WENZHOU, China (news agencies) — At a factory in Zhejiang province on China’s eastern coast, two mounds of discarded cotton clothing and bed linens, loosely separated into dark and light colors, pile up on a workroom floor. 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% recycled worldwide, according to fashion sustainability nonprofit Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Even less — only 1% — 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, where more than 26 million tons 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” — cheap clothes made from unrecyclable synthetics, not cotton. Produced from petrochemicals that contribute to climate change, air and water pollution, synthetics account for 70% of domestic clothing sales in China.
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 fibers and then all these waste textiles will be put into use again,” she said.
But that is an elusive goal: Only about 20% of China’s textiles are recycled, according to the Chinese government — and almost all of that is cotton.
Chinese cotton is not without a taint of its own, said Claudia Bennett of the nonprofit Human Rights Foundation. Much of it comes from forced labor in Xinjiang province by the country’s ethnic Uyghur minority.
“One-in-five cotton garments globally is linked to Uyghur forced labor,” Bennett said.
In May, the U.S. blocked imports from 26 Chinese cotton traders and warehouses to avoid goods made with Uyghur forced labor. But because the supply chain is so sketchy, Uyghur cotton is used in garments produced in other countries that don’t bear the “made-in-China” label, Bennett said.
“Many, many, many clothing brands are linked to Uyghur forced labor through the cotton,” she said. They “hide behind the lack of transparency in the supply chain.”
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 6 out of a possible 150 points. Temu scored zero.
Also getting zero were U.S. label SKIMS, co-founded by Kim Kardashian, and low-price brand Fashion Nova. U.S. retailer Everlane was the highest-scorer at 40 points, with only half of those for sustainability practices.
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.
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