Clothing recyclers find ‘treasure’ among castoffs
Print Edition
GRAB the 1.8-meter-tall panda by the nose and push its head open. Large plastic bags of clothing tumble out.
This panda-shaped clothes recycling bin, one of 2,000 in Shanghai, is located in Zihongjiayuan, a residential complex in Hongkou District. When Shanghai Daily checked it out on a late-January afternoon, local residents were complaining about the infrequency of pickups by the company that collects the donations.
The bins were set up to help make donations of unwanted and surplus clothing convenient for Shanghai residents. Some of the clothes are sorted, cleaned and distributed to the needy. Some of the clothes are recycled into clothes-making fabric.
The owner of the panda bins is Shanghai Yuanyuan, an 8-year-old company founded by 68-year-old Yang Yinghong, a retired government official.
Yang says 150 tons of clothes are collected from the bins every month by five full-time drivers.
The company is staying afloat financially, he says, even though only 3-4 percent of clothes collected are good enough to be donated to charities. The rest are recycled at factories that turned them into fabric.
This industry, Yang says, is a “race to the bottom.” Irresponsible recyclers are carving out their turfs, and many collected clothes are sold to local dealers for illegal resale or are recycled in processes detrimental to the environment.
Yang has invested 150 million yuan (US$22 million) in a new eco-friendly facility in neighboring Hangzhou, in tandem with another company. He says he is pursuing his own course and has no doubts that it will pay off.
Last year, his company added about 100 panda bins in 20 universities around the city, reducing the numbers of those in neighborhoods that have become recycling turf battlefields.
“We want to introduce the concept of clothes recycling to the younger generation,” Yang says, noting that the donations will be distributed back to needy students.
Unlike Shanghai Yuanyuan, emerging recycling businesses tend to rely on the Internet to drum up public interest.
One of them is Feimayi, or Flying Ants, founded by Ma Yun, a native of Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region and a graduate from a Shanghai university. Through the company’s namesake app, people can make an appointment for free pickup service to collect old clothes, as long as the bundles weigh 10 kilograms or more.
The clothes are delivered directly to factories. The 10 percent in the best condition, usually winter coats, are sorted out and donated to underdeveloped areas of China. The rest are either exported or recycled into new fabrics.
Ma says his team collected about 100 tons of clothes from all over the country last year, leaving the company in the black.
“An average package of clothes we receive weighs 15 kilograms, with many of our users telling us they collect garments from neighbors or colleagues,” he says.
The more clothes are handled, the less money Ma’s team has to spend on delivery services. But to a small recycling business like his, there are even more challenges to make it sustainable.
“Industrial recycling without government allowances is hardly profitable, and export demand has dropped in recent years, especially in Africa,” Ma says. “Meanwhile, we’re spending more on charity work because fewer non-governmental organizations are doing it because of the cost.”
To try to remedy gaps in the system, a large platform called One JIAN Charity Union was launched in December. The Shenzhen-based organization brings together One Foundation, the Alibaba Foundation and Cainiao Guoguo, a logistics tracking app developed by Alibaba. It weaves a network of dozens of organizations around the country dedicated to promoting clothes recycling.
One JIAN is said to mean both “a piece” and “a click.” Users of the app can mail their clothes via Deppon Logistics, with the first package every day exempt from fees on the first kilogram. Users are advised to mail under 2 kilograms of clothes.
Alibaba Foundation contributed 1 million yuan to the venture. Industry insiders believe that the money is mostly being spent on logistics, and they venture a guess that the financing is far from sufficient. The prime movers of the program announced that all donors would soon be able to track their donations through the app.
Buy42 is a 7-year-old online charity shop selling secondhand clothes through venues in Shanghai and the city of Nantong in Jiangsu Province. It was among the first to sign up for One JIAN and supports the employment of disabled people with proceeds from the sales of the clothes.
It now accepts clothes sent from Shanghai and Jiangsu via the platform but had to end free pickup delivery nationwide because of rising costs.
“We found that charging people a small fee to pick up clothes actually encourages them to donate more clothes of better quality,” says Yu Shiyao, co-CEO and marketing director of Buy42. “We put 30 percent of the donations on the sales shelf and hand over the rest to organizations with a better knowledge of recycling clothes in other ways.”
Her team is now seeking to open neighborhood charity shops in Shanghai, with the first expected in downtown Jing’an District in March.
“People will be able to drop off unwanted clothing at the shops,” she says. “But more importantly, we hope the shops will enlighten the public about charity and get them involved.”
To Nick Lim, a Singaporean expat in Shanghai who founded the social enterprise Baosquared in 2014, building trust with donors is important in the process.
He says his Fibre Project, conducted via 24 recycling boxes in Shanghai, collected and redistributed 16 tons of clothing in the past two years.
His team has been working as a bridge between Shanghai donors and schoolchildren in underprivileged parts of China. Lim says some of the old clothes can be “upcycled” into backpacks and pencil cases for the children.
“Instead of simply dumping clothes in poor villages like some do, we are looking to meet actual needs,” he says.
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