China is the world's largest textile producer and consumer, accounting for more than half of global fiber processing, yet the resource recovery rate of waste textiles is below 1%, and about 73% of discarded textiles ultimately end up in landfills or incinerators. Around the three major categories of cotton, polyester, and nylon, as well as blended fabrics such as polyester-cotton and spandex, recycling routes including mechanical methods, solvent methods, enzymatic hydrolysis, and chemical depolymerization are moving from the laboratory to pilot scale, while industrialization remains concentrated in a few low-cost segments such as re-spinning of high-quality waste cotton.

Key Points

  • China's waste textile recycling rate is below 1%, and about 73% of discarded textiles are landfilled or incinerated.
  • Global fiber production reached 124 million tonnes in 2023, with polyester fiber at about 71 million tonnes, accounting for roughly 57% of market share; only about 1% of colored textiles are recycled.
  • Cangnan, Zhejiang has formed a nationwide recycled cotton recovery and processing base, with its recycled cotton yarn cleaning products holding a 50% national share; Jiangsu Zhongyuan Industrial has an annual capacity including 200,000 tonnes of recycled polyester chips and 80,000 to 100,000 tonnes of recycled polyester filament yarn.

Three Fundamentals on the Raw Material Side

Cotton has the most mature route. China's cotton output in 2024 was 6.164 million tonnes, and producing 1 kg of cotton fiber requires about 1,559 liters of water and depends on pesticides and fertilizers. Waste cotton recycling mainly relies on mechanical methods, solvent methods, and biological recovery: mechanical methods are suitable for single-material cotton fabrics but cause significant fiber damage and mostly yield downgraded products; solvent methods use ionic liquids, alkaline/urea systems, and others to dissolve and re-spin cotton. Cangnan County, Zhejiang Province has built a circular industrial chain of "recovery—sorting—opening—spinning," using clean scraps from garment manufacturing as raw material and directly producing same-color cotton yarn through color sorting, eliminating the chemical decolorization step. Zhang Yaopeng's team at Donghua University produced regenerated pulp with a degree of polymerization of 300 to 1,172 from waste cotton fabrics; the "Development and Industrialization of Regenerated Cellulose Fiber from Waste Cotton" project jointly carried out by Tangshan Sanyou Group Xingda Chemical Fiber Co., Ltd. and Qingdao University developed multiple key technologies addressing challenges such as the low reactivity of waste cotton pulp.

Polyester is the largest category by volume. Data from Textile Exchange shows that global fiber production increased from 116 million tonnes in 2022 to 124 million tonnes in 2023, with polyester fiber output at about 71 million tonnes in 2023, up from 63 million tonnes in 2022. Physical methods mostly end in downgraded use and also face issues such as polymer thermal degradation and fluctuations in raw material batches. Chemical methods are divided by monomer into hydrolysis, alcoholysis, aminolysis, and others. Jiangsu Zhongyuan Industrial Group focuses on recycled polyester chips and differentiated recycled polyester filament yarn. Decolorization is a difficult point: dyed polyester has a stable structure, and Ren et al. developed a supercritical carbon dioxide and co-solvent synergistic decolorization technology; Zuo Weiwei's team at Donghua University achieved a decolorization rate exceeding 97.7% through a three-step process of "ethylene glycol vapor pretreatment decolorization, depolymerization, and BHET purification," while recovering dyes and recycling ethylene glycol.

Nylon's complexity comes from its source structure. Spinning waste accounts for about 10% of production, has a single composition, low contamination, and is easy to recycle; post-consumer waste, however, carries impurities such as dyes, metal adhesives, and plastics. Waste PA6 can be physically crushed and re-pelletized, or chemically depolymerized to recover monomers. Yu Jianyong's team at Donghua University used H+/OH- generated by subcritical water self-ionization to catalyze hydrolysis without an external catalyst, achieving a waste PA6 degradation rate of nearly 100%, a CPL yield of 91.6%, and a purity of 99.62%; Wang Huaping's team proposed a strategy of "PA6→hydrolysis to mid-polymer→regenerated PA6 or functionalized PA6."

Blends and Specialty Fibers: The Hardest Part

Polyester-cotton blended fabrics can selectively remove one component by exploiting the difference in solubility between cotton and polyester in solvents. Spandex blends similarly follow selective dissolution or selective depolymerization routes, with available solvents including tetrahydrofurfuryl alcohol (THFA), γ-valerolactone (GVL), DMF, DMSO, and others. A team from the University of Vigo in Spain and Aalto University in Finland used amino alcoholysis combined with the green solvent DMSO to degrade spandex in cotton-spandex waste at 80°C within 2 hours, with residual content below 0.08%; Belgium's Centexbel team used a 70% zinc chloride aqueous solution at 140°C to selectively decompose PU-coated fabrics while retaining the polyester base fabric; Sunitha Sadula's team at the University of Delaware developed a microwave-assisted catalytic glycolysis combined with solvent separation technology that depolymerizes polyester and spandex into monomers within 15 minutes under zinc oxide catalyst and microwave heating. The recycling routes for specialty/high-performance materials such as aramid, carbon fiber, and polyolefins show differentiated characteristics.

Where the Next Stage Is Stuck

The article summarizes the breakthrough points into three aspects: first, promote new technologies from the laboratory to pilot and engineering demonstration, as routes such as enzymatic depolymerization, microwave plasma, and catalytic conversion still need to solve engineering scale-up, cost control, and industrial chain coordination; second, break through the bottlenecks of intelligent sorting and component separation, develop intelligent sorting integrating hyperspectral/near-infrared and AI deep learning, and focus on dominant blend systems such as cotton/polyester and polyester/spandex to advance selective dissolution and mild catalysis; third, promote the efficiency of regeneration technologies and the high-valueization of products, maintain molecular weight through solid-state polycondensation, chain extension, and other means, while exploring low-loss decolorization or direct resource utilization of colored textiles, extending to applications such as nanocellulose, engineering plastics, and functional fibers.

For the industry, this means that the transformation of waste textiles from "low-efficiency disposal" to "high-value recycling" depends on the engineering progress of sorting, separation, and depolymerization, rather than consensus at the conceptual level.

Source: Waste Textile Recycling and Reuse: Status, Challenges and Development Prospects | ChinaReplas2025 31st Plastics Recycling and Regeneration Conference · Originally published on 2026-05-11