At the 2025 Circular Innovation · Fashion Conference held by the China National Textile and Apparel Council (CNTAC), Sun Ruizhe, President of CNTAC, disclosed a set of figures: from 2005 to 2024, energy consumption per unit of output value in the textile industry fell by more than 65%, the volume of waste textiles recycled and utilized grew at an average annual rate of 12%, and annual usage of regenerated fibers exceeded 3 million tons. At the same conference, multiple enterprises and research institutions showcased domestic new technologies such as intelligent sorting, enzymatic regeneration, and chemical closed-loop depolymerization. The circular path of the textile industry is moving from policy goals toward industrial implementation.

Key points

  • Before 2024, the volume of waste textiles recycled and utilized grew at an average annual rate of 12%, and annual usage of regenerated fibers had exceeded 3 million tons.
  • According to the 2022 Implementation Opinions on Accelerating the Promotion of Waste Textile Recycling issued jointly by the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Commerce, and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, by 2025 the recycling rate of waste textiles must reach 25%, and regenerated fiber output must reach 2 million tons.
  • Currently only about 2% of waste textiles are used for industrial recycling, and 1% achieve closed-loop circulation.

Policy and industry advancing in tandem

2025 is regarded by the industry as a key year for waste textile recycling. The targets set in the document by the three ministries and commissions include: a waste textile recycling rate of 25%, regenerated fiber output of 2 million tons, and guidance for relevant institutions and enterprises to study and formulate recycling targets and roadmaps.

Actions on the industry side are also following up. In April 2025, China Resource Recycling Group Green Fiber Co., Ltd. was inaugurated in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, with the direction of promoting the subdivision of waste textile utilization toward specialization and scale.

Chemical recycling becomes a key technological battleground

The real difficulty in old clothing recycling lies in separating complex components such as polyester-cotton blends. The processing route of General Technology Zhongfang (Tianjin) Technology Development Co., Ltd. is: feeding waste T-shirts and bed sheets of various colors into a reaction device, and through rapid dissolution and degradation, rapid solid-liquid separation, and bleaching and decolorization, separating polyester from cotton to serve as raw material for regenerated textiles. Jin Jian, a professor-level senior engineer at the Functional Fiber Research Institute of General Technology China Textile Science Research Institute Co., Ltd., said that polyester-cotton blended products have complex components and are difficult to separate, making them a "hard nut to crack" in regeneration and utilization. Traditional methods have low efficiency, high energy consumption, and heavy pollution, while chemical methods provide a green and low-carbon alternative.

At the enterprise level, Zhejiang Jiaren New Materials Co., Ltd. focuses on chemical reaction recycling technology. Yu Liangliang, Director of the company's Brand Marketing Department, introduced that its annual production capacity reaches 30,000 tons, it can process about 40,000 tons of waste textiles each year, and it has cumulatively recycled nearly 450,000 tons. Its Phase II project is under urgent construction to support the "Textile to Textile" model. Li Xiangyu, Chief Sustainability Officer of Qingdao Amineo Material Technology Co., Ltd., said that the company has achieved chemical recycling of polyester-spandex blended fabrics, mastered technologies for five major categories of polyester-based blended fabrics, and made breakthroughs in three-component blended fabrics.

However, the physical method is still the mainstream way to recycle polyester and cotton products at present, namely opening and crushing them into low-value-added products such as felt and filling materials. Chemical methods are constrained by high costs, complex processes, and solvent recovery issues, and have not yet achieved large-scale industrialization.

Digital passports enter the scene

Digital tools are seen as another hand for connecting the entire chain. In June 2025, CNTAC released the 2025 China Textile Industry Product Digital Passport (DPP) White Paper. According to Hu Kehua, Deputy Director of the CNTAC Social Responsibility Office, the product digital passport runs through the entire life cycle of "design-production-circulation-consumption-recycling" and is an electronic digital identity file for products. It has already achieved functions such as deep linkage with the carbon labeling system and dynamic map display of processing factories and logistics routes. Brand enterprises such as Li-Ning, Anta, and Bosideng, as well as manufacturers and technical service providers such as Kailesi, Dali, and Sumec, have joined the related work.

Global gap and industry significance

The challenge is not only in China. The Circularity Gap Report 2024 shows that the global share of secondary materials used fell from 9.1% in 2018 to 7.2% in 2023. International Energy Agency (IEA) data show that carbon emissions from the textile and leather industries account for 0.6% of total global carbon emissions, while the world produces 100 billion garments each year, with an average of about 12 kilograms of carbon dioxide emitted per garment. Sun Ruizhe believes that the lock-in effect of existing infrastructure and the difficulty of internalizing externality costs are the main constraints.

Xu Weilin, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and Party Secretary of Wuhan Textile University, pointed out that waste textile recycling still faces difficulties such as difficult collection, difficult separation, and low large-scale utilization rates. It requires interdisciplinary and cross-chain collaborative innovation, and brand enterprises need to improve product recyclability and durability at the design stage. Yan Yan, Vice President of CNTAC, regards the product digital passport as the key to opening industry transformation and requires the industry to shift from a linear economy to a circular economy. For the old clothing trade and recycling industry, the cost curve of chemical recycling and the chain transparency of digital passports will directly determine the category boundaries and pricing logic of future sorting, export, and recycled material trading.

Source: Where do old clothes and old bed sheets go? The textile industry unfolds a new picture of circular development_CNR · Originally published on 2025-09-16