The Terroir of Karnataka Weaving: Where Waste Becomes Wonder

How a region's weaving heritage transformed textile refuse into runway-ready fabric

The Geography of Second Chances

In the southern reaches of Bangalore, where the city yields to the wild green edge of Bannerghatta National Park, an unusual alchemy happens daily. At Weavers Colony in Gottigere, the air carries the rhythmic clack of traditional looms—the same sound that has defined this neighborhood for over fifty years. But what runs through those looms today tells a different story than generations past.

Above: Khaloom Textiles campus in Bangalore, Karnataka
(Image credit: Khaloom Textiles)

This is terroir in transformation. The elevation sits at 874 meters above sea level. The climate hovers around 25 degrees Celsius. The forest boundary provides not just scenery but a living reminder that nothing in nature ends—everything cycles. These conditions have always shaped how fiber behaves here, how tension holds, how weavers work, but what changed in 2016 was what those weavers were asked to work with.

When Waste Traveled East

Virgin cotton fabric remnants from European cutting room floors—clean material that had never touched a body, destined for landfills simply because they were the wrong size—began arriving in Karnataka. Enviu, a Netherlands-based social enterprise, had been collecting this post-industrial waste through partnerships with textile recyclers like Sympany. The material was pristine. The problem was what to do with it.

Industrial recycling typically shreds fabric into fiber, creating what the textile industry calls short-staple cotton. Mechanically torn fabric produces fibers measuring just 12 to 25 millimeters—sometimes shorter. Regular cotton fiber measures 25 to 45 millimeters. This matters because short fibers are notoriously difficult to spin into yarn. When shredded, these fibers also develop irregular surfaces and increased neps—small entanglements that frustrate mechanical spinning systems.

Power looms struggle with such material. The automated tension systems can't compensate for the variable strength. The high-speed shuttles break threads. The fabric emerges weak, if it emerges at all. This is why recycled cotton typically becomes insulation, stuffing, or industrial rags—applications where yarn quality doesn't matter.

The Hands That Machines Cannot Replace

In 2016, Nanditha Sulur and Ram Sellalu founded Khaloom Textiles India in the heart of Gottigere's Weavers Colony. Their premise was simple but radical: what if human hands could succeed where machines failed?

The weavers here came from families who had worked traditional handlooms for generations. Many had migrated from other weaving communities—Cubbonpet in Bangalore, Kallur in Tumkur, Tiptur, Halepalya. They understood something fundamental about fiber: it needs patience, not just precision. When you can feel the thread between your fingers, you adjust. When you can see the shed opening on your loom, you compensate. This isn't romantic craft nostalgia. It's mechanical reality.

Short-staple fiber requires tighter twist to hold together as yarn. Drafting—the process of thinning fiber before spinning—becomes critical. Too fast and the short fibers slip apart. Too slow and the yarn develops thick spots. Hand-spinning on a traditional charkha (spinning wheel) allows for constant micro-adjustments. The spinner feels when tension drops, sees when fiber starts to slip, adjusts the draft distance and spinning speed in real time. This level of responsiveness is exactly what power systems cannot replicate.

The same principle applies to weaving. On a handloom, the weaver controls every pick—every pass of the weft thread through the warp. If the recycled yarn has a weak spot, the weaver can adjust tension, slow down, ensure the catch. A power loom running at 200 picks per minute has no such flexibility. The fabric either forms properly or it doesn't.

From Refuse to Runway

Khaloom's process begins with sorting. The collected fabric waste is separated by fiber type and color—cotton from polyester, light from dark. The material is then mechanically shredded back to fiber form. These recycled fibers are blended with small amounts of virgin cotton to improve workability, though many Khaloom fabrics contain 70 to 90 percent recycled content.

Village spinners take these blended fibers and hand-spin them on charkhas into yarn. This step alone transforms waste into possibility. The yarn is then loaded onto traditional Kargha handlooms—frame looms that have been the backbone of Indian textile production for centuries. The weaving happens slowly, perhaps twenty to thirty picks per minute compared to a power loom's two hundred. But each pick is deliberate, responsive, correct.

The environmental mathematics are striking. Every 50 meters of Khaloom fabric prevents 15 kilograms of virgin fabric from reaching landfills. It saves 63,000 liters of water and prevents 45 kilograms of CO2 emissions compared to producing new fabric. No polluting chemicals are used in the process. And it provides nine days of fair-wage work to artisans who, industry-wide, face chronic underpayment.

The fabric that emerges is dense, textured, distinctive. It doesn't read as recycled—it reads as intentional. In 2018, Dutch ministers Bruno Bruins and Sigrid Kaag wore suits made from Khaloom fabric to public events, a deliberate statement about circular fashion's viability at the highest levels. Fashion brands from Amsterdam to New York began ordering fabric.

And now, some of that same fabric has found its way into kitchens.

The Reverie collection transforms these handwoven recycled textiles into tea towels and table linens. The fabric's weight and texture—a direct result of how short-staple yarn behaves when woven—make it exceptionally absorbent. The natural color variations, caused by the dyed waste fabric mixed into the blend, create organic depth that feels earned rather than designed.

The Terroir of Resilience

What makes this a terroir story is how much depends on place. Bannerghatta's weaving tradition provided the generational skill base. Karnataka's position as India's largest silk producer (65 percent of the country's mulberry silk) meant weaving knowledge ran deep here—families understood what fabric could and should be. The region's history of traditional textile production stretching back to the 8th century meant infrastructure existed: suppliers, finishers, dyers, the entire ecosystem.

Above: Khaloom weavers thanking their handlooms on Gowri festival
(Image credit: Khaloom Textiles)

But more than infrastructure, there was attitude. Weavers Colony had survived transitions before—from exclusively silk to silk-polyester blends, from purely handloom to a mix of handloom and power loom. When Khaloom proposed working with shredded waste fiber, the response wasn't "this is impossible" but "show us how."

The social structure mattered too. Khaloom pays weavers Rs 13,500 to Rs 15,000 monthly (approximately USD $160-180), two to three times the industry standard. Workers receive fixed contracts, health insurance, and pension contributions—unusual in an industry where more than half of handloom weavers earn below minimum wage. This financial security allows weavers to take time with difficult material rather than rushing to maximize piece-rate output.

The physical proximity to Bannerghatta National Park isn't metaphorical. The forest teaches a lesson the textile industry needs: nothing is waste, only material waiting for transformation. When weaver families walk home past trees older than their looms, the message reinforces itself daily.

Why This Matters Beyond Bangalore

The global fashion industry produces approximately 92 million tons of textile waste annually. About 87 percent ends up in landfills or incineration. Most recycling efforts focus on low-value applications—turning clothes into insulation or cleaning rags. Khaloom demonstrated that recycled fiber can re-enter the fashion supply chain at the same quality level as virgin material. The limitation isn't the fiber. It's the system.

Industrial textile production optimized itself for speed and scale. Those optimizations make certain kinds of work impossible. Working with variable-quality fiber demands responsiveness that automation cannot provide—at least not yet, and perhaps not ever. What Karnataka's weavers possess isn't just skill. It's adaptive intelligence that responds to material reality in real time.

This has implications for textile production globally. As environmental regulations tighten and landfill costs rise, mechanical recycling of textile waste will only increase. The question is what we do with those recycled fibers. If the only option is low-value applications, recycling remains a downgrade. But if those fibers can be spun and woven by human hands into fabric that competes aesthetically and functionally with virgin textiles, circular fashion becomes genuinely possible.

Karnataka didn't discover this possibility. The weavers there simply continued doing what they'd always done—working thoughtfully with fiber—while the material changed. That continuity of practice is itself a form of terroir. The knowledge wasn't imported or invented. It was already here, maintained across generations, ready for a problem worth solving.

The Kitchen as Closing the Loop

The Reverie collection—tea towels, napkins, table linens made from this recycled, handwoven fabric—closes a particular loop. Most fashion-industry sustainability stories end at runway or retail, leaving consumers with beautiful objects but no sense of completion. Khaloom's fabric made suits for ministers and dresses for boutiques. Now it dries your dishes.

Khaloom's fabric made suits for ministers and dresses for boutiques. Now it dries your dishes.

That feels correct. The textile waste that began this journey came from cutting rooms making ordinary clothes. Returning similar waste-derived fabric to everyday domestic use is coming full circle. The kitchen is where textiles take the most abuse: water, heat, stains, constant washing. If recycled fabric can hold up here, it can hold up anywhere.

The material properties that make this work are direct results of the process. Short-staple yarn, when tightly twisted and woven slowly, creates dense fabric with good capillary action—it wicks water effectively. The slight irregularities from hand-weaving add surface texture that improves absorbency. The fiber content, being predominantly cotton, provides the softness and breathability that kitchen textiles need. Even the mottled color palette—earthy terracotta, faded indigo, natural beige—comes from the mixed-dye content of the waste fabric. Nothing here is accidental. Everything follows from material logic.

The Future Tense of Tradition

Khaloom Textiles India incorporated in September 2017. The company has grown to work with ten weavers, eight helpers, and one supervisor. Annual revenue reached approximately $5 million by 2025. These aren't explosive numbers by tech-startup standards, but for a social enterprise employing traditional methods with challenging materials, they indicate something working.

The constraint remains scale. Handloom production is slow by definition. Fashion brands interested in sustainability often demand quantities that handweaving cannot supply.

Khaloom has explored hybrid approaches—using power looms for warp and handlooms for pattern work, or training more weavers to expand capacity. But fundamentally, the method that makes recycled fiber workable is also the method that limits volume.

This tension isn't new. Handloom weaving in India has faced mechanized competition since the 19th century. The number of handlooms has halved in recent decades. What's new is the possibility that handloom's limitations might also be its advantages. In an era demanding localized production, artisan employment, material transparency, and circular systems, the slowness of handweaving stops being a bug and starts being a feature.

Karnataka's Weavers Colony will continue adapting. Some families will shift fully to power looms. Others will maintain traditional methods. Khaloom will train new weavers while old weavers retire. The important part is that when someone figures out how to mechanically spin short-staple recycled fiber as reliably as human hands currently do, the weavers here won't be rendered obsolete—they'll have other knowledge to apply, other challenges to solve, other materials to master.

That's what terroir means in textiles. Not that conditions are fixed, but that accumulated knowledge equips a place to respond to what comes next. Bangalore's weavers didn't preserve tradition like a museum piece. They used it like a working tool, solving a contemporary problem with generational skill. The fabric they're producing now—tough, beautiful, genuinely circular—proves the method sound.

And every time you dry a dish with a Reverie towel, you're participating in that proof. The water soaking into cotton that was once European waste, spun by hand in Karnataka, woven slowly on a loom older than the person operating it, sold in Canada to elevate a kitchen. That's a terroir story. That's material given a second life because human hands knew what to do with it.

Although Khaloom no longer exists as an organization, its people, knowledge, and skills continue working in the area. The sound of their looms will continue - the question is what runs through them next.

Reverie | Series 07
Handspun and handwoven recycled cotton | Weavers Colony | Bangalore, India
Traditional Kargha Handloom

Environmental Impact (Per 50m):

• 15 kg of virgin fabric diverted from landfills
• 63,000 liters of water saved
• 45 kg of CO2 emissions prevented
• Zero harmful chemicals or pollutants used
• 9 days of fair paid employment for artisan communities

Discover the collection—where virgin fabric waste is diverted from landfills into runway-ready recycled cotton fabric.

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