Fashion and textile designer Ashita Singhal on living more sustainably

For fashion and textile designer Ashita Singhal, living sustainably has been the goal, and the challenge, ever since she began studying fashion design in 2016. Every tailoring class at fashion school would yield bags of scrap material destined for a garbage dump. So, for her graduation project, she decided to create a handspun yarn using only scrap. The upcycling project gave her an idea for a start-up and, after she graduated, Singhal launched a studio in Noida called Paiwand (Hindi for, to patch or repair), that takes scrap material from design studios, weaves it into fabric, and sells it back to them. Her studio also makes apparel and home furnishings from such scraps. Here, Singhal talks about her own efforts to live more sustainably.