At a mill in Zhejiang state on China’s northeast beach, two mounds of discarded cloth clothing and bed linens, lightly separated into dark and light colors, clump up on a workroom floor. As workers load the items into shredding machines, product labels, collars, and jacket sleeves emerge from the stacks.
The Wenzhou Tiancheng Textile Company, one of China’s largest cloth recycling facilities, is beginning a new chapter for the fabric with this project.
Textile spend is an essential global concern, with just 12% recovered worldwide, according to fashion sustainability volunteer Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Even less — only 1% — are castoff garments recycled into new clothes, the lot is used for low-value items like insulation or bed packing.
Nothing is the issue more pressing than in China, the nation’s largest cotton producer and consumer, where more than 26 million tons of clothes are thrown away each month, according to authorities statistics. Most of it ends up in landfills.
And companies like this one are only little making a dent in a nation where cheap clothing is produced from unrecyclable synthetics rather than cotton, which is “fast fashion.” Synthetics, which are produced from petrochemicals that contribute to climate change, air pollution, and water pollution, account for 70 % of domestic clothing sales in China.
China’s footprints is widespread: E-commerce giant businesses Shein and Temu make the country one of the world’s largest suppliers of cheap clothing, selling in more than 150 places.
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.
She said, “You need to start it with recycled fibers so that all of these used textiles can be recycled.”
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.
According to Claudia Bennett of the Human Rights Foundation, Chinese cotton has some flaws of its own. The ethnic Uyghur minority in Xinjiang province is largely responsible for the country’s forced labor.
According to Bennett, “One in five cotton garments globally is linked to Uyghur forced labor.”
To prevent goods made with Uyghur forced labor, the U.S. slowed imports from 26 Chinese cotton traders and warehouses in May. 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 supply chain’s lack of transparency.”
China has set a goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2060, but its efforts to promote fashion sustainability and textile recycling have taken a backseat. It is a world leader in the production of electric cars and electric-powered public transportation.
There is little accountability among the best-known brands, according to a report released this year from independent fashion watchdog Remake that evaluates major clothing companies on their practices in terms of environmental, human rights, and equitability.
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.
Inside China, it is forbidden to use cotton from old clothing to create new clothing. This rule was intended to stop fly-by-night Chinese companies from recycling dirty or otherwise contaminated material.
However, it now means that the enormous spools of used clothing, tightly woven rope-like cotton yarn, can only be sold for export, mostly to Europe, at the Wenzhou Tiancheng factory.
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.
Thirty-year-old designer Da Bao founded Times Remake in 2019, a Shanghai-based brand that takes secondhand clothes and refashions them into new garments. At the company’s work room in Shanghai, tailors work with secondhand denims and sweatshirts, stitching them into funky new fashions.
The venture, which began with Da Bao and his father-in-law posting their one-off designs online, now has a flagship store in Shanghai’s trendy Jing’an District that stocks their remade garments alongside vintage items, such as Levi’s and Carhartt jackets.
According to Bao, the designs “are a fusion of the current fashion aesthetic and the traditional style to create something special.”
Zhang Na has a fashion label, Reclothing Bank, that sells clothes, bags and other accessories made from materials such as plastic bottles, fishing nets and flour sacks.
The items ‘ labels have QR codes that show their composition, how they were made and the provenance of the materials. Zhang draws on well-established production methods, such as textile fibers made from pineapple leaf, a centuries-old tradition originating in the Philippines.
” We can basically develop thousands of new fabrics and new materials”, she said.
Reclothing Bank started in 2010 to “give new life to old things,” Zhang remarked of her store in a historic Shanghai alley with a mix of Western and Chinese architecture. A sizable used clothing store sat outside the entrance.
“Old items actually carry a lot of people’s memories and emotions”, she said.
Zhang said her store’s core customers, who are typically in their 20s and 30s, have increased their awareness of sustainability.
Bao Yang, a college student who stopped by the store while visiting Shanghai, claimed she was surprised by the way the clothes felt.
“I think it’s amazing, because when I first entered the door, I learned that many of the clothes were actually made of shells or corn ( husks ), but when I went to the details, I had no idea that they would have this very comfortable feel,” she said.
She did acknowledge that it was difficult to sell sustainable clothing. “People of my age are more addicted to fast fashion, or they do not think about the sustainability of clothes”, she said.
Due to their labor-intensive production processes, recycled clothing sold at retailers like Reclothing Bank is much more expensive than fast-fashion brands.
The real issue is there, according to Sheng Lu, a professor of fashion and apparel studies at the University of Delaware.
Consumers are not willing to pay more for clothing made of recycled materials, according to studies, but instead they expect a lower price because they believe such clothing to be made of used items, he said.
With higher costs in acquiring, sorting and processing used garments, he doesn’t see sustainable fashion succeeding on a wide scale in China, where clothes are so cheap to make.
“Companies do not have the financial incentive”, he said.
He continued, citing government objectives like those that helped China’s EV industry grow, for real change to occur, and “more clear signals from the very top.”
Still, in China “government can be a friend to any sector”, Lu said, so if China’s communist leaders see economic potential, it could trigger a policy shift that drives new investment in sustainable fashion.
The tightly-wound cotton cones that were being loaded onto trucks outside the Wenzhou Tiancheng factory were all headed for foreign markets, far from where their recycling journey started, for the time being.
“Fast fashion definitely is not out of fashion” in China, Lu said.