Wenzhou, China.- At a factory in Zhejiang province on China’s east coast, two mounds of discarded cotton clothing and bed sheets were separated into dark and light colors and piled on the floor.
Coat sleeves, collars and branded labels stand out from the mounds as workers feed the clothes into cutting machines.
This is the first stage of a new life for the textiles, part of a recycling effort by Wenzhou Tiancheng Textile Company, one of China’s largest cotton recycling plants.
Textile waste is an urgent global problem, with only 12 percent of textiles recycled worldwide, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a nonprofit focused on fashion sustainability.
Even less, just 1 percent, is clothing that is recycled into new designs, most of it used as low-value inputs like insulation or mattress stuffing.
Nowhere is the problem more pressing than in China, the world’s largest producer and consumer of textiles, where more than 26 million tons of clothing are thrown away each year, according to government statistics.
Most of it ends up in landfills.
Factories like this one represent a small percentage in a country whose clothing industry is dominated by “fast fashion” — cheap clothes made from non-recyclable synthetic fibers, not cotton.
Synthetic fibres, which come from petrochemicals and contribute to climate change, air and water pollution, account for 70 percent of domestic clothing sales in China.
China’s footprints are all over the world through online commerce giants Shein and Temu, making the country one of the world’s largest producers of cheap fashion, selling in more than 150 countries.
China’s domestic policy doesn’t help either, as recycled cotton from used clothing is banned from being used to make new designs within China.
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