Textile Sorting

The secondhand clothing market is growing fast, and the gap between that growth and genuine circularity is growing faster. A major new study by Circle Economy and Fashion for Good, covering sorting facilities across four EU countries and receiving markets in Ghana and Pakistan, shows that most discarded garments are physically rewearable. What keeps them out of circulation is not damage; it is economics.

The circular economy argument for textiles rests on a chain: collect, sort, process, recover. Across much of Europe, the first link in that chain has been built with considerable investment and political will. The rest of it remains incomplete in ways that collection data will never show—and that practitioners working inside recovery systems are now describing with increasing directness.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has released NIR-SORT 2.0, expanding its spectroscopic dataset for textile identification systems. The update strengthens model validation by introducing diverse material specimens and enhanced instrumentation profiles, addressing persistent limitations in benchmarking fibre classification models used in automated textile sorting environments.

Finnish researchers and industry partners are developing a deposit-return collection machine that uses digital product passport data and AI-based imaging to sort used garments for resale or recycling. The TexMat system aims to simplify clothing returns for consumers, improve business profitability for reuse operators, and support higher textile collection and resale rates across Europe.

Growing scrutiny of textile waste is exposing a technical reality: recyclers remain limited by trim heterogeneity, variable feedstock quality and labour-intensive preprocessing. From this vantage point, Eileen Mockus, COO at Accelerating Circularity, outlines how these structural barriers influence both early-stage pilots and industrial recycling lines. Her analysis points to the need for standardised specifications and coordinated investment to improve outcomes.

The textile industry’s circular transition hinges on how materials move between loops — from repair and reuse to remanufacture and recycling. A new mapping of “cascading circularity” reveals how companies relink fibres, technologies, and policies to extend value chains and slow waste flows, offering clues to where the system still breaks down.

Accelerating Circularity has unveiled a white paper revealing how trims, adhesives, and labels block progress in textile-to-textile recycling. The Toward Circular Systems for Trims and Ignored Materials (CSTIM) report examines overlooked components that disrupt fibre recovery, outlining solutions for scalable sorting, preprocessing, and design-for-disassembly—calling brands, recyclers, and manufacturers to align on standards for genuine circular systems.

As the circular economy gains traction, Ukrainian firm Re:inventex is emerging as a key player in scalable textile recycling through mechanical innovation and pragmatic adaptation. The company’s Development Manager, Tetiana Pushkarova, explains how they navigate fibre challenges, material complexity, and regulatory uncertainty—while building real-world recycling solutions that connect industry, policy and sustainability goals across Europe.

As circularity becomes central to the textile industry, French recycling innovator Cetia is streamlining disassembly and sorting through cutting-edge automation. Leading this transformation is Director Chloé Salmon Legagneur, whose team is developing intelligent systems that dismantle shoes, sort garments, and prepare materials for high-quality recycling—critical for scaling circular solutions across both footwear and fashion supply chains.

The US’ measurement institute could have made textile sorting a tad easier with the development of a database that contains the molecular “fingerprints” of 64 different fabric types.