Sustainable Sourcing
India has an extensive textile & apparel industry, and producing new garments for fast fashion brands results in waste by the truck-loads, and a serious environmental impact. Cotton growing especially consumes enormous amounts of water. An estimated 15,000 liters of water is utilized to produce 1Kg of fabric, that makes less than five t-shirts.
Pre-consumer waste is constantly being generated from manufacturing of yarn, fabrics & garments, and about 15-24% of all textiles produced in the fashion industry ends up in post-industrial waste.
Interested in what happens to waste that is generated from this industry, Harley Apparels India decided to develop a collection of recycled cotton for more socially conscious brands.
Dedication to the idea and technical expertise of our manufacturing partners put together we introduced the idea of converting cotton waste into yarn, through the process of ring spinning. This is a system that produces finer counts of yarn. Ring spinning works efficiently, using a longer staple length of fiber. Whereas recycled cotton fiber is typically of shorter staple since it comes from breaking of old yarns & fabrics. To overcome this, we blended recycle cotton with a carrier fiber that is long staple recycled polyester. This blending gave added strength to our fabrics and at the same time improved a softer hand-feel. It also allowed us to make lighter weight fabrics for summer season as well as heavier weight double counts for the winter.
Recycling cotton helps reduce the need for virgin materials while also keeping waste out of landfills, thus limiting the environmental impact of textiles.
We feel that by innovating in the way we recycle our waste; we can create new fabrics that are sustainable and meet the requirements of aesthetics and functionality without environmental destruction.
We make mistakes because we are human, Learning from them is importantso we can avoid them in the future. We believe that it is not necessary to create waste, however it is our responsibility to use it. We believe being sustainable also means to be economical and viable. We believe sustainability is the norm, What sets us apart is the beauty in the products we create.