There is a pile of discarded cotton clothing and bedlinens, loosely separated into dark and light colours, on the workroom floor of a factory in China’s Zhejiang province. Jacket sleeves, collars and brand labels protrude from the stacks as workers feed the garments into shredding machines.
It’s the first stage of a new life for the textiles, part of a recycling effort at the Wenzhou Tiancheng Textile Company, one of the largest cotton recycling plants in China.
Textile waste is an urgent global problem, with only 12 per cent recycled worldwide, according to fashion sustainability NGO, Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Even less – only 1 per cent – are castoff clothes recycled into new garments. The majority is used for low-value items like insulation or mattress stuffing.
Nowhere is the problem more pressing than in China, the world’s largest textile producer and consumer. More than 26 million tonnes of clothes are thrown away each year, according to government statistics. Most of it ends up in landfills.
And factories like this one are barely making a dent in a country whose clothing industry is dominated by “fast fashion”. Produced from petrochemicals that contribute to climate change, air and water pollution, synthetics account for 70 per cent of domestic clothing sales in China.
Fast fashion’s massive contribution to carbon emissions
China’s footprint is worldwide – e-commerce juggernaut brands Shein and Temu make the country one of the world’s largest producers of cheap fashion, selling in more than 150 countries.
To achieve a game-changing impact, what fashion expert Shaway Yeh calls “circular sustainability” is needed among major Chinese clothing brands so waste is avoided entirely.
“You need to start it from recyclable fibres and then all these waste textiles will be put into use again,” she said.
But that is an elusive goal: only about 20 per cent of China’s textiles are recycled, according to the Chinese government – and almost all of that is cotton.
While China is a global leader in the production of electric cars and electric-powered public transit and has set a goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2060, its efforts in promoting fashion sustainability and recycling textiles have taken a back seat.
According to a report this year from independent fashion watchdog Remake assessing major clothing companies on their environmental, human rights and equitability practices, there’s little accountability among the best-known brands.
The group gave Shein, whose online marketplace groups about 6,000 Chinese clothing factories under its label, just six out of a possible 150 points. Temu scored zero.
A worker feeds discarded textiles to a shredding machine at the Wenzhou Tiancheng Textile Company, one of China’s largest cotton recycling plants in eastern China’s Zhejiang province. Photo: AP
China’s domestic policy doesn’t help.
Cotton recycled from used clothing is banned from being used to make new garments inside China. This rule was initially aimed at stamping out fly-by-night Chinese operations recycling dirty or otherwise contaminated material.
But now it means the huge spools of tightly woven rope-like cotton yarn produced at the Wenzhou Tiancheng factory from used clothing can only be sold for export, mostly to Europe.
Making matters worse, many Chinese consumers are unwilling to buy used items anyway, something the Wenzhou factory sales director, Kowen Tang, attributes to increasing household incomes.
“They want to buy new clothes, the new stuff,” he said of the stigma associated with buying used.
Still, among younger Chinese, a growing awareness of sustainability has contributed to the emergence of fledgling “remade” clothing businesses.