China generates more than 20 million tonnes of waste textiles each year, yet the China Renewable Resource Recycling Industry Development Report shows that the recycling rate is only about 15%. Even among materials that enter the recycling stream, a considerable share is "downcycled" into low-value products such as insulation and filling materials; less than 1% of waste clothing material is ultimately remade into new clothes.

Key points

  • China generates more than 20 million tonnes of waste textiles each year, with a recycling rate of about 15%.
  • A large proportion of the materials that enter recycling are downcycled into low-value products such as insulation and filling.
  • Less than 1% of waste clothing material can be reprocessed into new clothing.

Putting old clothes into recycling bins, selling them to second-hand shops, or donating them to poor households are essentially forms of "reuse," not material-level "recycling." A shirt turned into a pillowcase will eventually become waste once it wears out. True recycling means extracting the fibers from fabric and remaking them into new textile products, forming a closed loop.

The problem is that this is extremely difficult worldwide. Waste textiles that are not recycled mostly end up in landfills or are incinerated. Incineration can pollute the air, while landfilling occupies land and degrades slowly. Take polyester, which is used in large quantities in fabrics: its chemical composition is the same as that of plastic beverage bottles, so it is likewise hard to degrade and brings environmental problems such as microplastics; even natural fibers, which degrade more easily, often do not get conditions in landfills that favor their decomposition. Discarding these materials also means waste: chemical fiber production consumes oil, cotton cultivation consumes large amounts of water, and recycling could reduce these resource inputs and the carbon emissions from producing new products.

The technical root of the recycling difficulty lies in fiber quality. Waste paper can be pulped and remade into new paper, but old clothes cannot simply be torn up and woven directly into new fabric—the fibers have already been severely worn during wear and are hard to bring up to textile requirements. Turning old clothes into high-quality new fibers requires more technologically sophisticated paths, such as dissolving cotton fibers with special solvents to make regenerated fibers, or dissolving and breaking chemical fibers down into small molecules and then repolymerizing them.

Several such "high-quality recycling" technologies have emerged, yet they are hard to popularize. The biggest obstacle is that clothing composition is complex and difficult to separate. Textile recycling processes are usually designed for the chemical properties of a specific fiber, and one method often can handle only one component. In theory, materials should first be sorted by type, but in practice there is still no mature system that can sort efficiently, and the work still relies heavily on manually checking labels. The complexity of composition is also reflected within a single garment: to improve fabric performance, a large amount of clothing uses blends of different fibers, making separation and recycling even more difficult. Researchers are trying to use infrared sensors to distinguish fabrics and developing chemical methods to handle blended textiles, but changing the status quo will still take time.

While waiting for technology to mature, reduction and reuse are areas ordinary people can work on: besides donating and reselling second-hand clothes, purchasing strategies can also be adjusted—buying according to need, choosing durable products to extend the wearing cycle, and minimizing the purchase of cheap, easily damaged fast-fashion clothing.

This article's facts are drawn from a popular science article republished by The Paper, and its assessment points to the same industry reality: the bottleneck in old clothes recycling is not "collection," but sorting and fiber-level regeneration; before circular technologies are fully in place, export sorting, second-hand circulation, and downcycling will remain the destinations for the largest volume of waste textiles.

Source: Where do the old clothes I throw into the recycling bin ultimately go?_The Paper·Paike_The Paper · Originally published on 2022-11-28