The two-story cutting room at Star Wipers fills with a soft, mechanical hum. Roughly twenty middle-aged women and a handful of men stand at workstations circled by six-foot-tall plastic bins full of used clothes and sheets. In the middle, Amity Bounds, one of the last professional American rag cutters, grabs a pink hoodie with a sparkly print across the chest that reads JUSTICE LOVE JUSTICE. Like her co-workers, she stands six inches from a tea-saucer-size blade that spins at chest-level, behind a guard with three small gaps. With a butcher’s precision, Bounds slips the hoodie into one of the gaps, cuts off the hood, then slices it twice so that it lays flat. Next, she cuts off the zipper and tosses it into a waste bin; she cuts off the sparkly print (“it’s abrasive and no good for wiping anything”) and tosses it, too. The remaining sweatshirt offers little resistance; she slices once, twice, three times, transforming it from garment to rags.
“It took me a year to learn all of the products and learn to cut them,” Bounds volunteers as she tosses the sweatshirt fillets into a barrel filled with fresh-cut rags.
“How long have you worked here?” I ask.
“Ten years.”
Few consumers, anywhere, have heard of the wiping rag industry. But it bails out everyone. Approximately 30 percent of the textiles recovered for recycling in the United States are converted to wiping rags, according to Secondary Materials and Recycled Textiles: the Association of Wiping Materials, Used Clothing, and Fiber Industries (SMART), a U.S.-based trade association. And that’s probably an undercount. The 45 percent of recycled textiles that are reused as apparel eventually wear out, too. When they do, they’re also bound for the wiping rag companies.
Nobody counts the number of wiping rags manufactured in the United States and elsewhere every year. But anyone who knows the industry acknowledges that the numbers are in the many billions, and growing. The oil and gas industry, with its network of pipes and valves, requires hundreds of millions of rags per year to wipe leaks, lubricants, and hands. Hotels, bars, and restaurants need billions of rags to wipe everything from glasses to tabletops to railings. Auto manufacturers need rags to wipe down cars as they come off the assembly line; repair garages need rags to clean off dipsticks after oil changes; car washes need them to apply wax. Painters need them to wipe brushes, spills, and drips. And the healthcare industry demands endless numbers of rags to keep hospitals and clinics clean and sanitary. If these businesses can’t reuse clothes and sheets, they’ll opt for disposable paper towels, synthetic wipes, and new cloth rags, complete with all their environmental and financial costs. (For years, the disposable-wiper industry has marketed its throwaway wipers as an efficient, modern upgrade from traditional rags.a) Decades before environmental organizations and governments encouraged reuse, recycling, and circular economies, the wiping rags industry had mastered the art.
Todd Wilson, the wiry, fifty-eight-year-old vice president of Star Wipers, stands beside me, watching Amity with rapt attention. “Did you see how many multiple cuts she did?” he asks with excitement. “Every time she runs it through the blade”—he stops to compose himself and then declares loudly: “Our competition doesn’t do that!” Todd is one of the wiping rag industry’s most passionate boosters. And Star Wipers, located in Newark, Ohio, forty miles east of Columbus, is one of the last American companies that—in his estimation—does rags “the right way.”
Like most people who don’t make money from cutting rags, I long assumed that the “right way” was how it was done at home. My mother would take old T-shirts and tear them into rags for polishing furniture and wiping down sinks. Our house wasn’t unique. For most of human history, rag making has been an act of household thrift so common that few consumers think of it as recycling, sustainable, or green.
What transformed this act of household thrift into an industrial process were the factories and machines that created the industrial revolution. Maintaining and repairing those machines required rags to apply or wipe up grease and oil. In industrializing England, the most abundant source of those rags was the growing surplus of used, unwanted textiles made by those very machines. An industry emerged to collect and deliver them to the rag makers, and by the late nineteenth century, British rag makers were as industrialized as the textile mills, with buying networks as complex as those used to distribute clothing to the growing retail industry. Rag making soon went global: by 1929, the United States was the leading rag-making nation, home to at least twenty-six wiping rag companies with industrial laundries that ensured the cleanest rags possible. Thousands of people were employed in rag-cutting factories.
The need for rags hasn’t gone away over the last century. Star Wipers has 110,000 square feet of space in Newark, much of it devoted to warehousing the rags that it packages and ships around the United States to distributors who know—intimately—what kind of user needs what kind of rag. Still, it’s a labor-intensive business, and as with textile manufacturing, much of the industry has migrated to Asia over the last three decades. Those who remain, like Star Wipers, need good reasons to stay in the United States. “It’s about quality,” Todd tells me. With as many as twenty-six rag cutters working at one time in Newark and another thirteen in the company’s North Carolina plant, Star Wipers is likely the largest U.S. rag cutter left (there are companies that distribute more rags than Star Wipers, but most of those rags are imported).
Yet, despite the vast global demand for stuff to wipe stuff, most consumers have no answer if someone asks, “Who will be last to use your hoodie?” The end of clothes has become nearly as mysterious as the end of life itself.
Todd Wilson and I sit across from each other at a long conference table in a windowless conference room. It’s lunchtime, and we’re eating sandwiches and chips from the Subway up the road. Behind me is a door that leads out to a giant laundry machine that looks a bit like a giant green metal caterpillar. It handles multiple individual loads at once, without mixing them. And not all those loads are used clothes. “The washer exists to make a new T-shirt feel like an old one,” Todd explains. This makes sense when I think about my own laundry. A new cotton T-shirt, generally, doesn’t feel as soft as one that I’ve had and washed for years. “Now think about it,” Todd says. “That soft T-shirt is going to do a better job of absorbing liquid than one you’ve just pulled out of the pack.”
As a result, buyers of clothes intended as rags typically pay more for used T-shirts than new ones. And when they can’t get used ones, they spend money to launder new ones so that they feel like used ones. For example, every three weeks Star Wipers receives a load of castoffs from apparel makers in Bangladesh that must be run through the washer before cutting.
“That’s upside down to me,” I concede.
“You haven’t spent much time around rags,” Todd says with a smile.
Rags have been in Todd Wilson’s family since the 1970s. Back then, his father, a manufacturer of components for card-filing systems, acquired a small rag company that became his dominant holding. In 1998, Todd and a partner formed their own rag company, named Star Wipers, and in 2005, it and Todd’s father’s company were acquired by the same buyer. Today, Star Wipers has 160 employees, additional operations in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, and a rag sourcing network that extends from Brownsville, Texas, to Kandla, India. In 2017, it sold around fifteen million pounds of rags, primarily in the United States.
Todd attributes the company’s success to two factors. First, he cares. As he says to me repeatedly during a several-hour-long visit, “I love rags!” Second, he is a stickler for quality. “A rag is a tool,” he explains. “No different than a screwdriver. Different tools for different applications. You have to make the tool and make it well.” A janitorial service doesn’t want to buy rags with sequins that scratch the furniture; an oil and gas company doesn’t want a polyester rag that’s going to discharge static electricity and set off an explosion; a maid service doesn’t want a colored rag that’s going to bleed dye onto a countertop. Lately, Todd finds that ensuring quality is getting harder. Wilson pulls out a copy of the January 1963 issue of The Bulletin, the official publication of the National Association of Wiping Cloth Manufacturers (NAWCM). Toward the end is a full page devoted to “Specifications for Purchase of Rags for Conversion into Wiping Cloths.” There are eighteen specifications by grade, including ones for White Wipers, Colored Wipers, Underwear Wipers, Mixed Wipers, and “Blue Overalls and Pants (Blue Denim)”:
Shall consist of 100% cotton material up to 12 oz. per sq. yd. Minimum area of pants leg when opened shall be 2 sq. ft. with a minimum width of 12 inches. Shall be free of coveralls and jackets. Shall be free of greasy, oily, painted, cement stock and skeletons.
The good news is that skeletons are no longer a threat to turn up in clothes purchased for wiping rags. The bad news is that the days of recycled 100 percent cotton wiping rags are pretty much over, and so are the days when wiping rag manufacturers could rely on industry specifications. The problem is that clothes and textiles simply aren’t as well made as they used to be. A shirt that falls apart after a few washes can’t be transformed into a rag suitable for wiping down a freshly washed car or a restaurant table. Cheap fast fashion isn’t just hurting thrift shops; it’s hastening a garment’s trip to the landfill or garbage incinerator.
“Go try to buy a hundred percent cotton shirt today,” Todd says with exasperation. “Even when it says ‘a hundred percent cotton,’ you can’t be sure.” This isn’t idle conspiracy mongering. In recent years, manufacturers have incorporated more and more polyester into clothes to meet consumer demand for ever-cheaper clothing. But they haven’t always done so honestly. Fabrics labeled 100 PERCENT COTTON often aren’t; and cotton-polyester blends often contain more polyester than the tag claims. Star Wipers first noticed the change in the millions of pounds of linens it purchased from laundries serving healthcare facilities. Sheets and blankets that used to be cotton-polyester blends were turning up as 100 percent polyester. That’s a problem. “A hundred percent polyester wiping rag is not going to do the same thing as a poly-cotton blend,” Wilson explains to me. “It won’t absorb as well.” That’s the least of it. Polyester might melt in the presence of certain solvents, heat, or—worst of all—emit static electricity.
At Star Wipers, a sorting and grading operation pulls the all-polyester blankets before they’re cut and packaged for customers. But back in 1963, those blends wouldn’t have made it through the factory gate. The NAWCM’s “Specifications for Purchase of Rags” specifically prohibited “silk, wool, rayon, and other synthetics” from rags purchased as wipers because of absorbency concerns. Today, just as clothing consumers are willing to accept lower quality in exchange for lower prices, so too are many wiper buyers. Todd tells me that many customers have accommodated themselves to cotton-poly blends. But not all of them: “Today if people can’t find what they want in a reclaimed wiper, they’ll look to a new one.” Paper towels are always an option; so are synthetic towels that offer greater absorbency than reclaimed poly-cotton wipers. It’s a quirk of the global economy that the most direct beneficiaries of the rise of fast fashion might be paper towel manufacturers.
Todd loves rags made from reclaimed textiles. But he can’t simply ignore the declining quality of used textiles. So, in recent years, Star Wipers has started to manufacture a new, 100 percent cotton wiping rag from yarn grown and manufactured in North Carolina. “We can follow it from field to here,” he tells me. The environmental impact of that new rag is steep compared with that of a reclaimed one (growing cotton is highly water intensive). But that’s the price of a lower price.
Star Wipers’ 100 percent cotton rag is known as the STB—short for Simply the Best—and around the wiping rag industry, that is a widely acknowledged statement of fact. “It’s not our biggest seller by any means,” says Wilson. “But if a customer wants that consistency and is willing to pay the premium for it, we make it available.” It’s not good enough; it’s as good as new.
Morning traffic fades as Nohar Nath’s driver navigates the leafy streets of South Mumbai. In the near distance I see the spindly glamour of Victoria Station, the city’s landmark train depot. The car stops just short of it and waits as we exit in front of the Empire Building, a handsome and prestigious colonial-era office building.
Nohar is forty-five, tall, lean, and handsome. He springs up the stairs, showing hints of the athleticism that earned him a spot on India’s national golf team in his teens. He could have turned professional, he tells me. “But I was honest with myself. I would’ve been one of those guys missing the odd cut and finishing fifteenth or twentieth or twenty-fifth. It wouldn’t have been enough to satisfy my ego.” Instead, he earned an MBA, spent two years as an international banker, and joined the Kishco Group, the eighty-year-old family textile-trading business. The India operations are based in four offices at the Empire Building; it also has offices in Bangladesh, China, and the United Arab Emirates.
We slip into a narrow, windowless conference room, and an employee enters with milk tea. Nohar leans back in an office chair and quickly acknowledges that life as a banker is more prestigious than life as a used-textile trader. “I’ve had situations in the industry—I might buy waste worth a million dollars. And somebody might buy virgin raw materials from some guy for ten thousand dollars. But that guy who buys virgin product for ten thousand dollars is far more important psychologically in their mind than the guy buying waste for a million dollars.”
The Kishco Group was founded in 1938 and over the decades grew into a global trader of textile products and waste. These days, it buys used textiles from Goodwills and other charities, thrift store chains, and graders across North America and Europe, and resells them around the world. Nohar knows Mississauga; he has entertaining stories about doing business in Mozambique. He is an occasional speaker at recycling conventions, and for good reason: On average, Kischo trades around two thousand shipping containers full of textiles—mostly waste—per year. “It becomes more like a commodity business,” he says. “We’re just paying for it and getting paid for it.”
Later, Nohar invites me for lunch at the Bombay Gymkhana, an exclusive members-only athletic club that dates back to 1875 and the headiest, wealthiest days of the British Raj. It’s a throwback: the bar and dining room face a neatly manicured ground used for cricket, rugby, and soccer, and guests cast lazy glances at the groundskeepers as they prepare the facility for a weekend tournament. “My family’s membership extends back decades,” Nohar tells me. “I’d come here after school and play sports, which is how I became so good.”
Nohar directs my attention to the crowded, bustling streets beyond the placid fields and fences of the Gymkhana. Clothing stalls extend for at least a quarter mile down the opposite side of the street. Some clothing looks standardized and new, some is fake (the Real Madrid jerseys, certainly so), and much is the telltale hodgepodge sold by used-clothing vendors around the world. “We call it Fashion Street,” he says with a wry smile. “Vendors mix used with the new, and nobody knows the difference.”
India has a long, fraught relationship with secondhand clothing. The country’s textile and apparel manufacturers spent decades lobbying to keep it out of the country for fear that lower-income Indians would prefer cheap used garments to new (they do if the price is competitive). Still, Fashion Street is filled with imported secondhand garments, and if those don’t suit a buyer, there are dozens of other places in Mumbai where imported secondhand clothes can be purchased. They’re smuggled through ports around the country and inducted into a complex network of buyers and sellers just below the surface of India’s formal economy.
Yet, in a curious twist of trade, India’s absolute prohibition on imported secondhand clothes has a notable loophole. For decades, India has granted sixteen companies the right to import secondhand clothes into Kandla, a port town of fifteen thousand people located five hundred miles northwest of Mumbai. Thanks to those licenses, Kandla is now one of the world’s biggest importers of secondhand clothes (and quite possibly the biggest).
But there’s a catch.
To ensure that Kandla’s clothes don’t compete against new, domestically manufactured clothes, the Indian government requires that every garment that arrives in Kandla depart from Kandla. As a result, Kandla has become a global hub for the grading, processing, and re-export of clothes. The city’s handful of hotels are filled with North American and European exporters, and African importers. Indian brokers move between them.
In another curious twist of trade, the prohibition of trading Kandla’s clothes into India has a spacious loophole. According to the law, “mutilated” clothes, which can’t be worn and can’t be sold as garments, can be sent northeast to Panipat, the town that Abdul Majid Moledina of Used Clothing Exports in Mississauga was eager for me to visit. Located fifty miles north of Delhi, Panipat has been for three decades the place where unwanted woolen clothes from the world’s wealthy countries go after nobody wants to wear them anymore. That’s a lot of clothes. Unlike summer clothes, which flow to developing countries in warm climates, winter clothes typically lack a reuse market. According to Nohar, Panipat at its peak could import close to a thousand shipping containers per month of secondhand woolen clothes. “You will see,” Nohar tells me as we eat. “The business is changing. In a few years, Panipat as we know it won’t exist anymore.”
In developed countries like the United States and Japan, the recycling bin has become a comfortable counterpart to the trash bin. Bottles and cans go in one; plastic wrappers, broken dishes, and paper towels soaked with spills go in the other. Most Americans, like most Japanese and Europeans, don’t complain about the sorting process and have even come to think of it as a civic duty. The few communities—mostly in the United States—that have added textiles to their curbside recycling programs have found that residents generally give their shirts away as easily as they give away their beer cans.
It wasn’t always this way, of course. Because clothes and other textiles were scarce and expensive, traders thrived by bartering and trading them. But in the early nineteenth century, traders encountered a demand-side problem: the woolen clothes being manufactured on industrial looms throughout Europe couldn’t be easily reused once their upwardly mobile owners didn’t want them anymore. Unlike cotton and linen, which are ideal for making paper and stuffing cushions and—in wartime—bullet casings, wool has short, coarse fibers that are ideal for nothing but their original use. In a sense, they were the fast fashion of the early nineteenth century—useless and growing in abundance.
One solution was to grind up the used wool for use as fertilizer (it’s an organic product, after all). But those who wanted to reuse wool as wool fabric had to wait until 1813, when Benjamin Law of Batley, England, devised a way to remake it into a cheap, coarse fabric that came to be known as “shoddy.” The process is straightforward and familiar to anyone who’s ever pulled apart a failed piece of knitting: rip it up and reuse the fibers in a new garment. Law developed processes to do this on an industrial scale, and soon shoddy was found in low-cost blankets and other garments marketed to the poor and—significantly—the military.
For the next century, shoddy was a highly profitable business, especially when supplies of virgin wool were short during wartime. By the late nineteenth century, trade in waste woolen clothing had gone global, with much of it flowing to the shoddy mills of northern England and the industrializing East Coast of the United States. But shoddy was not destined to remain an Anglo-American industry for long.
“In 1981 Panipat was just coming up,” Nohar Nath tells me as we sit in the back seat of a car driving us from Delhi’s airport to visit some of Kishco’s clients in Panipat. “Just a small town with some hand-loom factories coming up, and some home furnishing factories coming up. And people just experimenting with the idea of recycling.”
At the time, Prato, Italy, was where most of the world’s shoddy was made. The industry had moved there before World War II, attracted by cheap labor and the region’s history of working with wool. But Asia was starting to emerge as a textile-making rival, and several savvy Mumbai entrepreneurs saw a future for recycled textiles in India. The Indian business started in Mumbai, and labor pressures—strikes and rising wages—pushed it north to low-cost Panipat.
Because of labor pressures, Kischo, which had been a yarn manufacturer for decades, sold off its yarn making business in 1981. But it still had customers who wanted wool. So rather than leave them in search of new sources, Kishco fulfilled their orders with wool from other mills, many of which were moving to Panipat. It was a fortuitous shift. “We could take an order from our regular buyers and place the order with Factory A, B, C, X, Y, Z,” Nohar explains. “And we didn’t have any of the problems associated with owning a factory.”
As Panipat’s shoddy mills grew, so too did the need for a used-clothing supply to feed them. India, a low-income country, didn’t waste nearly enough clothing to feed Panipat’s mills. So Panipat’s mills asked Kishco if the company could find used woolen clothes abroad and import them. Nohar’s father contacted embassies and followed up in person at sources of used clothing in the wealthy developed world. Soon, waste textiles once bound for Prato or the dump were making their way to Panipat. At its peak, in the mid-2000s, Panipat had perhaps six hundred factories making shoddy, and it was—and still is—the biggest recycler of wool clothing in the world.
But it’s not a business that lasts, no matter where it’s located. The problem is straightforward: nobody really likes shoddy. It’s coarse, it smells musty, and the number of colors and patterns it can hold are limited (and drab). For years, the leading consumers of Panipat’s shoddy were disaster-relief agencies like the Red Cross, which purchased shoddy blankets for use in relief operations following earthquakes and other disasters. It’s been a spectacularly good business. In the early 2010s, Panipat’s manufacturers were making one hundred thousand blankets per day, roughly 80 percent of which were exported for use in disasters. The remainder were sold either to the Indian military or to consumers as the “poor man’s blanket.” But that’s no longer the case.
In the mid-2000s, Indian incomes were increasing and low-income Indians were in a position to buy something better than shoddy. Around the same time, Chinese exporters of petroleum-based polar fleece entered the Indian market with blankets that felt, looked, and smelled better than shoddy. The fleece blankets were also durable and lightweight, making them ideal for relief operations and home use alike. They were also cheap. Over the last decade the price of a Chinese polar fleece blanket imported into India dropped from around $7.50 to roughly $2.50. “Compare that to a two-dollar [shoddy] blanket,” Nohar says with a shrug. “The potential client goes to a store and naturally prefers virgin.”
The dusty urban hustle that is Panipat spreads out before us, and—as if to avoid it—the highway vaults over the town. Beneath the overpass, traffic barely moves, jammed by unsynchronized stoplights that stay red for long minutes. Small shops line both sides of the street; at least half are devoted to selling mobile phones and service. Everything is shades of gray, except for the flashes of color provided by the occasional truckload of baled used clothes.
We turn from paved roads to dirt roads cratered with deep potholes that—if not avoided—could disable a vehicle. Factories are everywhere, but the gates are closed and there are few signs of what goes on beyond the ten-foot-high concrete walls that surround them. Children play in front of some of them; parents sit on stoops, chatting; and occasionally a pair of women sort through a pile of clothes.
Around a dusty corner our car stops in front of a steel gate. The driver honks the horn, and a moment later the gate slowly rolls open to reveal a courtyard filled with a rainbow of color. There are piles of blue woolen clothes, and piles of orange; piles of red woolen clothes, and many, many piles of black. Scattered amid the piles are women draped in saris brighter than the waste, sorting through sweaters, blankets, and bolts of unused cloth. They are surrounded on three sides by warehouses and the humming of machinery.
Nohar gestures for me to follow him through the office door, where we’re met by a male secretary who leads us into the office of the rotund company director, Ramesh Goyal. He wears a wool sweater beneath a flannel sport jacket; his arms are crossed, and he’s crabby because of production problems. The secretary nods at something said in a language I don’t understand and rushes out.
“Ramesh Knitting Mills is a very old customer,” Nohar says by way of introduction. But Goyal isn’t interested in talking about the history or the future of shoddy. He likes fleece. In 2016, he installed a polar fleece line that accounts for a growing percentage of his overall production.
Nohar folds his hands into his lap. “Polar fleece is replacing wool,” he says to me, more than to Goyal. “And that’s a big problem for us. Polar fleece can’t be recycled into new fibers, and it makes a terrible wiper. No absorbency.”
Goyal doesn’t care. Prior to installing fleece production, Ramesh Knitting Mills made 7,000 kilograms of yarn and blankets per day. Two years later, its overall production has increased to 12,000 kilograms per day. Of that, 8,000 kilograms is new polyester fleece made from petrochemicals; the remainder is shoddy yarn and blankets made from winter clothes. “Many Indian companies realize that demand has arrived for virgin,” Goyal explains.
It’s an environmentalist’s heartache. But there’s not much that an environmentalist can do to change the economics. A growing excess of used clothes in cold-weather countries combined with a drop in demand in Panipat has changed the business of used wool. Nohar says that ten to fifteen years ago the price of secondhand wool hung around fifty cents per kilogram. Today it’s fallen to fifteen cents per kilogram, with no reason to believe that the demand, or the price, will ever rise again. Soon, that will pose a problem to exporters of secondhand wool clothes already drowning in an excess of supply. “Watch—in two to three years, recyclers in Western countries will pay people to take clothes,” Nohar predicts. “The cost of landfill versus sending here will justify it. In the E.U., especially, consumers will definitely prefer to pay to send it here than the landfill.”
Ramesh Goyal suggests we have a look at production, so we walk out of the office and into a warehouse where a dozen women sit on the floor around a six-foot pile of black woolen blankets. The scene might as well be lifted from the nineteenth century. Herman Melville, in his 1855 short story “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” offers this description of the young women cutting clothes at a New England paper mill: “Before each was vertically thrust up a long, glittering scythe, immovably fixed at bottom … To and fro, across the sharp edge, the girls forever dragged long strips of rags.” Women with scythes work all over Panipat. They are mostly older than the ones Melville describes—I’d guess over forty for the most part—and they work in relative silence. Some work on black wool; others on orange. I see piles of blue in other warehouses.
Sorters at Ramesh Knitting Mills in Panipat, India.
Color segregation matters. Goyal leads us into a room where a male worker feeds pieces of orange into the far end of a crude, twenty-foot-long, chest-high machine driven by exposed chains and gears. In turn, those gears power spiked wheels that tear the wool garments into their individual fibers inside steel drums. At the far end, a thick orange fuzz emerges and fills up two large alcoves that branch off the room. Even the slightest breeze caused by someone walking past can send it flying into the air. Everywhere, orange fuzz.
Next door is a larger room in which bags of black shredded wool await their turn at the adjoining yarn mill. At the far end, a worker is dwarfed by a pile of black wool at least ten feet high and fifteen feet long. He stands in front of another equally crude but far bigger machine, feeding black clothes into it. “Twenty, twenty-five percent of every load is black these days,” Nohar says. “It’s a growing percentage.”
A worker in Panipat is surrounded by piles of shredded black wool produced from imported secondhand clothes.
We turn a corner into another room that hums with the manufacture of yarn. Gears and belts are exposed, drops of oil and grease stain the floor, hundreds of spindles spin, and yarn fills them up in an orange haze. Nohar reaches into a bag of gray wool yarn and pulls out a roll. “The shirt you are wearing was made from yarn with a one hundred thread count,” he says, nodding at my Bangladesh-made, U.S.-bought flannel. Then he turns back to the shoddy. “This has probably a ten to twelve thread count. Good for blankets, a rug, or a towel or some jacketing materials.”
But who will want it?
In the last decade, two thirds of Panipat’s shoddy mills have gone out of business or consolidated into bigger companies. Of the perhaps two hundred remaining factories, at least fifty make polar fleece blankets. From Nohar’s perspective, that’s the future. “It’s not as if the price of production is coming down. The costs are fixed. But fleece is coming down, still.”
Ramesh Goyal leads Nohar and me from his shoddy mill to a clean and airy warehouse where polyester thread spins from hundreds of spools with a gentle hum and comes together in raw, milky-white sheets of raw polar fleece. I pause at a nightstand-size control console encased in steel. It’s the ZY301 High Speed Warping Machine, manufactured by Wuxi Zhongyin Textile Technology Co. Ltd., of Wuxi, China. Panipat’s shoddy manufacturers, long undercut by China’s polar fleece manufacturers, are now buying the equipment that—until recently—outcompeted them. Thanks to labor that’s cheaper than China’s and abundant nearby sources of petrochemicals, Panipat’s fleece makers enjoy lower costs than China’s. Goyal tells me that they’ve even started exporting.
Sumit Jindal is the fourth-generation member of his family to run Jindal Spinning Mills in Panipat. He is short and slightly rotund, and his smartphone plays the opening chords of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” He and Nohar Nath have known each other for years, and he’s happy to offer a late-afternoon tour of the family’s shoddy factory. “We were one of the first to Panipat,” he tells me. “We started in 1973.”
Jindal Spinning Mills is typical of a large Panipat shoddy mill. Clothes are sorted by color, cut on scythes, ripped and torn to fibers, and spun into shoddy. Toward the back of the factory complex, a handful of mechanical looms chug away, weaving shoddy into drab-looking blankets with occasional mechanical clanks. The blues are shallow; the reds are dull; the greens remind me of house plants denied the sun. But it’s the equipment that stands out. It is ancient, creaking, and European-made. It heaves, and—here and there—it leaks.
“We have to buy secondhand machines for the recycled blankets,” Jindal says. “We import them from Europe. But they’re slow, especially compared to new machines.”
A worker stands with an Italian-built, near-antique shoddy loom at Jindal Spinning Mills.
I think of the fleece line we saw across town. “Why not buy new?”
He smiles at me with pity. “The new technology can’t handle recycled fibers.” They’re too coarse. So, for now at least, the shoddy industry—and wool recycling, in general—is mired in the past. The competition from fleece all but ensures it will remain there.
“How many blankets can you make in a day?”
“We can make forty thousand recycled blankets per month,” Jindal tells me.
“That’s a lot, no?”
He leads Nohar and me up a stairway. “The relief agencies want fifty thousand delivered today. When they call, I have to explain how long it takes us to make, how difficult it is to get them from here to port. If a supplier like us can’t go fast, we’re expected to keep a stock. But then we have to ask what happens if the relief agencies change their quality standards or specs? What if they go from one-ply to two-ply?”
We reach a long room covered in a vinyl floor printed to look as if it’s hardwood. In places, it peels away to reveal concrete. At the far end, hundreds of shoddy blankets are piled against the walls, and a man sits at a sewing machine, stitching nylon edging on them. Farther along, women are packaging the blankets for shipment.
“We had someone in Germany that wanted six hundred thousand blankets immediately,” Jindal recalls. “We’d need eleven months to do that.” He shakes his head. “China can do it, and over the last three years all of the relief agencies, the Red Cross, the UN, they’ve switched to polyester blankets.”
Jindal, like others, has refocused on the domestic market. Last year, he sold five hundred thousand shoddy blankets locally. But he’s not counting on shoddy for his future. He, too, has started making polar fleece.
“Are you worried the shoddy trade will eventually end?”
“The trade won’t end in Panipat. The whole world depends on Panipat. They can’t dump it in the sea.” He smiles as he says this, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
It’s getting late in the day, but Nohar and I have one more stop. From Jindal Spinning Mills, we ride to a nearby two-story warehouse where we’re greeted by Puneet Goyal, Ramesh Goyal’s son. He leads us up a set of stairs and into a hazy factory in which sunbeams cut sixty-degree angles from windows to floor. Below them, the milky-white rolls of polar fleece are loaded into screen-printing equipment that extends for several hundred feet through the room. As Nohar and I watch, the raw fleece moves through the printer in blanket-size intervals. Along the way, a mechanical arm sweeps over and prints the outline of flowers; another arm prints a blue background; another fills in the flowers with red. From raw blanket to print takes perhaps one minute. Hundreds of blankets can be printed this way in an hour.
Chinese-made machinery churns out rolls and rolls of polar fleece blankets. Production is an order of magnitude greater than shoddy blanket production.
“The designs come from a factory in China,” Puneet tells us as we’re shown additional lines where the designs are baked in, the blankets are cut and washed, and the fleece is pricked and pulled so that it stands up in the fashion characteristic of polar fleece. “We also have an in-house designer. There are hundreds of designs we can have. But a recycled blanket can only have a few designs.”
I glance at Nohar. He isn’t saying much as he follows the screen printing, the washing, the cutting. But his mouth is pinched—I can’t tell if it’s because he is deep in thought, has a distaste for the strong chemical smell in the air, or is concerned for the future of his used-woolen-clothes trading business. We stop at the end of the line and see piles of thousands of blankets with different designs: flowers, tiger stripes, geometric abstractions, checks, squares, and squiggles. The blankets are soft, warm, tough. If I’m ever in a natural disaster, I sincerely hope that the Red Cross skips the shoddy and sources polar fleece to keep me warm.
Nohar starts asking about exports. “Where are you sending this material?” Kishco has markets around the world, and these fleece blankets might appeal to some of the customers who buy shoddy and other goods.
“Dubai, South Africa, the Middle East, mostly.”
Nohar Nath, shoddy trader, nods. “Get me some samples and swatches. Let me work on it.”
Toward the end of the Friday afternoon shift at Star Wipers, Todd Wilson stops beside a cart piled with cut-up white sweatshirts. “Now here’s what I’m gonna tell you about this product,” he says to me. “This is reclaimed white sweatshirt. For us to keep up with demand, we have to buy it offshore. There’s not enough in the States.” The problem, for those who view it that way, is that it’s typically cheaper to cut sweatshirts into rags in India than in Ohio.
None of the cut-up fragments of sweatshirt through which Wilson is rummaging were used in India. Rather, they were likely made in South Asia, exported to the United States, and worn until they were donated to Goodwill, the Salvation Army, or some other thrift-based exporter. When they didn’t sell there, they were exported again, to Kandla most likely (or perhaps Mississauga, en route to Kandla), cut up, and exported again—this time to Star Wipers in Newark, Ohio. Each step of that journey makes perfect economic sense, even if the totality of it sounds ridiculous.
In fact, it’s the future.
Middle-class consumers in Asia already outnumber those in North America. Soon, their unwanted secondhand stuff will exceed that which is generated in more affluent countries. If those clothes don’t sell, they can always be cut into wipers (assuming the quality is sufficient). And those wipers, sourced from clothes worn and cut in developing countries, will make their way to the United States. A secondhand trade that once flowed in one direction—from rich to poor—now goes in every direction.
Todd Wilson accepted that dynamic years ago. In 2016 he traveled to Kandla to teach a local rag-cutting firm how to cut rags to Star Wipers’ exacting standards. It wasn’t hard to find a partner. Demand for wipers from factories, hotels, and restaurants serving India’s booming economy has been strong for years, and the reclaimed textiles that might have once stayed in the United States are now flowing there. Todd just wants to be sure that those rags are cut to a standard that he can import as his own.
That’s not easy. Workers in Newark are taught to cut shirts and other garments so that they get around ten wiping rags per pound. “But the industry standard is around five rags per pound,” Wilson says, referring to big, sloppy cuts that make an old T-shirt look like a pair of oversize wings. “And that’ll be the death of us as an industry. People will feel like they’re getting a better deal buying new rags. So you have to find the people cutting the rags the way you want them.” His cut, the Star Wipers cut, looks like what most people think of as a rag.
That may seem trivial—maybe even comical—to someone outside the wiping rag industry. But it’s absolutely critical to anyone who wants to see the life of secondhand clothing extended for as long as possible.
Wilson is unswerving in his optimism about the future of reclaimed wiping rags. But that doesn’t stop him from dropping an occasional joke at the expense of the industry. Toward the start of our interview, he told me that during a recent industry convention, a fellow trade association member reported that he had good news and bad news about the industry. “The good news,” Wilson recounts, starting to laugh, “is that nobody wants to get into this business.”
a For example, Kimberly-Clark, a U.S. manufacturer of personal care products, markets its professional-grade Wypall disposable rags in a campaign titled “Who Would You Hire?” In one advertisement, a handsome, well-dressed Wypall representative engages in a tug-of-war with a short, fat, sweaty, and greasy man in a soiled tank top, who represents rags.