A project being led by the IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute is developing an automated sorting system for waste textiles in a bid to increase the recycling rate from its current 5%.
According to IVL every year 4.3 million tonnes of textile waste is either sent to landfill or energy recovery in the EU alone. In Sweden some 120,000 tonnes of new textile products are purchased annually, but just 5% are recycled.
The Institute said that this low figure was behind the project, in which it is joined by 10 other ten other actors in a bid to develop and test an automated sorting system to facilitate high-quality textile recycling.
IVL’s Maria Elander explained that the automated sorting of textiles would make it possible to manage large streams of textile and at the same time produce sorted textiles that are better adapted to different recycling.
Of all the clothing and household textiles sold in Sweden only around 20% are said to be collected for reuse and under 5% recycled. The goal is to eventually create sorting capacity for 45,000 tonnes of textile recycling.
Current Situation
IVL noted that textiles collected today are sorted manually, but it is difficult to sort clothes and other textiles for recycling, partly because a growing proportion of the textiles consist of mixed materials.
Industrial and automated sorting processes, suitable for fibre-to-fibre recycling, were said to be necessary in order to handle large amounts of fabric with high precision, says
Phase I
The first phase of the IVL-led research project, SIPTex, was conducted in 2015. In that phase the potential for an automated sorting was examined. The project conducted a small scale testing technique where optical sensors detect different types of materials.
The Institute said that the technology used was the same as for sorting packages and the initial stages of the project has shown that automated textile sorting has the potential to provide both high sorting rate and a high purity of the sorted textiles.
The Future
Based on promising results IVL said that the project is now moving on to the next step - building a unique test environment for automated textile sorting.
Behind the project is a broad consortium of eleven project partners, including research institutes, authorities and participants from different parts of the textile value chain.
As part of the development work a sorting facility will be leased and operated in Sweden for a year to handle and sort used textiles that are collected at recycling centres in Stockholm and Malmö. The sorting will be based on the need of the potential customers.
The project will also test and evaluate new possibilities for how to collect waste textile and textile waste, as well as examine how targeted communication efforts can contribute to an increased textile collection.
“The idea is to create a sorting solution that is tailored for the needs of both the textile recycling industry and the textile business. Thus becoming the link that is missing today between textile collection and a high-quality textile recycling,” concluded Elander.
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