China generates over 20 million tons of waste textiles annually, yet actual recycling last year was only about 5.15 million tons, putting the recycling rate well below 30%. Even though recycled fiber technology has made breakthroughs, the circular use of discarded clothing still faces scale bottlenecks at three stages: composition sorting, foreign object separation, and technology implementation.

Key Points

  • In 2024, China's waste textile recycling volume was about 5.15 million tons, compared with over 20 million tons generated annually, a recycling rate below 30%.
  • Jiangxi Ganxinyuan Company produces 1 ton of recycled fiber from waste fabric at a cost of just over 1,000 yuan, but its annual waste fabric usage is less than 50,000 tons, mainly because it cannot collect enough material.
  • National plans target a 25% recycling rate by 2025 and 30% by 2030, while some developed countries have already reached 50%.

Where Do Old Clothes Go: 60% of Worn-Out Garments Can Only Become Industrial Raw Materials

Old clothing recycling bins are already common in urban residential communities, and online door-to-door pickup has expanded to more than 300 cities, but the destination of the collected old clothes is not encouraging. According to the head of an online recycling platform in Shanghai, sorting factories first pick out relatively new garments for secondhand circulation, while about 60% of the worn-out clothing is sent to recycling plants. The problem is that this portion of worn-out clothing sells for only 200 to 300 yuan per ton, not even covering the labor cost of door-to-door collection, and the platform's operation depends entirely on revenue from secondhand circulation. The platform's national annual recycling volume is only about 60,000 tons.

Jiangxi Fengxin County's Ganxinyuan Renewable New Materials Company recycles nearly 200,000 tons of waste fabric and plastic bottle flakes each year, processing them into recycled fiber for sale to textile mills. Manager Li Jian has done the math: making 1 ton of recycled fiber from waste fabric costs just over 1,000 yuan, while the plastic bottle flake route costs about 5,000 yuan. The cost advantage is clear, but annual waste fabric usage is less than 50,000 tons, and the bottleneck is collection. Large quantities of bed sheets, plush toys, and construction geotextiles are thrown away by residents as household waste. Most old clothes that reach the factory can only be mechanically crushed and opened into insulation cotton, soundproof cotton, and geotextiles; after the fibers are physically broken, re-spinning is coarse, and very few can be made back into clothing. After these industrial and agricultural materials are used, they mix with construction waste and often end up in incinerators.

Cai Haizhen, deputy secretary-general of the China Renewable Resources Recycling Association, pointed out that crushing old clothes into industrial raw materials or even selling them directly as fuel to power plants is not "self-circulation" within the textile industry, let alone secondary or tertiary recycling. Wang Huaping, a researcher at Donghua University, said that among the five major categories of recyclable solid waste in urban garbage, waste textiles have the lowest utilization rate. According to UN Environment Programme data, every ton of old clothes recycled can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 3.6 tons, save 0.5 tons of crude oil, and save 20 tons of water.

The Technology Exists, So Why Can't It Scale?

At Wuhan Textile University's Key Laboratory for Resource Utilization of Waste Cotton and Wool Textiles, Professor Wang Jinfeng's team, in collaboration with Professor Zhang Jun of the Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has been able to decolor old school uniforms, make pulp, dissolve and spin, and re-weave them into new school uniforms. Even cotton-polyester blended fabrics, long considered difficult to handle, can now be effectively separated. But Wang Jinfeng admits that while the technology exists, market promotion still faces many challenges.

The first barrier is composition sorting. There are many types of fabric fibers—cotton, linen, silk, wool, polyester, nylon, acrylic—and large amounts of blending complicate recycling. Li Jian said recycled fiber production lines require waste fabric with a polyester content above 90%, otherwise nozzles clog and equipment fails. Most materials that meet this requirement are sportswear, while cotton-polyester blends such as shirts and suit pants are all ruled out. If sorting by fiber type or even ratio were required, overall costs would rise sharply.

The second barrier is foreign object separation. Buttons, zippers, and other metal and plastic items mixed into textiles affect fiber quality and damage equipment, and can only be removed manually. Garment factory scraps are in high demand precisely because their composition is fixed and they contain no foreign objects. Wang Huaping added that separating adhesives, coatings, and other different materials also drives up costs, further压低 economic value.

The third barrier is technology implementation. A Tongji University team is advancing an integrated demonstration of chemical recycling for cotton-polyester blends but has encountered policy obstacles. Du Huanzheng, director of the Institute of Ecological Civilization and Circular Economy, explained that recycling projects could be regarded as waste recovery projects and should logically be located near landfills or treatment plants, but environmental protection policies prevent them from being sited nearby; chemical methods are required to be carried out in chemical industrial parks, yet emerging projects' investment and production scale cannot meet the entry thresholds of those parks. "Without economies of scale, it is hard to meet GDP-per-mu assessment requirements, and new technologies are caught in the middle."

Break Through via Uniforms, Break the Deadlock through Coordination

In 2022, the National Development and Reform Commission and other ministries issued policies planning for a waste textile recycling rate of 25% by 2025 and 30% by 2030. Compared with the 50% level in some developed countries, there is great room for improvement, and the raw materials saved are equivalent to adding new "urban oil fields" and "urban cotton fields."

The experts interviewed jointly called for building a complete collection, sorting, and comprehensive utilization system so that mixed collected old clothes can be categorized by material and then connected to corresponding recycled fiber production lines. Wang Jinfeng suggested setting up visual or machine-readable labels for fabric materials at the production end, so machines can scan and identify categories, and improving traceability and certification standards for recycled fibers, noting the amount of recycled fiber used in fabric labels. School uniforms, workwear, and other uniforms, because their materials and usage cycles are uniform, can be centrally procured and centrally recycled, and are seen by the industry as a breakthrough for scaled circular utilization. Du Huanzheng believes that from raw material collection and classification to technology industrialization, financing, and the formation of a closed-loop system, coordinated supporting policies from multiple departments are needed, using integrated innovation in policy, technology, and business models to clear the bottlenecks.

Source: Where Is the "Renewal" of Waste Textiles Stuck? · Originally published 2000-01-01