Jinan's old clothing recycling chain has formed a three-tier structure: "door-to-door collectors — sorting factories — coastal export enterprises." Collectors purchase clothing, shoes, bags, quilts, and plush toys at about 0.2 yuan per jin. Sorting factories categorize better-quality summer clothing and connect with coastal export enterprises, which sterilize and disinfect the items before selling them to Southeast Asia and Africa. Lower-quality old clothing is shredded and processed into spinning raw materials, home textiles, industrial fabrics, or stripped of down and zippers for secondary use.

Key Points

  • Jinan collector Zhao Qinglei left a state-owned enterprise in July 2021 to found "Jinan Little Swallow Old Clothing Recycling." He visits over ten households per day on average, sometimes collecting more than 1,500 jin in a single day, and sells by the ton to the next-tier factory.
  • Changqing Xunding Environmental Technology Co., Ltd. handles sorting and distribution. Manager Yang Jiefei says good goods go directly to coastal export enterprises and are uniformly sterilized before export; according to industry rules, shipping costs are borne by the receiving party.
  • Lower-quality old clothing is shredded and spun into yarn for woolen fabrics, home textiles, industrial weaving, filtration materials, and blanket linings. Down jackets require a disinfection step when the down is extracted.

Door-to-Door Collection: The First Stop in Old Clothing's Journey

At 5 a.m. on January 8, before dawn, Zhao Qinglei had already planned his route based on prior customer appointments and set off to collect clothing from residents' homes. He left a state-owned enterprise in July 2021 and started his own old clothing recycling business, with "Jinan Little Swallow Old Clothing Recycling" as his starting point. He notes that processing 1 kilogram of waste textiles equals saving 0.2 kilograms of pesticide, 0.3 kilograms of fertilizer, 3.6 kilograms of carbon dioxide, and 600 liters of water.

Citizen Ms. Liu felt relieved after handing over old clothes she had accumulated for years to Zhao Qinglei. She found Little Swallow Old Clothing Recycling by chance while scrolling through Douyin. With a large household, old shoes and clothes had long lacked a disposal channel — too wasteful to throw away, and no one would take them as hand-me-downs. That day Zhao collected from Erhuan South Road all the way to Liuyun Community, with winter clothes, summer clothes, and quilts piled into small hills at doorsteps. According to him, clothes, shoes, bags, quilts, bedsheets, and even plush toys are all collected, at an average price of about two mao per jin. The business is not easy — to accommodate customers' work schedules, he often leaves at 5 a.m. and visits a dozen households a day. Goods in the warehouse also don't stay long; the next-tier factory sends trucks to haul them away, settling by the ton before finer sorting.

Sorting Determines Destiny: Good Goods Exported, Poor Goods Shredded

Xunding Environmental Technology Co., Ltd. in Changqing is the second stop for much of Jinan's old clothing, but only a transfer point, not the final destination. Manager Yang Jiefei has been in the industry for two years. The factory mainly sorts, distributes, and reuses old clothing, with trucks arriving almost daily to unload. He makes clear that his operation is one tier above the collectors and does not directly collect door-to-door. The factory works with export enterprises in coastal regions, and good-quality clothing is exported abroad through them.

At 5 p.m., bundled clothing piled up like small mountains inside the factory. At one side of the sorting table, Yang Jiefei's partner Zhang Ming was training two young people about to become offline agents, explaining from categories to quality which clothing should be collected. Agents collect separately by district and deliver to the factory at agreed prices. Export factory agent Li Wei (pseudonym) says that once goods accumulate to a certain quantity, the factory is notified to send a truck. According to industry custom, shipping costs are borne by the receiving party, and agents usually only supply the upstream factory.

The goods list in the office shows that secondhand clothing is sorted quite finely — summer clothing alone is divided into five or six types, including men's T-shirts, men's shirts, men's short-sleeve shirts, men's long-sleeve shirts, women's dresses, and smooth-fabric sportswear. Zhang Ming says the fine categorization is to match goods to orders, selecting only items of good quality that can be sold directly on the market. According to Zhang Ming, the social environment in parts of Africa creates strong demand for Chinese secondhand clothing, which is also an important reason for the expansion of China's recycling market in recent years. The Jinan factory only does one round of fine sorting; final sterilization and disinfection occur after the goods reach coastal export enterprises.

At the regulatory level, domestically old clothes can only be recycled or shredded for reuse, not refurbished. Sun Zhen, who once worked in Tanzania, saw large quantities of Chinese secondhand clothing for sale in local clothing markets, with inner labels showing the shipping origin as coastal Shandong.

Shredded Old Clothing: Ending Its Identity as Clothing, Becoming Industrial Raw Material

Lower-quality old clothing finds another outlet. Garments with longer wool fibers can be directly spun into woolen fabrics or knitted into sweaters and pants, with quality no inferior to virgin wool products. Longer recycled wool fibers can also be blended with good fibers, and the resulting yarn can be used for home textiles, industrial weaving, filtration materials, and various blankets, fabrics, and clothing linings.

At Sun Shangcheng's Nanshan factory, workers occasionally remove zippers from garments for direct reuse. Down jackets that are too damaged to enter the market have their down extracted and sent to processing plants for secondary use — this step includes a disinfection process. Sun Shangcheng also plans to sell qipaos or Chinese-style formal wear in bulk, as the other party is interested in Chinese elements. As for shredded waste material, it is generally used for industrial products and processed by factories according to procedures; for those shredded old clothes, their identity as clothing ends there.

For the industry, this diversion path of "high-grade export, low-grade regeneration" is both the driving force behind the expansion of China's secondhand clothing recycling scale and a reminder that sorting capacity, disinfection conditions, and compliance boundaries remain key links determining the value of old clothing.

Source: Exposed! Where do recycled old clothes go? Some are shredded, some can go abroad · Originally published 2022-01-11