One of the longest and most storied trade routes in human history was named not after a precious metal or a rare spice, but after a fabric. The Silk Road carried so much more than culture, language, religion and invention. Yet we remember it by the cloth that travelled along it. For most of human history, beyond simply being a commodity, textiles were a central facet of our lives.
Good fabric held its value when little else did. This went beyond clothing; it was the tent that sheltered a family, the sacks that held its provisions and the shroud in which we buried our dead. Cloth was not used up. It was lived inside and handed on.
We are surrounded by textiles, and we have managed to engineer them for almost every human purpose. Firefighters walk into burning buildings wearing materials designed to resist flame and heat. Our hotels and hospitals move through mountains of bedding and linen we do not think twice about. Few materials are at once so intimate and so invisible.
In our part of the world, there was an additional logic applied. Before oil wealth shifted our economies, our ancestors dressed almost entirely in natural fibres, such as cotton, silk and light wool – not as a philosophical choice, but as a practical one. Man-made fibres were introduced to the region as early as the 1930s, but women largely rejected them: they simply did not adapt to the heat and humidity. What the body knew, the land confirmed. Natural fibres breathe, they biodegrade, they return to the Earth they came from. The choice that kept people cool also kept the planet whole.
Fabric also held a different kind of value then. According to research documented by The Zay Initiative, an organisation focused on preserving Arab heritage, dresses and textiles were considered “inflation-proof” and were included in trousseau lists, divorce settlements and wills. Cloth was not fashion. It was a form of wealth as stable as land.
And yet, somewhere along the way, we stopped treating cloth as something that holds value, and began using and discarding it without a second thought. Today the global textile industry consumes about 3.25 billion tonnes of materials a year, and according to the Circularity Gap Report Textiles, barely 0.3 per cent comes from recycled sources. Meanwhile, The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, an organisation that promotes the idea of a circular economy, has found that garments are worn a third fewer times than they were 15 years ago. We are consuming more and discarding faster than our planet can process what we throw away.
This is the gap that Naseej, the UAE’s national initiative for textile circularity, was created to close. Launched under the directive of President Sheikh Mohamed, and delivered through a partnership between the National Projects Office, the Ministry of Economy and Tourism, the Emirates Foundation and the Tadweer Group, Naseej aims to move our textile sector away from a linear model of “use and discard” towards one that keeps materials in motion. Its ambition is concrete: to recycle more than 220,000 tonnes of discarded textiles each year, supported by work spanning collection, research, policy, innovation and public awareness.
What moves me most is the word “Naseej” itself. The name means “weave” in Arabic, and the initiative is rooted explicitly in our heritage of preservation, craftsmanship and resourcefulness. It speaks to an instinct that once made an offcut too valuable to discard. This is not a foreign idea imported into the region. It is our own memory, returned to us as national purpose.
At The Climate Tribe, an Abu Dhabi-based engagement and impact storytelling studio, we recognise that an offcut is not waste, but it is simply a beginning that has not yet found its purpose. In honour of this, we want to help turn offcuts from our textile industry into something people can hold in their hands. The Climate Tribe Hub in Mina Zayed will serve as a collection point for textile offcuts, a place where the fabric we no longer need can begin its next life rather than its last. It is a modest contribution to a national effort, but circularity has always worked this way, one thread at a time. Together, we will create unique items that can be cherished and used.
Our grandparents understood something we are only now re-learning: that cloth is not disposable. It was once among the most dependable forms of wealth a family owned, worked, worn, mended and passed on with care. Had we kept faith with that idea, we might never have arrived to where we are today.
The question we now need to ask is: as we begin to understand the cost of what we have built, will we find our way back to wisdom and the natural fibres of our ancestors?
Naseej invites us to remember that what we weave, we can also mend. My hope is that we will.