‘When people see second-hand clothes, they think poverty’: China has millions of tons of discarded clothing no one wants

China’s love for fast fashion sees 26 million tonnes of clothes and footwear thrown away every year, less than one per cent of which is reused or recycled

Only charities in China can sell used clothing, and with few takers, most is exported, downcycled, sent to landfill, or burned in incinerators

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Employees sort used clothing at a facility operated by second-hand clothing trading firm Baijingyu in Hangzhou, China. Less than 1 per cent of the 26 million tonnes of clothing and accessories discarded each year in China is recycled or reused; the rest is exported, downcycled or burned. Photo: Bloomberg

Published: 7:29pm, 19 Oct 2020Updated: 7:29pm, 19 Oct 2020

“Low-carbon, warmth, love,” reads the sign on a large green metal bin, into which Beijing resident Zhao Xiao stuffs her unwanted, old clothes. “If some poor Chinese person really needs them, that would be great and would make me feel less guilty about throwing them away,” said the 35-year-old resident of Dongcheng District.

Zhao is right to worry about what happens to her charitable donation. There are clothing collection bins dotted all around China’s major cities, but few of the garments go to charity. Some are sold to developing countries, others are either burned or buried in landfills.

In a country that makes more than five billion T-shirts a year, there is a stigma to wearing old or second-hand clothes and tens of thousands of of tons of garments are discarded every day. An aspirational middle class, combined with a boom in e-commerce, has turned China into the world’s biggest fashion market, overtaking the US last year.

Greater China accounts for a fifth of Japanese retail giant Uniqlo’s global revenue and the company’s sales in the region rose almost 27 per cent in the 2017-2018 financial year to more than US$4 billion. Most of China’s purchases are fast fashion – mass-produced, cheap, short-lived garments.

Second-hand clothes at a charity shop in China. Photo: Bloomberg

The result: China throws away 26 million tons of clothes every year, less than one per cent of which is reused or recycled, according to state news agency Xinhua.