Textile and fashion industries have huge circular potential that has yet to be developed. One of the main issues holding back the application of the circular economy in this sector is sorting through textile waste, which requires a high degree of precision and is still done manually. Being able to automate the process and launch it on an industrial scale will therefore be the key to a real revolution in the world of textiles.

This is the goal of German company Stadler and Norwegian company Tomra, both specialized in collecting and recycling systems, which have opened the world's first fully automated textile sorting plant in Malmö, Sweden.

Textile and fashion industries have huge circular potential that has yet to be developed. One of the main issues holding back the application of the circular economy in this sector is sorting through textile waste, which requires a high degree of precision and is still done manually. Being able to automate the process and launch it on an industrial scale will therefore be the key to a real revolution in the world of textiles.

The German company Stadler and the Norwegian company Tomra, both specializing in collecting and recycling systems, have opened the world's first fully automated textile sorting plant in Malmö, Sweden. The facility is part of the SIPTex project (Swedish Innovation Platform for Textile Sorting), which aims to develop a fabric sorting solution suited to the needs of recyclers and the fashion industry. funded by Vinnova, the Swedish government's research and development agency, and led by IVL, the Swedish institute for environmental research, funded by Vinnova, the Swedish government's research and development agency, and led by IVL, the Swedish institute for environmental research, The result is a synergy between Stadler, who designed and built the facility, and Tomra, who supplied the NIR optical separators.

The third phase took off with the start-up of the fully automated sorting plant at Sysav Industri AB in Malmö. The plant has a capacity of up to 4.5 metric tons per hour in one line. The incoming material is delivered in bales comprising pre- and post-consumer textile waste, industrial waste such as cuttings, yarns, and scrap, and used domestic clothing and textiles, all to be sorted and separated by type and quality. "In the Avesta pilot project, we demonstrated that TOMRA's NIR sorting technology is capable of recognizing and differentiating various types of textiles,” explains Matej Fuerst, project manager at Stadler. "In the third phase, our objective was to ascertain that the system we designed could successfully operate on an industrial scale and that the output fractions could achieve the purity and recovery required for recycling and reutilization." "There is no industrial-scale technology for recycling textiles without downcycling them, so we had to develop a complete sorting solution."

"Little research is so far available on the recycling of textile fractions," adds László Székely, vice president at Tomra. "In order to be effective, automated sensor-based sorting is essential. In this project, our technology has proved efficient in separating different textile fractions by material type and color. We are proud to be part of this pioneering work.

SIPTex is a Swedish research project that will test and evaluate automated textile sorting by building and operating a pilot facility for 12 months (in Sweden). The recognition and sorting equipment is based on near-infrared (NIR) technology. The project contributes to resource efficiency and closing textile loops by matching customers’ quality requirements with fast and highly accurate sorting technology. At the end of the project, one can conclude that NIR / VIS technology has shown great potential for sorting textile waste by fiber composition and color, resulting in high-quality recycled products suitable for fiber-to-fiber recycling.

Photo Credit: SIPTex – Swedish Innovation Platform for Textile Sorting---https://boergroup-recyclingsolutions.com/projects/siptex-swedish-innovation-platform-for-textile-sorting/