When you sort your wardrobe at the change of seasons, what do you do with the old clothes and home textiles you dig out? Suzhou residents now have an online option—through the old clothing recycling convenience service on the Suzhou App, they can submit a reservation at home and SF Express will pick up the items free of charge, so there is no need to specially look for offline recycling points.

Where do the items go after recycling

These textiles will not simply be landfilled or incinerated. According to the service, the recyclables will be sent to the Yihuishou sorting factory and go through a complete regeneration and processing process: first, they are finely sorted and classified by item type and material, then physically dismantled to separate parts such as zippers and buttons; afterward, with the help of professional chemical recycling processes, components such as cotton, polyester, spandex, and acrylic are extracted and put back into production as textile raw materials. This path is what the industry calls "textile-to-textile" (T to T) sustainable regeneration, giving waste textiles renewed use value.

How the environmental account is calculated

The resource and emission-reduction benefits of recycling have been specifically measured: for every 1 kilogram of waste textiles recycled, 6,000 liters of water can be saved and 3.6 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions can be reduced. The article believes this not only helps conserve natural resources and promotes the circular regeneration of textile raw materials, but also reduces resource consumption at the source.

A tidying window before the double festivals

As the Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day holidays approach, the service provider suggests that residents take advantage of the holiday to sort out idle textiles at home and use online reservations to give old clothes a new destination.

For the old clothing industry, this type of recycling model, led by urban government affairs or lifestyle service platforms and with express delivery companies providing door-to-door transport capacity, is channeling scattered old clothes from residents into a standardized sorting and regeneration chain; and the process route of sorting by material and extracting fibers chemically also means that old clothes entering the recycling system are no longer regarded only as second-hand goods for export, but may also become a source of recycled textile raw materials.

Source: Don't throw away old clothes at the change of seasons! Let idle textiles embark on the path of circular regeneration - Mingcheng Suzhou News Center · Originally published on 2026-09-21