In Fengze District, Fujian, an old clothes collector from Anhui buys old clothes through door-to-door purchases or from scrap buyers at five or six mao per jin, collecting more than ten tons a month and sometimes dozens of tons. The collected clothes are sorted and packed by category—garments, pants, shoes, hats—and once three or four tons have accumulated, a middleman is contacted to haul them away at over 1,000 yuan per ton, yielding a profit of about two or three mao per jin. The vast majority of these clothes pass through middlemen to old clothes processing enterprises in Zhejiang, Guangdong and elsewhere; clothes in poorer condition are broken down into textile raw materials, while those in good condition are processed into second-hand clothing for export.

Sorting is the key value-adding step. After washing, disinfection and classification, better-quality old clothes multiply in value several times over. Although China has no relevant standards, export enterprises and renewable resource companies still follow international market conventions and divide them into three grades—A, B and C: Grade A is new-looking, scarce, expensive and most sought after, while Grade C is relatively hard to sell. To balance price and shipment volume, this step usually adopts mixed sales, with men's tops, women's dresses, jeans and children's wear combined in each batch. A ton of second-hand clothing sells for between 5,000 and 8,000 yuan, depending on condition and mix, and is then exported to African countries through trading companies.

The same recycling chain operates in other residential communities. Mr. Xu sets up old clothes collection bins in his community, and the clothes he collects are mainly sold to other provinces for textile material recycling. Collectors report that most of the old clothes they receive are summer wear, which is directly related to Africa's climate; a small number of winter clothes are broken down for raw materials, and even overly worn fabrics are sold to pig farmers as fuel for cooking pig feed.

Africa is the world's largest market for old clothes and an important outlet for China's old clothes. Besides China, the countries exporting old clothes to Africa are mainly the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Japan and South Korea, with the US holding a market share of over 70%, followed by developed countries such as Japan and South Korea.

At the policy level, old clothes exports remain in a gray area, with most export enterprises declaring them as textiles or waste materials. African countries' attitudes also vary: Nigeria lists old clothes as absolutely prohibited imports, while Uganda, Niger, South Africa and others allow old clothes imports, with markedly different tariff levels. In Sierra Leone, a West African country, for example, the CIF price of old clothes is US$1 per kilogram, with tariffs and sales tax levied at 20% and 15% respectively.

For China's old clothes recycling industry, this chain—from community collection bins and door-to-door purchases to cross-provincial processing and re-export to Africa—currently depends both on Africa's continued absorption and on the constantly adjusting import policies of destination countries. The lack of proper customs declaration methods and standards in the export segment remains an uncertainty that participants must face.

Source: Old Clothes Sold by the Ton, Some Exported to Africa · Originally published on 2014-11-14