China's overall recycling rate for waste textiles is less than 30%. Although old clothing collection bins have become widespread in residential communities across major Chinese cities, and online free door-to-door collection services are also widely favored, most of the collected old clothes end up at waste incineration plants after collection, aside from a portion that enters the second-hand market. Harder-to-recycle categories such as worn-out bed sheets, stuffed toys, and geotextiles from construction sites further drag down the overall utilization rate. This is the current situation disclosed in a September 18 report by Economic Information Daily.

Key Points

  • China's overall recycling rate for waste textiles is less than 30%, with large quantities of collected old clothes ultimately incinerated
  • Most collection bins are operated by private companies, with the core logic being commercial profit rather than charitable donation
  • After collection, clothing in relatively good condition is sorted and exported to second-hand markets in Africa and elsewhere, while severely damaged items can only be incinerated or landfilled

The report points out that many residents deposit old clothes into collection bins bearing the words "public welfare" or "charity," but the vast majority of these are actually operated by private companies, with the proportion of clothing genuinely used for donation being extremely low. Clothing of acceptable quality, after simple processing at sorting facilities, is either used as recycled raw material or exported to second-hand markets in Africa and other regions; while clothing that is severely damaged or stained, due to high reuse costs and significant technological barriers, can only be incinerated or landfilled, wasting resources while also generating carbon emissions and environmental pollution.

The root cause is that the current recycling system remains at a crude stage. First, the sorting mechanism is inadequate—residents lack effective guidance when depositing items, and clean clothing is mixed with worn-out fabrics, greatly increasing the difficulty and cost of downstream sorting. Second, regeneration technology lags behind—physical recycling methods tend to reduce fiber strength, and although chemical methods can achieve closed-loop recycling, they are costly with limited production capacity, and high-value regeneration as a whole is still in its early stages. Third, policies and regulations are absent—compared with the fine-grained sorting and Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) systems established in countries like Germany, China has yet to introduce dedicated regulations specifically targeting the recycling and utilization of waste textiles, with unclear responsible parties and a missing standards system.

The report also raises a cognitive issue worth reflecting on: the public's understanding of "old clothes donation" remains stuck in the historical memory of "lacking clothing and suffering from cold." As poverty alleviation achievements have been consolidated, the actual demand for old clothes in many remote areas has dropped significantly, and well-intentioned "charity feeding" may instead increase the processing burden on recipient areas, or even disrupt local textile industries.

To push waste textiles from "pseudo-circular" toward "true regeneration," the report suggests starting from three aspects: the government should accelerate legislative progress, clarify the responsibilities of each link in production, sales, and recycling, and establish unified sorting and regeneration standards; increase support for key technologies such as chemical regeneration; and guide the public to view old clothes as "recyclables" rather than "charity goods," promoting recycling behavior from emotional motivation to rational environmental protection.

For the old clothing recycling and regeneration industry, this utilization rate figure of less than 30% serves as a reminder: the pace of building the front-end collection network has far outpaced the construction of back-end sorting and regeneration capacity, and the filling of gaps in policies, regulations, and technology will be key for the industry to shift from crude expansion to sustainable operations.

Source: Let Waste Textiles Move from "Pseudo-Circular" to "True Regeneration" · Originally published on 2025-09-19