Automated processes are already highly developed all along the global textile and garment manufacturing chain. The supply chain is, however, still strictly linear, while being highly complex – spanning from fibres to finished garments and still involving tremendous waste and many unnecessary transportation steps globally on the route from the first chemical processing plants or cotton fields to the shelves of High Street stores.

In addition to continuing to address these issues, the supply chain will now very quickly have to become more circular, as legislation closes in and changes things dramatically.

New Restrictions

There is an immediate need for advanced new technologies that can close the loop for the collection, sorting and pre-processing of waste garments, in order for recycling to be further developed, especially in the European Union (EU), which will be first in imposing new restrictions.

As previously reported by Fibre2Fashion, over seven million tons of waste textiles is being mandated to be separately collected each year within the EU from 2025. It will be paid for by the brands who put product into the market via the new Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) scheme, and this waste is no longer eligible to be landfilled, incinerated or moved on to other countries. As such, it will create a 32 million-ton mountain of new waste by 2030 without immediate action.

Worn Again Technologies

The huge challenge this poses was emphasised by a number of speakers at the 62nd Dornbirn Global Manmade Fibers (GFC) conference held in Austria from September 13-15, including Toby Moss, director of business development for Worn Again Technologies.

Worn Again Technologies has raised funding of some €42.9 million to support the construction of its new textile chemical recycling demonstration plant in Winterthur, Switzerland, and counts Sulzer, Oerlikon and fashion retailer H&M among its key strategic investors.

The demonstration plant will be opened in 2025 and will recycle fibres from hard-to-recycle fabric blends using a solvent-based process, with an annual capacity of 1,000 tons. (Just for context, annual global fibre consumption is currently 120 million tons.)

Licensing model

Worn Again, however, is a technology licensing company and does not plan to build its own facilities, but is working with technology partners who will quickly build much larger-scale commercial plants. The first of these is expected to come onstream in Europe and have annual capacities of approximately 50,000 tons per annum by as early as 2027-28, when feedstock streams from waste textiles have sufficiently built up.

“At the moment, most current recyclers are focused on post-industrial waste, but demand will soon outstrip supply, which will lead to a rush into post-consumer textile waste,” Moss said. “At the same time, recycling capacity is not yet growing as fast as demand, while bottle companies are getting a lot better at bottle collection so a lot of rPET from bottles currently used in textile production will not be available. As a result, recycled content in textiles is likely to go down rather than up for a period and this indicates some healthy price premiums for the first companies producing recycled PET polyester fibres with the same performance as virgin fibres.”

As with many other current recycling technologies being developed and planning industrial upscaling in the near future, success is in part hinged on the collection and sorting of waste clothing becoming much more sophisticated – and quickly.

300 grades

“Collected clothing initially goes through a so-called ‘simple sort’ which is not actually that simple,” Moss explained. “There are something like 300 different grades of material that can come out of a sorting facility and they are currently loosely grouped into materials that can either be resold in domestic stores or exported to lower income countries – which is a bit of a grey area since a lot of potentially non-rewearable materials can also be exported to those countries and they cannot deal with it.

“Other materials are classed as non-rewearables and then finally non-reusable grades – about 10 per cent of the total that nobody really wants to deal with, so it is disposed of. This still leaves a big chunk that is recyclable, and what is now needed is investment in sorting and pre-processing to get to material specification for recyclers.”

The first thing is for the waste to be sorted into predominant fibre types.

“A lot of technologies are currently developing in this space and their accuracy is getting better all the time,” Moss said. “Hopefully the cost profile will come down because it will make the whole system more commercially viable as things progress.”

Size requirements

For the Worn Again process, once the garments are sorted, they then need to be mechanically processed to get to the company’s size requirement of around one-square centimetre.

“Some of our competitors have bigger or smaller size requirements, but what is common amongst chemical recyclers is that we need a different morphology than mechanical recyclers,” Moss explained. “Mechanical recyclers are trying to get to individual fibres that are as long as possible so that they can be taken and respun into new yarns. What we are actually looking for is to have as few of those individual fibres coming into our system as possible – we want to maintain the fabric shape by having a sharp cut material coming into our plants. This is important because of the way the material is mechanically moved through the chemical recycling process. If we have lots of dust or individual fibres, they can basically get washed away or stuck in different bits of the plant. It is a similar story with a lot of our technology peers.”

Worn Again Technologies is looking to recover both the cotton and polyester in polycotton blends and convert them into a PET resin and a pulp which can both then be respun into new fibres.

Renaissance Textile

On the face of it, Renaissance Textile—the new mechanical recycling plant established by workwear specialists Klopman and TDV Industries in France—has some distinct advantages when it comes to the supply of its waste input materials, yet still sees sorting as a major obstacle.

The Renaissance plant aims to achieve significant energy savings while localising the supply chain for workwear fabrics in Europe, which is currently 85 per cent dependent on non- European countries.

Klopman is establishing agreements with clients to take back and recycle workwear at the end of the first life cycle, enabling the production of new fabrics made with an increasing amount of recycled fibre which can be put back on the market.

A key part of the project is the advanced Andritz Laroche recycling technology which has been installed for Renaissance in Laval, France, where the garments are being grouped and sorted and then transformed into new raw materials.

Targets

At Dornbirn 2023, Klopman’s marketing manager Thomas Sieber said that Renaissance has set annual targets that will see it recycling 3,000 tons of fibre this year and 12,000 tons by 2026 – allowing the annual production of 42 million new garments by then.

At present, the plant is recycling white and unbleached cotton and polyester waste clothing, and by 2025 anticipates accommodating coloured textiles too.

“Our business today is 98 per cent workwear, with a focus on fabrics that fit the needs of the global workwear rental industry,” Sieber explained. “Renting and industrial washing is a completely different concept to retail. With rental we are talking about the lifetime of the garment and total cost of ownership which demands a completely different approach to the design and construction of products.”

Pressure

Rented workwear has to endure between 50- 100 wash cycles in industrial conditions over its usable life.

“We have partners washing in 300kW machines with a lot of chemicals and a lot of loading putting tremendous pressure on the fabrics,” Sieber said. “So, when we are talking now about circularity, whatever we do, our fabrics need at the minimum to have the same performance level as the original virgin fibre products. Everything we make is performance driven and that is the reason we cannot have any compromises, since it would kill the basic rental concept.”

In 2018, the partners started to work with Andritz and developed a mechanical recycling concept enabling the full end-of-life garments to be loaded into the tearing machine with the hard and soft parts automatically separated to get out a fibre that can be reused again in the spinning and weaving processes.

“Our customers renting workwear know what a bib-and-brace cost 25 years ago and also what it should cost tomorrow and the day after, so we have no chance to make higher margins, meaning the recycling has to be cost efficient,” Sieber said. “This can only be achieved with a high degree of automation and a high degree of the utilisation of the feedstock for the process. Already, from 1 kg of an end-of-life garment, we have been able to obtain 85 per cent as reusable fibres and everything else is the hard waste.”

Logistics

He added that the laundry industry is in itself operating in a circular way.

“This is an absolute advantage in terms of logistics and how we can bring back the garments compared to the challenges the retailers face,” he said. “Laundry garments are not sold directly to consumer markets and come back every week to be washed and serviced and repaired, so a laundry company is naturally interested in a long lifetime and durability because whenever a garment is no longer usable, they have to change it. If a garment continues to be used for three years instead of one that is gross margin and profit at the end of the day.

“The bad news is that these laundries know everything about the products when they are in service, but have no interest once they pass that point, so one of the keys in the future for us in the sorting process is – how clean we can make the feedstock for recycling. This will be one of the biggest investments for us in the coming years.”

Nouvelles Fibres Textiles

Unlocking the potential of automatic sorting in order to accommodate more recycled fibres is precisely the aim of another project in France in which Andritz is involved, in partnership with companies Pellenc ST and Synergies TLC. The three companies are setting up a new industrial-scale business called Nouvelles Fibres Textiles, combining Pellenc ST’s automated sorting technologies with Andritz recycling machines.

Pellenc ST has installed more than 2,000 machines globally, including those for sorting fibrous materials such as paper, as well as plastics.

“Nouvelles Fibres Textiles will process post-consumer textile waste to produce recycled fibres engineered for the spinning, nonwovens and composites industries,” said Andritz Nonwovens general manager Alexandre Butte. “It will serve as a production line and also as an R&D line for the three partners, as well as a test and demonstration centre for customers.”

Second life

Butte observed that many nonwoven products made from recycled fibres are often considered ‘second life’ materials and their manufacture has been somewhat demeaned by being termed ‘downgrading’, by advocates for a fully circular economy.

In reality, effectively doubling the life of any product that cannot enter a fully circular system will be extremely useful in attempting to meet the near-term goals of the EU’s Textiles Strategy.

“The nonwovens industry should be proud of the applications for recycled fibres it has already developed,” said Butte. “Even with the latest fibre-to-fibre chemical recycling methods being commercialised, only 30-40 per cent content can be incorporated into yarns for conventional spinning at best, and we are already achieving 100 per cent in many high-value nonwoven products.”

Producer pays

It is no surprise that so much of this activity is taking place in France. The country has operated a “producer pays” EPR scheme for textiles for over a decade now, under which brands and retailers putting products into the market are charged a fee to cover the cost of recycling them.

The French scheme currently includes an ‘eco-modulation’ component, resulting in a reduction in fees for products that are easy to recycle or that contain recycled content, and the end goal is to incentivise design for durability and make products last longer.

Effectively, what this has led to, is businesses receiving €1 back for every kilogram of recycled content they put onto the market – a significant concession when considering the huge volumes that can be involved.

“This is incentivising the use of recycled materials by making it economically advantageous,” Butte said.

Rehubs Europe

In July this year, Brussels-based industry body Euratex, which represents around 154,000 companies employing 1.47 million workers in the European textiles and clothing industries, launched ReHubs Europe as a new international non-profit association.

Its stated aim is “to bring together the best in class of different industries as well as newcomers to make textile recycling in Europe a reality” and achieve the annual fibre-to-fibre recycling of 2.5 million tons of Europe’s textile waste by 2030.

The ReHubs initiative calls for the establishment of between 150-250 dedicated new sorting and recycling centres to be established in Europe in the next few years. The estimated investment cost is put at between €6-7 billion, largely to scale up sufficient sorting and processing infrastructure.

Once matured and scaled, however, it is envisaged the new industry would be profitable, with a total annual market value of between €6-8 billion, generating around 15,000 direct new jobs by 2030 and resulting in significant near-shoring.

Legislation

At Dornbirn 2023, Euratex director Dirk Vantyghem observed that in five years from now, textile trading in the EU will be completely transformed as the bloc moves from being an open market to a much more demanding one.

“The EU’s Textile Strategy will introduce sixteen separate pieces of legislation that companies have to comply with, and this new framework of rules and regulations will see the market move from being based solely on free trade, to free-but-fair trade, and it is essential to create a level playing field for all operating within it,” he said. “We are working in Brussels to ensure the regulatory framework is realistic, enforceable and is not damaging to SMEs. We have to ensure the EU strategy becomes a global strategy.”

There is no doubt this is already creating movement outside Europe. In April this year, for example, China – as the world’s largest fibre producer and also the biggest consumer of textiles since 2021 – announced plans to recycle a quarter of its textile waste by 2025.

Texaid

In one of the earliest ReHubs initiatives, founding member Texaid has been leading the Project to Transform Textile Waste into Feedstock, involving 11 partners, spanning from leading fibre producers Indorama and Lenzing to major brands Decathlon and Inditex. A number of research institutes have also been involved, including ITA Augsburg and ITA Aachen in Germany.

The aim has been to develop an Industry 4.0 sorting system comprising semi-automated sorting for reuse, automated sorting and pre-processing for recycling.

Headquartered in Schattdorf, Switzerland, Texaid is a leading solution provider for the collection, sorting, repair, resale and recycling of textiles and shoes, already collecting 75,000 tons of textiles per annum. With 65 owned and operated second-hand shops in Germany it has approximately 1,000 employees group-wide.

The project has identified the need for a sorting system to automatically detect – in order of importance – composition, impurities, disruptors and non-textiles, contamination, colour, feedstock format and fabric structure and surface formation.

“In pre-processing, impurities must be removed, with blends and multi-material textiles making higher demands on the accuracy of the sorting and recycling,” said Texaid’s recycling solutions lead Anna Phersson at Dornbirn 2023.

Neural network

As part of the Texaid project, researchers at ITA Augsburg have been working on the Detex sub-project to develop a neural network system for AI-based clothing recognition.

“While skilled operators will still be key within textile waste sorting, data will play an increasingly important role in digitalisation and scaling,” said ITA researcher Amon Krichel. “Sensor technologies for the recognition of material composition do not yet meet the needs of recyclers and the requirements are very different for different use cases, but we have already established that the recognition of clothing and the detection of anomalies is possible with our system.”

Texaid is now working on establishing the infrastructure for a new sorting plant in Europe using the very latest technologies, with an annual capacity of 50,000 tons, while in the second phase of the Detex project, goals have been set for the further development of the AI network architecture for type detection and the improvement of anomaly detection, as well enhancing the realism and robustness of the data set being established.

NIR Spectroscopy

ITA Aachen has meanwhile been working on advancing the accuracy of near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy for textile waste sorting with Tomra Textiles, effectively identifying polyester, cotton, elastane, viscose, acrylic, wool and polyamide in mixed batches.

Headquartered in Asker, Norway, Tomra specialises in advanced collection and sorting systems, as well as food processing by sensor-based sorting and grading technology. With annual sales of over €1 billion, Tomra already has approximately 105,000 installations in over 100 markets worldwide.

Autosort NIR/VIS

It has developed the world’s first fully automatic sorting system for textiles at Siptex in Malmo, Sweden – the Autosort NIR/VIS – which has been industrially operational since 2020 and will serve as a template for other ReHubs projects.

Siptex has a recycling capacity of 4.5 tons of waste textiles every hour, with automatic sorting by both fibre type and colour. The plant is fully automated – people are only needed to start and stop it, feed the material in and take the bales from the baler.

“Automated sensor-based sorting is the key to effective textile recycling and our NIR technology can detect the fibre composition, including multi-material blends,” said Tomra solution manager Malte Althaus at Dornbirn 2023. “Pre-processing is, however, specific to each recycling process and we need to know from the individual recyclers what input materials they need in terms of material composition, colours, sizes and the acceptable contamination levels. Our automatic sorting is mature and ready to scale, and we can find the solutions to feed your processes.”

It seems highly likely that Tomra is going to be kept very busy by the textiles industry in the next few years.

Conclusion

Dornbirn 2023 revealed a textile industry currently in a state of tremendous flux as it seeks to respond to the pending legislation which will force it to take responsibility for the waste generated by post-consumer garments.

Automation will be crucial to hitting targets, especially in the area of sorting and pre-processing for cost-effective and efficient recycling, which up to now has been of little interest to the major brands, or indeed, much of the established linear textile supply chain.