The circular economy is a central theme of the European Union on the way to achieving ambitious climate goals. The textile sector is also becoming more and more important. A sophisticated collection is essential for sustainable waste management. There is already an existing system for wearable textiles for used textiles, but this is currently being reconsidered. A large proportion of common household textiles are currently collected as residual waste and the potential is virtually lost as this proportion is not reused. The aim of this work was to record and quantify the proportion of wearable old textiles in residual waste. For this purpose, waste analyzes were carried out in several regions with different waste management criteria, such as a central or decentralized collection of used clothing. Four regions are chosen, which differ in terms of socio-economic factors into rural, intermediate and urban areas. Part of the investigation was to pick out all old textiles from a defined sample of residual waste and then sort them into different fractions using hand sorting. This resulted in six categories, which were divided into old clothes, shoes and accessories as well as other textiles and each into wearable and non-wearable. Based on the data from the analysis, the potential for wearable textiles in residual waste was calculated and the various factors were discussed. The results of this work showed that on average 5.1 kilograms of old textiles per capita could be collected from residual waste and more than half of them would still be wearable and therefore suitable for reuse. Differences between the individual areas can be deduced, for example, that the amount of discarded wearable textiles is lower in rural regions than in urban or intermediate areas.