This article has been authored by a member of The Quint. Our membership programme allows those who are not full-time journalists or our regular contributors to get published on The Quint under our exclusive 'Member's Opinion' section, along with many other benefits. Our membership is open and available to any reader of The Quint. Become a member today and send us your articles on TQmembersonly@thequint.com.Panipat, a city of roughly 500,000 people in the state of Haryana, carries a quiet, extraordinary distinction: it recycles more discarded clothing than almost anywhere else on earth. Known as the "cast-off capital of the world," it processes millions of tonnes of used garments sent from Europe, North America, and East Asia every year, transforming worn-out jeans and last season's coats into blankets, industrial rags, insulation material, and new yarn. The city keeps tonnes of textile waste out of landfills—landfills that belong to the countries which created the waste in the first place.A recent CNN report told this exact story, but mostly through a narrow lens of the difficult working conditions of the labourers who sort and shred these clothes. Those concerns are real and should not be dismissed. But reducing Panipat's textile recycling industry to a tale of suffering—with no context, no acknowledgement of what it achieves, and no examination of who is ultimately responsible—is journalism that misleads more than it informs.Over 4 million jobs generated by India's textile recycling sector100 billion garments are produced globally every year, and most are discarded quickly