The Batt and the Closet: denim insulation checked to the source, and what India's customs tables say about where the world's rags go (ZeroWaste, piece 2)

A background article following The Pulse (11 Sep 2026) on denim jeans shredded into wall insulation in Arizona. The story's arithmetic is checked to the source: the federal 2018 figures are exact and a federal auditor has already called them an eight-year-old snapshot; the programme's counter (6 million pieces, 3,000 tons, 12 million sq ft) is quoted with the date read, while the quoted monthly throughput is unverified and twenty to thirty times the consumer programme's own average; the diverted total is 0.027 % of one year's landfilled textiles; a mattress line in the source conflates the discard rate with the recycling rate by about nine times. One layer down, the strongest published cotton–elastane separation route converts spandex to 4,4′-methylenedianiline; the EU's July-2026 destruction ban ranks recycling below reuse; textile-to-textile recycling is under 1 % of 132 Mt of fibre. The article then runs the same arithmetic where most of the world's discarded cotton goes. From India's own customs record as reported to the UN (HS 6310 rags and HS 6309 worn clothing, 2014–2025, partners for 2024): rag imports tripled from 215,337 t to 658,634 t; worn-clothing imports peaked at 355,563 t in 2017 and were 222,483 t in 2025; both lines together were 881,117 t in 2025. In 2024 the largest supplier of rags was Bangladesh (31.8 %, garment-factory clippings), then Canada (19.2 %) and Korea (15.0 %); the seven European suppliers together were 18.2 %. Worn clothing was 57.7 % American and 76 % North American. The three published figures for Panipat's intake (100,000 t; over 500,000 t; 1.1 million t) are bounded against the line, and the Ministry of Textiles' 'about 7 % imported' is shown to match the rag heading alone. The customs mutilation test and a July-2025 tribunal case at Kandla show that some 'rags' arrive wearable. The piece closes with the cooperative — Magarpatta's asset cooperative and SWaCH's labour cooperative — as what the arithmetic is for, and names four numbers nobody has measured. Every number is tagged computed, quoted or null. The raw Comtrade tables and the re-run script are included.