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. v1.1 (12 Sep 2026): adds the partner series for every year 2014–2025 — Europe supplied 29–40 % of India's rag imports until 2017; Bangladesh overtook it in 2018 and has led since (peak 40 % in 2022); Canada tripled to 136 kt in 2023; Japan surged to 75 kt in 2025; the United States left the rag line while remaining 45–58 % of the worn-clothing line every year — and the mirror tables: Bangladesh and India agree within 17 % where both report (Bangladesh has filed nothing since 2019), and India records 1.1–2.4× more American worn clothing than the United States records sending, a routing hypothesis left open. The record adds the year-by-partner tables, the mirror series, the blankets series, the measurement ledger and the PDF render script. Nothing in v1.0.0 is contradicted. v1.2 (12 Sep 2026): answers the fifth open question in two sentences. The rules have been read — UN IMTS 2010 has importers book by country of origin and exporters by last known destination, India compiles to that standard, the US files to the ultimate destination as known at export, and the Revised Kyoto Convention holds that sorting and grading confer no origin — so the US–India gap is a recording convention by design; and the UAE's own re-export table shows 21,000–66,000 t of worn clothing a year leaving for India in 2017–2023 against 6,000–16,000 t that India books as from the UAE, a sorting-yard trade that carries a fifth to nine-tenths of the American gap in those years (upper bound). Canada's export books, 3–300× below India's records from Canada, cannot close the rest; the US 2025 row is a weight-reporting artefact. The record adds the measurement-3 ledger and nine intermediary series.