Those green metal bins in residential compounds, printed with "Loving Donations, Warmth for the Mountain Areas"—where do the clothes dropped inside actually end up? A recycler who has collected scrap in the south of the city for seven years gives an answer based on what he has seen with his own eyes.

According to this recycler, named Chen Zhiqiang, he collected all kinds of scrap in his early years, but later specialized in old clothes for a very direct reason: in this line of work, "the profits are big, the competition is small, and many people can't bring themselves to do it because of face."

His suspicion began one time before dawn when he passed the back gate of a logistics park in the east of the city. It was not yet light, and he saw workers beside a 9.6-meter truck tossing gray-green woven bags—the same kind used in scrap recycling—into the cargo bed, each bag packed with clothes and weighing close to a hundred jin. A man in glasses at the scene inspected the goods with an iron hook and instructed, "This bag is pure cotton, put it aside separately," recording each item in a notebook. By his count, forty-seven bags were loaded that trip, and he later verified that the carrying vehicle belonged to a renewable resources company in the north of the city—clearly not headed for the mountains.

To trace the chain, he chatted several times with Liao, the property cleaning supervisor responsible for watching the donation bins (referred to in his account as Liu), who said the old clothes "seem to be sent to Yunnan," arranged specifically by a manager surnamed Sun, and that he was only responsible for calling a truck when the bins were full. After that, Chen made three more trips to that renewable resources company and slipped into the plant area, where he saw the large warehouse behind the workshop: bagged old clothes were opened and fed onto a conveyor belt, and came out as bundled strips of cloth. During an afternoon spent watching from a small restaurant opposite, he recorded six trucks entering and leaving, each trip going in fully loaded and coming out empty.

He learned how the profits in this chain were distributed from a driver he was on good terms with: Manager Sun paid the property management a site fee monthly in order to place recycling bins in the compound; the recycling bags were sold by the ton to the renewable resources company at about nine hundred yuan per ton; the company then processed them into greenhouse insulation quilts, industrial rags, soundproof cotton, and the like, which could sell for two to three thousand yuan per ton. Roughly calculated on the basis of one compound collecting two tons a month and more than forty compounds in the south of the city, the monthly flow was about eighty tons. The final factory destination of those clothes was sale by the ton to plastic recycling plants. As for how to classify the products of these recycling and processing stages—whether greenhouse insulation quilts and industrial rags count as reused products or downcycling—industry standards vary; as long as the resulting fiber is not sufficient to meet the basic requirements for clothing or home textiles, it is usually counted under that category.

This year is Chen Zhiqiang's seventh year in the trade. He finally used his savings to buy a secondhand small truck and no longer touches donation bins. Instead, he puts up a sign with clearly marked prices and does paid recycling: five mao per jin, weighed and settled on the spot. The old clothes he buys are sorted and baled, then still sent to that renewable resources company, where they sell for seven hundred fifty yuan per ton, one hundred fifty yuan lower than the recycling price he had handled earlier. "Not just for sentiment, I did the math too," he says. After about twenty runs, deducting the cost of handling and sorting, he can clear nine thousand yuan a month.

Signs of change have already appeared: after removing its donation bins, a compound in the south of the city posted a notice saying that, on the owners' suggestion, it had switched to "paid recycling, on-site settlement, and if we can't collect it, let the next one make up the difference." The site settles accounts on the last day of each month and no longer treats clothes as free donations; from that afternoon to evening it collected more than ten thousand jin. Chen's feeling is that in recent years he has met many people who have gradually shifted from "first wash everything clean and stuff it into the bin" to "either exchange it for points or weigh it on the spot," and that people now have some sense of proportion about old clothes. Those bags filled with goodwill a few years ago deserved a more transparent outlet.

Source: After 7 years of collecting scrap, I dare to speak: most old clothes from community recycling bins are hauled off and sold by the jin, earning 900 per ton, while donors think they were sent to the mountains, · Originally published on 2026-09-22