be cut away. Where does that bit go? A bolt of fabric comes in at about 10.5 metres. Someone buys 10. What becomes of the leftover piece? What about surplus stock sitting in godowns? Fabric damaged in storage? Who is responsible? Who even keeps count?
Mostly, no one. These bits and pieces of khadi slip through the gap between the loom and the landfill because they are the wrong size at the wrong time.
The problem is that we have become remarkably good at making waste disappear from our sight: out of the shop, out of the godown, out of our homes, out of our streets and eventually out of our city.
But out of sight is not out of existence.
A cut piece is not the end of a fabric. It is an unfinished sentence.
At Metaphor Racha, we have been quietly finishing those sentences for a while now.
Every five or six months, 150 to 200 kilos of khadi arrive at our workshop. Surplus lengths, cut-aways, stained ends, bruised bits, gathered from Khadi Bhandars in Bengaluru and a few towns in North Karnataka. Not free, by the way. We pay for them. Rescue has a price tag too.
This April, the latest lot came in.
First, our tailors sat with every single piece. Checking for damage. Hunting for stains. Measuring. Packing. Then everything went for a thorough wash, because second chances deserve a fresh start.
Then my part began. I sorted the fabric by colour. Reds and maroons here. Greens and blues there. Yellows and oranges in their own corner. It looks like child’s play, but it isn’t.
This is not a case of throwing everything together and hoping for the best. The pieces were joined with contrast thread, flat-finished and neat, until scraps slowly grew into full bolts of cloth. Fragments became fabric. Leftovers became length.
It may look random, but nothing about it is. Which colours sit together. How big each piece should be. The shape of every join. Which cloth suits which design. Which trim finishes it. These judgements come from years of figuring out what works and what doesn't.
Now a confession that makes my accountant wife dizzy every time. Sometimes, buying new fabric is cheaper than recovering, sorting, washing, joining and preparing leftover fabric for another life. Upcycling is not automatically the economical option. It takes time, thought and a fair amount of patience.
The fabric was discarded. The possibilities weren't.
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