As the changing seasons increase residents' need to organize their wardrobes, various used clothing recycling channels—such as online appointment-based door-to-door pickup, community recycling bins, and brand store collection points—are being rolled out at an accelerating pace, and discarding is no longer the only fate for old clothes. The recycling and reuse of waste textiles is driving the green transformation of the textile industry and helping reduce carbon emissions and the volume of household waste, while also being seen as a circular economy track with commercial potential, becoming a new growth area for the industry under the guidance of the "dual carbon" strategy.

Policy as the Foundation, Industry Moving Faster Toward Standardization

China is a major textile consumer, generating large amounts of waste textiles every year. The 2022 "Implementation Opinions on Accelerating the Recycling of Waste Textiles" set out nine specific measures in three areas—production, recycling, and comprehensive utilization—including encouraging the use of green fibers, strengthening textile producers' social responsibility, improving the recycling network, broadening recycling channels, and strengthening recycling management. The "14th Five-Year Plan for the Development of the Circular Economy" also makes long-term plans at the macro level. The resonance between policy and the public's green consumption concepts has driven up the density of recycling points and the value of recycling.

The Back-End Journey of a Piece of Old Clothing

Handing old clothes to a digital recycling platform is not the end point. Ma Yun, founder of the internet environmental recycling platform Feimayi, said the complete chain must go through front-end collection, centralized sorting, categorized disposal, secondary circulation or regeneration: after recycling companies collect and consolidate the items, they sort and grade them by condition and fabric material, then decide the destination based on material and condition. Because the chain is long and involves many stages, it demands strong multi-party collaborative operational capability, and a recycling platform alone finds it hard to run the whole process independently.

The implementation of the producer responsibility concept has led brands to actively enter the back-end disposal stage of clothing. In August this year, Uniqlo expanded its RE.UNIQLO clothing recycling service to stores nationwide and, together with the Feimayi mini-program, opened an online recycling channel: offline stores support drop-off along the way with no minimum quantity, while online supports door-to-door pickup, resolving consumers' difficulty in recycling due to insufficient quantity or weight of old clothes. In this process, brands can also continuously collect feedback on drop-off convenience, process transparency, and where the clothes go, for service iteration.

Aya Hanada, sustainability manager at Uniqlo China, introduced that the RE.UNIQLO project was launched in 2020, with the original intention of trying to extend the service life of the clothing itself. In China, in addition to clothing recycling services, the brand has also opened five RE.UNIQLO STUDIO clothing renewal workshops, offering old clothing repair and creative alteration services, meeting personalized needs through creative embroidery and other methods.

There Is Still a Gap Between Recycling Volume and an Established Industry

The China National Resources Recycling Association's "China Renewable Resource Recycling Industry Development Report (2025)" shows that last year China's waste textile recycling volume was about 5.15 million tons, which is less than 30% of the more than 20 million tons generated annually. Front-end participation is increasing, but mid- and back-end sorting standardization, the maturity of regeneration technology, and large-scale application capability still need to be built up, especially the "fiber-to-fiber" (T2T) circular model, which still requires continuous exploration. Hanada said that from recycling, sorting, and pretreatment to regeneration, the entire process still requires extensive testing with different partners, and "the RE.UNIQLO clothing recycling service is not a finished answer," but rather a direction to explore together with all parties.

The Next Step of Multi-Party Collaboration

Building a complete "recycling—sorting—comprehensive utilization" system is inseparable from technological innovation, corporate model upgrading, and public participation. AI intelligent sorting, chemical recycling, functional regenerated fibers, and ten-thousand-ton complete equipment are being introduced; Uniqlo and Feimayi are unifying the back-end sorting and disposal process, achieving full-chain traceability through dynamic records and data systems; the online recycling entrance offers multiple options such as exchanging for eco-friendly goods, paid recycling, and charitable donations to bring it closer to people. The China Consumers Association's "China Consumer Green Consumption Guide (2026 Edition)" is also guiding consumers to establish a scientific concept of idle item disposal, while various regions have seen participation models such as personal carbon accounts and government-guided transparent recycling. Industry insiders believe that old clothing circulation is a systematic upgrade of the entire industrial chain, and the effectiveness of project implementation depends on whether consumers can provide a sufficient scale of old clothing supply—only when recycling volume continues to expand can there be realistic support for optimizing the recycling system and iterating regeneration processes.

Source: From Community Recycling Bins to Brand Stores, Used Clothing Recycling Becomes a Daily Part of Green Consumption · Originally published on 2026-09-21