Wang Lin, Director of the Resource Comprehensive Utilization Project under the Environmental Resources Committee of the China National Textile and Apparel Council (CNTAC), stated at a sustainable fashion event in Shanghai on October 31 that China's textile industry is accelerating the formulation of recycling targets. However, waste textiles have mixed compositions and rely heavily on manual sorting, making it difficult for the recycling scale to meet industrial production needs. A more orderly closed-loop recycling system with clear material flows must be established.

Key points:

  • Wang Lin disclosed key targets: by 2025, the recycling rate of waste textiles should reach 25%, and the output of recycled fibers should reach 2 million tons; by 2035, recycled fibers should account for 15% of total fiber processing volume.
  • The EU passed the ESPR in April 2024, with textiles among the first batch of regulated products, requiring apparel and footwear to contain a specified proportion of recycled fibers in raw materials, and plans to implement rules for all textile waste by 2028.
  • China proposed "Zero Waste" in 2014 and launched the "Zero Abandonment of Old Clothes" initiative. Special recycling research has been carried out in scenarios such as brand stores and hotel linens. Carbon footprint testing of recycled down shows a reduction of 188 kg CO₂ per kilogram.

On the policy side, Wang Lin outlined two driving tracks at home and abroad. The EU has successively launched the Circular Economy Action Plan and issued the "EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles – 2030 Vision," aiming to make it the norm for old clothes to enter the circular system, prevent unsold or returned textiles from being destroyed, and establish a profitable repair and recycling mechanism by 2030. The Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) passed in April 2024 includes apparel and footwear in its first batch of regulated objects, explicitly requiring consideration of recycled fiber use and full life-cycle impacts at the design stage. In China, since the "30-60" dual carbon goals were proposed, the textile industry's "Action Outline for Building a Modern Textile Industrial System (2022-2035)" has set clear requirements for output growth of biodegradable materials, green fibers, and recycled fibers, with the target for the share of green fibers in the chemical fiber industry raised to over 25% by 2025.

From the perspective of material structure, global circular pressure is mainly concentrated on chemical fibers. In 2023, global fiber production was about 124 million tons, with China accounting for half; of this, chemical fibers totaled 84 million tons, accounting for 67% of global fiber production. Wang Lin said that in recent two years, chemical recycling of polyester has broken through cost and output bottlenecks through industry-university-research cooperation, and industrial production lines have been launched; in the direction of waste nylon, the first-phase 30,000-ton recycled differentiated fiber capacity has been put into operation, and a 100,000-ton production line is planned, with raw materials from waste fishing nets, scraps, and old clothes. She also called for establishing a closed loop starting from deep-sea fishing net recycling and encouraging ocean-going companies to bring fishing nets back for reuse.

Wang Lin's team concluded after years of research: waste textiles cannot enter the textile industrial system mainly because the recycling end is mixed and the scale of sorting individuals is small, unable to meet the batch sizes required by industry. Therefore, she proposed "targeted recycling and quality-based utilization," allowing bulk raw materials to directly connect from the consumption end to remanufacturing enterprises. Implementation cases include brand store recycling and hotel linen processing: the former test shows that recycled down produced from automated disassembly of down jackets recovered from brand channels is close in value to virgin down, with processing per kilogram consuming 1,140 megajoules less energy and reducing 188 kg CO₂ compared with virgin down; the latter has advanced physical and chemical pathways for towels, bath towels, and bedding, with a thousand-ton-level chemical pilot line under construction. It is estimated that each ton of recycled linen reduces 103 kg CO₂ equivalent, and 10,000 tons of waste linen can reduce up to 40,000 tons of CO₂ equivalent.

Wang Lin said that the closed loop requires cross-industry and cross-regional collaboration, with unified connection from green design and green manufacturing to consumption and reuse, in order to reduce recycling costs and increase the circular proportion. For the industry, circular targets are no longer just an end-of-pipe disposal issue, but are bound to raw material procurement, product design, and public procurement compliance. Companies going global and upstream supply chain players need to respond in advance to recycled fiber ratio and full life-cycle data requirements.

Source: Wang Lin of CNTAC Environmental Resources Committee: A More Orderly Closed-Loop Recycling System with Clear Material Flows Needs to Be Built · Originally published on 2024-11-15