South Korea — one of the world’s largest exporters of used clothing — is facing an escalating textile waste crisis as fast fashion drives record consumption, weak regulation fuels opaque waste flows, and recycling infrastructure lags far behind the scale of the problem.
Between March 2024 and February 2025, South Koreans spent an extraordinary $58 billion on fashion, reinforcing a culture of consumption where appearance carries outsized social weight. As buying accelerated, waste surged: the country now generates 800,000 tonnes of textile waste annually, equivalent to more than 2,000 commercial aircraft. Yet only 12 percent is recycled due to limited public infrastructure.
With more than 80 percent of used-clothing collection controlled by private operators, the system functions as a largely unregulated marketplace. Collection boxes with no identified owners, missing audits and opaque export channels enable intermediaries to profit from public waste. Much of the collected clothing is shipped to India, Malaysia or Pakistan — and then re-exported — effectively outsourcing the environmental burden.
Advocacy organisations such as Wear Again Lab argue that this regulatory vacuum has created a system resistant to oversight. “Anyone can buy a box,” says founder Juyeon Jung, describing a model in which private collectors actively oppose regulation that could reduce margins.
South Korea’s predicament reflects a global pattern in which fast fashion generates volumes of waste that existing systems cannot manage. The UN estimates a truckload of textiles is landfilled or burned every second, contributing to toxic emissions and microfibre pollution. Meanwhile, the fashion industry as a whole accounts for up to 8 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions.
The Korean government has begun responding. In 2025, it committed $24.7 million to develop polyester-recycling technologies that could reintroduce composite fibres into domestic production cycles. Civil-society groups are pushing for measures aligned with European legislation, including bans on destroying unsold stock — a practice contributing to the 30 percent of clothing produced globally that never enters the market.
A cultural shift is also underway. Wear Again Lab now runs more than 50 clothing-swap events and repair workshops annually, reframing reuse as enjoyable rather than burdensome. Vintage districts in Seoul are booming and the second-hand market is expected to reach $30 billion in 2025 — double its size in 2021.
But advocates warn that resale alone cannot fix overconsumption. Inflated buying for resale risks reinforcing the very behaviours that drive waste. The path forward, they argue, requires systemic regulation, investment in recycling infrastructure, and a genuine shift in consumption habits: buy less, use longer and close the loop domestically rather than exporting the problem.
South Korea’s challenge is now clear: the country must build a circular textile system robust enough to match its fashion-driven identity, or risk drowning in the waste of its own success.
