LONDON — The U.K. Fashion andTextile Association Thursday unveiled a 4 million pound textile recycling infrastructure to eventually develop “a pioneering fully integrated, automated sorting and pre-processing demonstrator for waste textiles” that aims to provide an effective, one-stop and scalable solution to save thousands of metric tons of waste textiles from landfill each year.
As a first step in achieving that vision, UKFT introduced a two-year project called Autosort for Circular Textiles Demonstrator (ACT U.K.). It will support the transition from labor-intensive and costly manual sorting of clothes and textiles that are not suitable for resale to highly automated sorting and pre-processing.
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Participants in this project include recycling technology developers, textile collectors, academia, manufacturers, industry associations, brands, and retailers, such as Marks & Spencer, Tesco, Pangaia, and New Look.
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It’s estimated that more than 1 million metric tons of used textiles are generated annually in the U.K., and a third of these non-rewearable textiles are being lost to landfill, or being exported and to be sorted in lower-cost labor regions.
To overcome manual sorting’s limitations, ACT U.K. will combine, and advance existing and new supporting technologies to overcome current barriers to materials circularity. Key technological tools to be used include optical scanning, robotics, AI, pre-processing of buttons, zips, trim removal and size reduction equipment.
Adam Mansell, chief executive officer of UKFT, said this project aims to create “a model to sort and prepare NRT for recycling in a way that’s never been done before, at scale” and “in turn, the system could generate huge volumes of material for use across the U.K. textile manufacturing sector.”
The project is part of a broader circular fashion program supported by Innovate U.K., the Arts, and Humanities Research Council, and the Natural Environment Research Council, all part of U.K. Research and Innovation, and it was unveiled by Lucy Frazer, Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, as part of the Creative Industries Council Sector Vision.
UKFT added that ACT U.K. is closely linked to several other projects that all aim to drive infrastructure and capital investment into the British fashion and textile industry.
These include the Circular Fashion Innovation Network, part of the Institute for Positive Fashion, in partnership with the British Fashion Council; the Digital Supply Chain Hub for Textiles, which improves the visibility of data flows in waste textiles, and the sandbox development of an industry-led Extended Producer Responsibility scheme for textiles.