“Fast fashion definitely is not out of fashion” in China, says Sheng Lu, professor of fashion and apparel studies at the University of Delaware. China, the world’s largest textile producer and consumer, is grappling with an overwhelming surge of textile waste. Each year, around 26 million tonnes of clothes, mostly made of unrecyclable synthetics, find their way into the country’s overflowing landfills, according to a report by AP .
But this isn’t just a problem for China — growing textile waste is an urgent global crisis. Only 12 per cent of textiles are recycled worldwide, as noted by the fashion sustainability nonprofit Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Shockingly, a mere one per cent of castoff clothes are repurposed into new garments, with the vast majority relegated to low-value items like insulation or mattress stuffing.
As fashion trends take over China, what’s the situation like and how are they dealing with the growing waste? Let’s take a closer look The fast fashion dilemma At a factory in Zhejiang province on China’s eastern coast, two piles of discarded cotton clothing and bed linens, loosely sorted into dark and light colors, cover the workroom floor. Jacket sleeves, collars, and brand labels stick out from the heaps as workers feed the garments into shredding machines. This marks the first step in the textiles’ new life, part of a recycling initiative at the Wenzhou Tiancheng Textile Company, one of China’s largest cotton recycling plants.
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