The global competition in textile circular economy is shifting from 'how to recycle' to 'how to sort'. At the Textiles Recycling Expo held in Brussels from June 24-25, 2025, the first-ever 'Textile Collection and Sorting Award' was presented to Green Worms Eco Solutions, a social enterprise based in Kozhikode, Kerala, India. The award highlights a long-overlooked bottleneck in the textile recycling value chain: upstream collection and sorting efficiency is now the critical factor determining whether the entire loop can function economically.
The Revaluation of Sorting
Green Worms Eco Solutions was founded in 2014 by Jabir Karat, whose background involved working with informal ragpickers in Mumbai. Over the past decade, the enterprise has built a collection network across Kerala, combining community drop-off points and municipal partnerships to manually and mechanically sort discarded garments and industrial waste by fiber composition, color, and contamination level.
Sorting determines the quality and cost of downstream regenerated fibers. Currently, less than 15% of global textile waste is recycled, with the main bottleneck not being recycling technology but the inability to efficiently classify textiles at the front end. Green Worms' model proves that in regions with relatively low labor costs, community-driven collection combined with graded sorting can significantly improve the supply quality of recyclable textiles.
Ripple Effects Upstream
The award's location in Brussels signals that European policymakers and brands are acknowledging the limits of domestic recovery systems. The EU's upcoming Waste Framework Directive requires member states to separately collect textile waste from 2025, but Europe lacks sufficient sorting infrastructure and faces high labor costs.
Green Worms' recognition sends a clear message to the global textile supply chain: future cross-border flows of textile waste will no longer be simple 'scrap exports' but 'recycled raw material trade' based on standardized sorting. For major textile producers like China, India, and Pakistan, this presents both a challenge and an opportunity. China's current textile recovery system remains dominated by individual scrap dealers and low-end downcycling, lacking standardized sorting networks comparable to Green Worms.
Lessons for China's Textile Recycling Industry
China produces approximately 26 million tonnes of textile waste annually, with a recycling rate of only about 20%. Compared with Green Worms, the key problem is not a shortage of recyclers but the coarseness of the sorting stage—most old clothes are downgraded into filling materials or industrial wipes, with very little achieving 'fiber-to-fiber' closure.
- Lack of standardized sorting: No uniform national standards for fiber composition, color, or contamination level lead to unstable regenerated fiber quality.
- Loose community collection networks: Most recovery relies on itinerant peddlers, lacking enterprise-level collection systems.
- Misaligned policy incentives: Subsidies mostly go to downstream recycling processing rather than upstream collection and sorting.
Green Worms' case demonstrates that a social enterprise model can make low-margin collection and sorting sustainable. China's coastal textile clusters—such as Keqiao in Shaoxing and Nantong—can adopt its lightweight model of 'community collection points plus centralized sorting centers', partnering with local governments and brands to build recovery networks.