Meet Women Who Are Reducing The Load Of Textile Waste By Upcycling

Meet Sujata Chatterjee, founder of Twirl.Store - an award-winning social initiative that aims to reduce fabric waste and empower women. Based in Kolkata, Twirl.Store collects unwanted clothing and fabrics from individuals, housing societies, and organisations all over India and repurposes them. The mission is to transform "waste to wonder" while also providing a source of income for rural women, or as they describe it, "twirl your trash".

The clothes collected are either given to those in need or upcycled and put back into circulation in a new form. For upcycling, clothes are segregated by type and style of fabric - cotton, denim, silk, kantha and embroidery. The clothes then go through a process of steaming, which is done to sanitise and clean out all bacteria, dust and other external dirt. The clothes are dried in the sun, which also works to remove strong odours and make them smell much fresher.

The all-important stage of stitching something old into something new is where Twirl.Store's range of 200 products takes shape. These products are all one-of-a-kind, unique, single-piece products, with no two pieces alike. They are all available for purchase on their website, they are shipped all over India. And, you can even return the clothing items (within nine months of the date you first ordered them) when you are done using them.

In the six years since it was founded, Twirl.Store has collected more than a staggering 1.2 lakh kilos of clothes and fabric, distributed more than 30,000 kilos of clothes and essentials, and upcycled more than 90,000 kilos of fabric into products.
Twirl.Store has empowered over 200 women and in so doing contributed to many of the United Nation's (UN) Sustainable Development Goals including gender equality, economic growth, reduced inequalities and responsible consumption.

Headquartered in Kolkata, Twirl.Store works with rural communities in the districts surrounding Kolkata, such as South 24 Parganas, through their rural centres. In fact, there are more than 25 such centres where local women are taught the skills of cutting, stitching and preparing the cloth which will then be transformed by them into various products. This is empowering the women, giving them basic livelihood, improving their standard of living, and giving them a sense of purpose and belonging.

Another woman trying to reduce fabric waste is a 45-year-old artist and advocate of zero waste, Medha Bhatt from Vadodara. Medha is a trained designer who has been threading her journey by advocating zero waste and making art with fabric discards. She uses Applique technique - a sewing technique in which fabric patches are layered on a foundation fabric and stitched - to talk about the environment and waste.

The colour palette of the environment and the changes it has undergone transformed Medha's thinking about how she selects discards and applies them. It can take Medha hours, days even, to look for the right color and the right fabric from the bag of fabric scraps she has collected from nearby tailor shops and sometimes from neighboring homes.
For Medha this is simple math - either you look at how much you buy or you figure out how are you going to discard, a responsible way of loving and living with the planet.