Social design has rapidly emerged as an interdisciplinary approach that applies design methods to address complex social problems and improve quality of life. Emphasizing sustainable development and social value, it integrates creative thinking and collaborative models across multiple fields to generate innovative solutions, reflecting design’s growing responsibility in driving meaningful social progress. This review examines community old-item recycling from a social design perspective by reviewing both international and local perspectives from the international and Chinese literature. It identifies three critical shifts for advancing the field: from functional optimization toward community construction, from digital-centric solutions toward integrated online-offline spatial design, and from universal templates toward contextually adaptive approaches. The review reveals that while scholarly achievements have accumulated considerably, significant gaps remain in integrating social design theory with recycling practice, understanding communities as social organisms, and attending to the symbolic dimensions of used items. By proposing a framework that treats old-item recycling as a process of meaning transfer and social relation reproduction, this review provides theoretical grounding and practical guidance for designing sustainable community resource systems that foster collective well-being.