In 2020, China generated about 22 million tons of waste textiles, with a recycling rate of about 20%; according to relevant development goals, the recycling rate should reach 30% by 2030, with recycled fiber output reaching 3 million tons. The commercial value of old clothes recycling is built on exactly this order of magnitude—a single garment is worthless in a household's eyes, but the tons of old clothes continuously generated by one residential compound, dozens of communities, or even an entire city are industrial raw materials that can be sorted, processed, and traded.

Key Points

  • In 2020, China generated about 22 million tons of waste textiles, with a recycling rate of about 20%; the 2030 target is 30%, with recycled fiber output of 3 million tons.
  • The revision project for technical specifications for waste textile recycling already covers collection, sorting, disinfection, storage, transportation, safety, and environmental protection; classification and coding standards are also being revised.
  • Old clothes in good condition and made of a single material have clear utilization paths, while blended materials are significantly more costly to process because fiber separation, decolorization, and regeneration are difficult.

The actual operation of old clothes recycling is not as simple as "buy low, sell high." The first step after clothes enter the recycling end is sorting; different materials, ages, degrees of damage, and categories lead to different downstream destinations. Cotton, chemical fibers, and various blended fabrics differ in processing difficulty. Public information shows that blended materials account for a relatively high proportion of textiles, and separating, decolorizing, and regenerating fibers of different compositions involves technical challenges. The easier the purity is to identify and the clearer the utilization path, the higher the processing efficiency. This is also why the industry feels more like a supply chain business than manual labor: for the same truckload of goods, mixed processing and finely separated processing can result in a huge difference in final value.

The division of labor where profits are hidden is also clear. The recycling end must solve the problem of source density—if a truck cannot collect much clothing in a day, labor, vehicle, and time costs cannot be spread out; only sufficiently dense sources can lower unit recycling costs. The sorting end competes on classification efficiency; if sorting is not detailed, it is just a "mountain of cloth" that cannot connect to downstream utilization scenarios. The processing end depends on material value; after standardized processing, waste textiles can be turned into recycled fibers and other uses, and recycled products can also enter fields such as building materials, automotive interiors and exteriors, agriculture, and environmental governance.

At this level, the pricing logic is completely decoupled from retail. The recycling stage does not calculate by tag price, but by weight, material, category, usability, and processing cost. An 800-yuan blended coat, once it enters the material recycling stage, may not necessarily have more processing value than several ordinary cotton garments with simple structures—consumer prices belong to retail logic, while recycling prices belong to raw material logic.

Changes at the standards level have a direct impact on practitioners in 2026. At present, the revision project for technical specifications for waste textile recycling covers collection, sorting, disinfection, storage, transportation, safety, and environmental protection, and standards related to the classification and coding of waste textiles are also under revision. This means recyclers aiming for long-term operation must be solid in warehousing, sanitary handling, transportation efficiency, and downstream stability. After scaling up, the biggest dilemma is not being unable to collect old clothes, but having goods piled in the warehouse that cannot be sorted out, shipped out, or sent to stable destinations; the goods occupy space while capital cannot be recovered.

For the industry, the threshold of old clothes recycling has never been how much premium a single garment can command, but rather concentrating scattered low-value items at lower cost and then raising overall utilization value through classification. The goods are cheap, but the process cannot be chaotic; per-item profit is inconspicuous, and scale and efficiency determine success or failure. If any link is missing—front-end supply, mid-stage sorting, or back-end absorption—the business will get stuck.

Source: Can recycling old clothes really make you rich? The clothes you casually throw away are sorted and resold, and some people have made a lot of money · Originally published on 2026-09-26