Circular Online speaks to Karishma Gupta, founder and CEO of Eslando, about how this unique platform has created a thriving digital marketplace for textile waste.
Eslando is a digital marketplace that connects textile waste collectors with specialist recyclers.
The company wants to make it easy for businesses to trade leftover fabrics, clothing waste and offcuts, while ensuring these materials are recycled instead of ending up in landfill or incineration.
Circular Online spoke to Karishma Gupta, founder and CEO of Eslando, about how the platform works and what successes they’ve seen after five years of operations.
What is the problem that Eslando wants to solve?
The global textile recycling industry is fragmented, opaque, and inefficient. Vast volumes of recyclable textile waste exist, yet recyclers struggle to source the right feedstock, while collectors and brands struggle to find reliable buyers.
Transactions often rely on informal networks, brokers, and WhatsApp groups, with little standardisation around material quality, pricing, traceability, or trust. As a result, valuable textiles are downcycled, exported blindly, or incinerated – not because recycling solutions don’t exist, but because the right connections are missing.
Eslando solves this by treating textile waste as a tradable commodity and providing the digital infrastructure to match supply with demand efficiently. Our marketplace connects verified collectors, recyclers, and brands globally, enabling transparent listings, clear material specifications, and faster deal-making.
By standardising how textile waste is described, traded, and trusted, Eslando unlocks liquidity in a market that has long operated behind closed doors.
For the industry, this means fewer failed deals, better-quality recycling outcomes, and higher value recovered from waste. For the resource and waste sector, it’s an invitation to participate in a trusted marketplace that is actively shaping the future of textile recycling – and to turn waste challenges into real commercial opportunities.
What are the biggest barriers in the supply chain?
The textile recycling industry has all the right players – collectors, recyclers, brands, and waste managers – but they are not well connected. Three key barriers are preventing the textile recycling ecosystem from being fully connected: lack of standardisation, limited transparency, and low trust across the supply chain.
Textile waste is described inconsistently – by source, fibre blend, colour, contamination level, or processing state – making it difficult for recyclers to assess suitability and for collectors to market material effectively.
This leads to failed transactions, inefficient logistics, and recyclable material being downcycled or disposed of unnecessarily.
Most transactions still happen through emails, phone calls, or informal networks, which makes it hard to scale good recycling outcomes or bring new organisations into the system. Without transparency or price signals, textile waste continues to be treated as a problem rather than a resource.
In parallel, the industry operates with significant information asymmetry. Supply and demand are global, yet there is no central mechanism to view available feedstock, recycling capacity, or pricing signals across regions. Most trading still relies on offline processes and closed networks, which limit market access for new entrants and slow innovation.
Eslando removes these barriers by creating a trusted marketplace where textile waste can be clearly listed, discovered, and traded. By making supply and demand visible and comparable, Eslando helps the industry collaborate more effectively.
Has the idea worked?
Eslando has demonstrated measurable success in reducing textile waste by turning fragmented supply into a visible, tradable market. To date, the platform has digitised over 30,000 tonnes of textile waste across key recycling regions, including Europe, Central America, and India, making previously hidden feedstock discoverable to the right recycling partners.
Through the marketplace, Eslando has enabled the trade of over 100 tonnes of cotton waste, helping sellers secure verified recycling routes instead of disposal or low-value outlets.
Beyond direct transactions, Eslando actively promotes live marketplace stock through its private auction newsletters, reaching more than 1,000 verified industry subscribers. This targeted exposure has led to tangible outcomes – including one seller securing a long-term recycling contract for over 400 tonnes of textile feedstock.
These results show how transparency, visibility, and structured market access directly reduce textile waste. By joining the Eslando marketplace, organisations can unlock new recycling routes, access global demand, and convert waste challenges into scalable commercial opportunities.
What’s missing: The basic instruments of trade?
To understand why textile recycling struggles to scale, it helps to compare it with almost any other market.
If you want to buy a white T-shirt online, you simply search for ‘white T-shirt’. Instantly, you can compare prices, specifications, delivery times, supplier ratings, and even access financing options like buy-now-pay-later. The same digital infrastructure exists if you want to start a T-shirt print-on-demand business – from sourcing blanks to logistics, payments, and credit.
In textile recycling, none of these basic instruments of trade exist. A recycler looking for cotton clipping waste typically receives their ‘catalogue’ through WhatsApp messages – hundreds of images, scattered specifications, and no consistent format.
Price comparison happens manually in spreadsheets. Logistics costs require repeated back-and-forth with freight partners. There is no central view of supply, no standardised listings, and no market signals.
This fragmentation creates fatigue on both sides of the transaction. Buyers are overwhelmed, sellers struggle to reach the right demand, and recyclable material is lost simply because trading is too hard.
Eslando exists to change this – by building the digital marketplace infrastructure that makes textile recycling trade as searchable, comparable, and scalable as any modern supply chain.
